Fangio used to think about accidents and admitted that he worried about having them. When he retired, he said he had been seriously affected by some of the accidents he had been involved in and by the ones which had injured or killed people he knew. The death of Onofre Marimon at the Nurburgring, in particular, upset him quite deeply.

Jackie Stewart’s way of dealing with danger was to try to make racing safer, and although I respect him, I did not agree with many of the things he did. While racing fortunately does not lose drivers in the way it did in the ’50s and ’60s, the element of danger remains and there are strong opinions as to how it is best dealt with.

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The historic racing scene has brought many excellent cars back to the circuits over recent years, although quite a lot of them are not very original, and many have been substantially improved. While there are some safety arguments for this, it opens the door to modifying cars with new parts, which certainly isn’t in the spirit or interest of historic racing.

Some cars are so well known that it is nearly impossible to change them without people noticing, and I think the Birdcage Maserati fits into this group. These cars actually started historic racing not many years after they retired the first time around, so the historians can keep an accurate record of them. I have spoken about the Birdcage before when talking about the best cars I have raced, and certainly the Tipo 61 was amongst the best front-engine sports cars I ever drove. Maserati produced a wide range of sports cars and some of them were very good, like the 300S, and some were pretty desperate. I had terrific success in the 300S, having started 13 races with it and won 9, so it is saying something about the Birdcage to consider it better.

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I have been asked a number of times who had the most influence on my career, the way I drove, and the way I behaved. For me the answer to that question has always been fairly straightforward. The three main influences have been my family, and by that I mean my mother and my father, Nino Farina and Juan Fangio, but all for different reasons.

My parents had a big influence in a number of ways. My father really didn’t want me to race at all, and was hoping I would finish school and qualify as a dentist like himself. I was hopeless at school and finally left at sixteen and went to train in the hotel trade. Both of my parents had been keen motorists, and my father raced at Indianapolis and my mother drove in a number of trials and rallies and was very enthusiastic. They did a number of trials together in the Singer and Marendez they owned in the mid-1930s. When I was young, about six, she would let me steer the car when she was driving on our farm. A year or two later, my father bought me an Austin Seven. I could reach the pedals when the seat was pulled all the way up, and I was allowed to drive it around the fields. So, I would have to say that they had a strong early influence.

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The feature this month on the C-Type Jaguar which won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1953, the car I drove at this year’s Le Mans Classic, gives me a chance to talk some more about long distance races. This year’s event was the only Le Mans that I really enjoyed. First of all, it was short and only took place during the day. Secondly, I was driving a jolly good car. Thirdly, it was always 24 hours before, which is not my idea of pleasure, especially since I consider myself a racer, not a driver. Although it was a great event, to me it was just another race and one that I disliked sufficiently to make it a separate deal in my contract with the companies for whom I drove, with the exception of Mercedes. I was happy enough to do it with Jaguar in the beginning, but as I got more “senior,” I said I would like to leave it out. I just didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t racing for pleasure, staying up all night in all weathers, sharing with another driver. That just wasn’t enjoyable. That is why this year’s event was! Having said all that, however, I did do Le Mans 10 times!

Endurance by its nature means long distance. The Mille Miglia was an endurance race but it wasn’t like Le Mans, and the Targa Florio; and though it wasn’t ever referred to as an endurance race, it was just that because it was long. But the difference with some of these was they were one-driver races. If I was driving on my own, no matter how long the race might be, I didn’t see these as endurance races, though it might take endurance to do it. My definition of endurance is that it is a shared drive, and I didn’t like sharing because I wanted to set the car up the way I liked it, and anything else would be a compromise. I have raced with some of the greatest drivers going, like Dan Gurney, and that I enjoyed. I would enjoy the fact that I was driving with somebody of his stature. But you make a compromise in many of these races, so instead of 40 or 50 starters, you are going to have eighty or one hundred starters, or even 120 starters at Le Mans.

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At the end of the 1955 season, Mercedes Benz made the decision to withdraw from motor racing, partly because of the Le Mans disaster, but in reality they wanted to concentrate on developing their road cars. This left me without a Grand Prix drive for 1956, but I had some talks with Maserati, and they made me a serious offer. However, I wanted to drive for a British team if I possibly could, so in November, I had two test sessions within ten days of each other.

The first test was at Oulton Park with both Vanwall and BRM. Tony Vandervell had been manufacturing “Thinwall” bearings for sometime and he had been part of the BRM consortium until he got fed up with it and decided to start his own team. The Vanwall Special ran in 1954 with a 2-liter engine and then as the Vanwall with a 2.5-liter engine in 1955, and was showing some promise. They brought their Cooper-designed chassis, and I have to say the handling was quite good, but the engine left a lot to be desired and had a flat spot at low revs and a misfire at high revs. I also tried a BRM on the same occasion, which was quicker in the damp conditions.

