With a Nudge for Luck

The Ferrari snarled down the straightaway past the finish line, coasted through a slowdown lap, and eased into the pits. What's this? wondered Driver John Surtees when mechanics swarmed round, hugging, kissing, pounding him on the back. Then they began chanting "Campione del mondo! Campione del mondo!" and Surtees finally got the message. "Oh," he said.

"I did it, didn't I?" It was enough to confuse anybody. In one of the wildest finishes in racing history, Britain's Surtees became the 1964 Grand Prix champion--by the humbling margin of a leaky oil line and a bent exhaust pipe.

Going into the tenth and final race at Mexico City last week, three drivers were still battling for the championship, and it would have taken a mathematical wizard to figure all the possibilities. Under the complicated system of Grand Prix scoring (nine points for a first place, six for a second, four for third, etc.), Britain's Graham Hill was leading with 39 points, Surtees was second with 34, and Scotland's Jimmy Clark, the 1963 champion, had 30. Now, if Hill won, it was all over. But if Clark won and Hill and Surtees were out of the money, or if Surtees came in second while Clark and Hill--oh, never mind.

Fist in Anger. The starter's flag had barely fluttered when Clark shot into the lead, opening up a gap of 18 sec.

over the U.S.'s Dan Gurney, who had no chance at all for the championship. Hill was a careful third, and Surtees, off slowly, was fifth, hopelessly out of the running. Or so he thought.

Then luck took a hand--with a nudge from Surtees' teammate, Lorenzo Bandini. Running fourth, unable to pass Hill on the straightaways, the Italian picked the worst turn on the course, a tight hairpin, as a likely spot to make his move. Four times he tried to slip past; four times he failed--coming so close to Hill's B.R.M. that the Briton shook his fist in anger. On the 31st lap he tried again--and this time he slammed into the B.R.M., bounced it clear off the track into a fence. Tail pipes bent, title hopes shattered, Hill limped into the pits and exploded with rage: "Rank amateur driving. Inexcusable." That put Surtees fourth, but after 63 laps, Clark's Lotus was still far ahead, and the championship was surely his.

Suddenly a shout went up. Clark was merely coasting. An oil line had snapped. The Lotus was out of the race --just two laps from victory. Now all Surtees had to do was finish second behind Dan Gurney. Ferrari mechanics frantically signaled Bandini to slow down. Obediently, Bandini lifted his foot and Surtees shot past, crossing the finish line 69 sec. behind Winner Gurney.

Tired of Thinking. That gave Surtees 40 points and the championship--not bad for a man who drove his first four-wheel race in 1960. The son of a South London motorcycle dealer, Surtees, 30, grew up gunning bikes around the countryside, won his first world motorcycle racing championship in 1956, his seventh in 1960. Grand Prix drivers still shudder at his first attempts to corner a racing car. "First you would see one side of the car," says Stirling Moss, "and then the other, and then the front, and then the back." "Coordination," says Surtees, was his trouble: "On a bike you do all the work with your hands, but in a car your feet have to work as well. That meant I had to think all the time, and that was very tiring." Plagued by mechanical troubles, he spent the first half of the 1964 season watching gloomily while the Lotuses and B.R.M.s whizzed past. Once, the exquisite machines of Italy's Enzo Ferrari had dominated Grand Prix racing, but the British took over, and now experts were suggesting that old (66) Enzo had lost his touch. Then the bugs departed--to feast on other people's metal. Surtees won the German Grand Prix at Nuerburgring, followed that with a victory in Italy, a third in Britain, a second in the U.S. race at Watkins Glen, N.Y. And last week in Mexico, by the slimmest possible margin, he overhauled everyone to give Ferrari a sixth championship in the past 13 years.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.