Deadly Antiques

By almost any test, auto racing ranks as the most dangerous and demanding of sports, the ultimate in man's ability to drive an automobile fast, controllably. Control is the key word. For all their speed, racing cars are also intended to be safe. They are equipped with ultrasensitive steering, roll bars to protect the driver, specially designed tires to insure maximum road adhesion. Still drivers die, and it is not always entirely their fault.

The tracks share the blame. Some old tracks have been modified for today's cars. But the Indianapolis Speedway has turns that are banked 9DEG--just as they were 56 years ago, when the first Memorial Day 500 was won at 74 m.p.h. It is no surprise that 30 drivers have lost their lives at Indy. What is remarkable is that last week, practicing for this month's 500, drivers were turning 170 m.p.h. laps and though twelve crashed, none was killed.

The real antique among race tracks is the 38-year-old Monaco Grand Prix course. It is really not a track at all--merely a hair-raising path through the city streets of Monte Carlo, barely wide enough to allow one car to pass another, and replete with such hazards as a curving tunnel in the middle of a 120-m.p.h. straightaway and two hairpins. It is hard enough to steer a Corvair around a 180DEG turn, let alone a 400-h.p. Formula I racing car. In the past 15 years, the winner's speed has climbed from 58.2 m.p.h. to 75.8 m.p.h.

Into the Water. It was at Monaco that Italy's world champion, Alberto Ascari, drove straight through a sea wall into the Mediterranean (luckily, he could swim); that Rudy Caracciola suffered the leg injury that left him a cripple for life; that Luigi Fagioli crashed and died. Last week 16 cars and drivers took the starter's flag, and only six finished the race. Among those who did not: Scotland's Jimmy Clark, the 1965 Grand Prix champion, who smashed into a retaining wall and walked away.

Nowhere nearly so lucky was Italy's No. 1 driver, Lorenzo Bandini, 31. Roaring out of the tunnel into sunlight, Bandini's Ferrari caromed off a guard rail, slammed into a lamppost, flipped over and burst into flame. It took rescuers four excruciating minutes to pull him out. Doctors charted ten chest fractures and third-degree burns over 70% of his body. Three days later he died.

The race was won by New Zealand's Denis Hulme, averaging 75.89 m.p.h. Much of the luster went off his victory in the uproar that followed. U.S. Driver Dan Gurney insisted: "Cars are meant to negotiate a track, not the other way around." But Claude Bourillot, president of the Federation Francais des Sports Automobiles, argued that most European tracks are 50 years behind the times. "We are," he said, "like aviators trying to land Boeing jets on the airfields of 1914."

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