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Aston Martin was one of the cars and teams I had a relationship with for quite a long part of my career, from 1950 right up to 1961. I remember sharing a DB2 coupe with Lance Macklin in what was called the Daily Express 1000 Mile Rally at the end of the 1950 season. It was a pleasant car to drive, but the engine was like many of the Astons I drove. For its time, it had sufficient power but it could have used more, and it was somewhat fragile if you worked it hard, as the aluminium bodywork would crack over the wheel arches. The cars handled well and this DB2 was no exception. Even though we completed the entire road section of this event without any penalties, we made a mess of the parking tests at the end which were characteristic of some rallies in those days… a big difference to championship rallies now!

After driving for Jaguar in the sports car races of the early 1950s, I went to Mercedes to drive both Grand Prix and sports cars, and shortly after Mercedes withdrew from racing in 1955, Aston Martin’s John Wyer talked me into a test session at Goodwood in February 1956. Wyer was a very well-organized and methodical team manager, and played a very important part in the team’s success. He then went on and did the same for the Gulf Ford GT team and then for Gulf Porsche. I had been impressed by the Aston DB3S when I was racing against them and the test was successful, even though it was freezing cold and slippery at Goodwood. I managed to break the sports car lap record and agreed to sign to drive for them for the season and got the remarkable signing-on fee of £50!

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I was really surprised when I learned that there was going to be an historic race on the same circuit and on the same day as the 24-Hours. This was amazing in itself, and then the organisers agreed to have some reserves which they normally wouldn’t do at Le Mans. This was beneficial for the historic race because it meant there would be a good field by the time the race actually happened, and there were nearly 65 cars present for the race.

This was the first time I had been to the circuit in the way that it is set out now, and there certainly are some corners which are quite difficult. I think the Porsche Curves are the most exhilarating and demanding and if I were younger, I would go through them faster than I did. You come into them and just ease the throttle back a bit and then progressively come back on the throttle. This is a series of curves which are almost flat but not quite. You just need to ease off enough to balance the car. The Dunlop Chicane at the top of the hill past the pits is now a boring corner and has ruined the corner before it, which was really fast. You put in a chicane and it doesn’t do much except slow the cars down. I can understand the modern reasoning behind this but it has emasculated the circuit. Tertre Rouge is still very good, and you go down the straight until you come to more chicanes. I didn’t mind these very much because I was amazed by how good the brakes were in the C-Type Jag I was in. It’s an old car, and the first one with disc brakes, but they are remarkably good. Chicanes aren’t my idea of great corners but the Jag could handle them well.

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Goldie Gardner had broken many records both before and after the war, and I had read a great deal about him as I was growing up. MG was sending a new car, the EX.181, which was to contest records in the 1101 cc to 1500 cc class, and I was fascinated, as I had never done anything like this before. The target was to reach 240 mph, so a new streamlined machine with a mid-engine and superb teardrop shape was built to try for a new record. The engine was a 1.5-liter with twin overhead cams based on the BMC-B unit, and a Shorrock supercharger. The engine managed to produce 290 bhp, which in those days, was amazing, and benefited from 32 psi of boost. It had a very narrow rear track and was only a foot wider at the front, with a wheelbase of just eight feet. The body had a lovely shape, but I am not so sure how sophisticated it was aerodynamically. It didn’t seem to have much drag at all, but I don’t know whether it had lift or down-force. Those were the days when we knew relatively little about aerodynamics.

I remember clearly two things about that experience. One was the environment which was so strange to me and seemed unreal. The intense heat created mirages, and in the distance, the telegraph poles seemed to be floating in the air. The huge expanse of salt was amazing because you could see the horizon in opposite directions! The other memory is, of course, the car. That MG made me feel in a way no other car had before. The car was very low and built to minimal tolerances, so I had to lie on my back with the steering wheel horizontal over my lap. When it came time for a first run, I was not enjoying the experience very much. The mechanics closed the canopy over me and locked it with Dzus fasteners, so I knew I would not be able to jump out.

We had about eleven miles of the salt to use, five miles to reach our speed, one mile flying for the record, and a further five miles to stop. We had one hour in which to do the same in the reverse direction, as a record must be done in each direction to be established. It was incredibly noisy once the engine started, and although I had driven cars at 180 mph before, this felt much faster, partly because the environment was so strange. I had been going very quickly in the Maserati 450S in the Mille Miglia just before the brake pedal snapped, but that was very different than this.

The MG team had been running another car, the older EX.179 in 1-liter form, trying to break the 12-hour record, which Tommy Wisdom and David Ash did – raising it to over 118 mph, then they put the supercharger on it and Phil Hill got it up to 143.4 mph. I arrived in late August, but by that time it had been raining so we had to sit and wait until the surface was dry again. I finally got some practice runs in, but it was difficult to get used to all that noise and the confined space in the car. I really didn’t like it too much.

I had been told to “take it easy” until I got used to the EX.181. It was a matter of being locked in and then easing away from the start, being very careful not to give it too much throttle or I would spin the tires. We were using 15” tires with no tread and they were quite small, and as they were pumped up to 75 pounds, there was hardly any contact with the ground – well under one square inch. I was told to take it up to 200 mph gently, and when I got to it, I should then push it into top gear. One had to be careful not to get wheelspin. They also said I should cut the ignition after I had gone through the measured mile, but to put my foot on the accelerator so if there were any flames it would suck them through the exhaust and out the back!

The first run went well, and I do remember taking top gear at about 200 mph, which was impressive, as that was the fastest I had been in a car up until then. They had also warned about the braking, but I didn’t know what to expect. There was only the single inboard disc brake at the rear connected to a small flap, which opened to improve the cooling. That was about the most sophisticated thing on the car. I knew I had to brake very carefully and smoothly so the brakes wouldn’t lock up, and I wasn’t to use the gearbox to slow it down. Phil Hill had also warned me that the cockpit tended to fill up with methanol fumes, so I should take a deep breath when I turned it off. None of this was very inspiring at the time.

It took me the first runs to get used to the braking. One of our mechanics was standing down at the turnaround area where you came back for your second run. He was waving for me to brake and stop by him, but I had to brake a lot harder than I thought I would, and I went sailing past him as he stood there waving. It was partly due to the type of brakes on the car but also to how deceptive the environment was with no features there to judge your speed by. The rolling resistance on the car was minimal… it really had a perfect shape for what it was meant to do, and the tires offered so little drag. I got used to it after the first runs, but you don’t actually steer it. You sort of wish it to go in the right direction, and ease it where you want it, and you put on the brakes comfortably and carefully, and keep a close eye on the instruments.

Even though I lost third gear and had to shift from second to top, it ran very well, and I was touching 6500 rpm at the start of the mile and getting to 7000 rpm by about five miles. We managed to take five records, including 245.64 mph for one kilometer, 245.11 for one mile, five kilometers at 243.08 mph, 5 miles at 235.69 and ten kilometers at 224.70 mph. It was something I remember clearly because it was a weird experience, with the car following the long black line and passing the occasional pole in that featureless and amazing place.

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I always think I have to be cautious when I talk about “great cars” or “my best cars,” because the cars in which I did well were not always the best or the easiest to drive, and some of those which were difficult to drive produced some of the best results.

There are some pretty obvious choices for my list of cars that were important to me. The Grand Prix cars include the Maserati 250F, the BRM P25, the Lotus 18, the Vanwall and the Mercedes Benz 196. Many people think the Mercedes might have been one of my “greatest,” but it was not an easy car to drive at all. It felt large and cumbersome, and though the engine was powerful and had lots of torque, I found the gear-change extremely demanding due to its being “back to front,” and it was a real handful in the wet. Of course, it provided me with the chance to be in a very competitive team and race alongside the great Fangio.

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The current good form being shown by Ferrari in Formula One means a lot of people ask me what I think of Ferrari, and why I never drove for the Scuderia.

Of course, I did drive Ferraris, though not that many times, and I always drove private cars or cars which were run by some of the Ferrari teams such as Luigi Chinetti’s North American Racing Team, NART. But I never drove for Enzo Ferrari or for the factory team. In fact, it was my first contact with Ferrari which put me off driving for his team, and in many ways that turned out to be unfortunate.

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As Michael Schumacher has just won his sixth consecutive Grand Prix at Malaysia, and all six have been from pole position, this might be a good time to consider some of these “modern” drivers.

The reason I admire Schumacher so much is that he obviously knows his own strengths and he knows the weaknesses of other drivers. You have to know the other drivers and what they are like, and what their style is – their strengths and weaknesses – and you must use that knowledge to your advantage. Schumacher seems to be better at this than the other drivers, at least at the moment. Of course, times change, style changes and so do ethics. Some of the things Schumacher does now and what Senna did would have been completely unacceptable in my era, partly because of the danger, but also because of the ethics. I personally believe that if Schumacher and Senna had been racing when we were racing, they would have been just as ethical as we were. Whether we would be as unethical now as they are I can’t really say.

Senna and Schumacher could both be very intimidating, but the way that happens now is very different. In an earlier period, it was more subtle. You had to have the respect of the other driver. Respect means that if you and another driver were going into a corner neck and neck and he saw you coming, he would just know it was your corner. I would find a way of out-psyching the other driver, maybe waving him on and taking him in too deep, so he would have to use the escape road. But it still depended on respect.

Times have changed, and this has been brought about by the concern for safety, and increased safety tends to bring contempt of danger. I think this has been to the detriment of the sport. I think what we considered sportsmanship is now quite different. Senna and Prost, two of the best drivers in the world, just pushed each other off at 170 mph, and that couldn’t happen in the earlier days because of the danger involved. It just wouldn’t have happened.

I think in the past, respect came from a person’s ability and the way they were as a person. I respected Fangio immensely because of two things: his enormous driving skill and the way that he would handle himself. Nowadays, respect seems to come from money, and one driver respects another because he’s making X million dollars, which I think is a shame.

Ayrton Senna was probably the only person who had similar skills to Fangio. I think there was an enormous talent there. He had such confidence in himself, which one needs. I think perhaps he had just a fraction more confidence in his ability than he should have had, although he was so good that he should have had the most confidence. Senna was inclined to feel that he was not as fallible as any other driver, and he would push as hard as he could. I don’t think his fatal accident was his fault at all. The tragedy of his accident was that he died because of this modern business of trying to make the sport too safe. If the wall he hit hadn’t been pushed back for safety purposes – and had been closer to the track, like at Indianapolis – he could have “skirted” it and gotten away with it. But unfortunately, he went in head first. I do believe he rightly had enormous confidence because he had this great car control and ability, but it was just “one time too many.”

Senna seemed to believe he could do almost anything, that a gap would always open up for him. And while I believe you may be lucky 99% of the time, you always have to keep something in reserve. Yet Senna always seemed to push the envelope just that bit further. I think I know what he might have been thinking, but I don’t think I would have taken the chance. I always kept a safety buffer. I would be willing to reduce that on slow corners where I wasn’t likely to be hurt. Ayrton didn’t seem to keep that reserve and he believed other drivers would always move over for him. He had a great talent and he is the only one I would put that close to Fangio purely on skill. I think Jimmy Clark was up pretty close as well, but I would put Ayrton and Fangio at the top.

I also think Schumacher has an enormous talent. He is at the Fangio-Senna skill level at times, but he makes too many mistakes. He makes mistakes that we see and he probably makes ones that we don’t see. There is no doubt that when the weather is bad, when these cars become a bit more equal, he shines more than other people. I think this is because he has a greater appreciation and a greater facility to balance a car. When a racecar is going along in a straight line, there’s not much difference in drivers. But when you go into a corner and start asking more of the tires and the suspension and the brakes, that’s when it gets more difficult. When you have a person who can take hold of all that and feel and sense the limit and get close to it and hold it at the edge, that’s what makes one driver faster than another. The driver input magnifies as the lateral-g decreases, and that’s where Schumacher seems so dominant. To me, Schumacher is in a class of his own. Once you get past Schumacher, there’s Villeneuve and Hakkinen, and then you go down one more level to the Coulthards and the rest of them, but it’s Schumacher who has the race craft.

The reason he’s so good in my mind is that he has great talent, great concentration, great confidence, and one other important ingredient. That ingredient is that he can make people around him join him on his side. He can draw a team together, and you could see that at Benetton. This then gives him more confidence, which helps him drive better. You can see at Ferrari how Schumacher and Ross Brawn are positive for each other. With another driver, Brawn wouldn’t accomplish so much, but with Schumacher there, they drive each other on and Ferrari does so well as a result. The difference in sheer speed between one driver and another isn’t that great, but the ability Schumacher has to apply his skill in such a concentrated way is what I think sets him apart.

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Like any racing driver who has competed seriously, I am often asked what were my favorite cars, or the quickest, or the easiest to drive. That’s always a difficult question to answer because cars are so different from each other. Certain cars suit certain circuits, the others don’t, and some feel better to one driver than to another. It is always an interesting question and the discussion can easily go on for hours, or years in my case!

The question I am not asked so often is which cars I didn’t like, and I can answer that pretty quickly. At the top of the list, by a very long way, is the BRM 16-cylinder car, which was by far the most appalling car I ever drove. For different reasons, the Maserati 4.5 coupe is well up the list, and also for different reasons is the Eldorado Maserati. The 3.5-liter Maserati sports car wasn’t a nice car, so it seems I’m being tough on Maserati, but I’m not really, as the 250F Grand Prix car was certainly one of the best cars I ever drove.

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I am often asked what was my “greatest race,” and that is not an easy question. The Mille Miglia in 1955 was a great one because of the endurance it required, and there have been some races that I didn’t finish which had some of the qualities that make an event great for the driver.

For a number of reasons, the Monaco Grand Prix of 1961 was always one I considered to have been best for me as a driver. The Ferraris had been very quick in practice and I knew it was going to be a tough race, but I have never driven a race as hard as I did at Monaco that year, at least for a good 90% of it. The first few laps were the usual ones where you get sorted out, but after that I drove as hard as I ever had before. One of the things about Monaco is that you can see the other cars behind you, which is not possible at places like the Nurburgring or in events such as the Mille Miglia.

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