Juan Fangio

Interesting facts

He drops out of school at 13 to apprentice as a mechanic, the mechanical grounding behind his later trademark of nursing a car home rather than thrashing it. During the 1948 Buenos Aires-Caracas road race he survives a catastrophic crash in which his co-driver, Daniel Urrutia, dies of a broken neck. At Monza in 1952, after missing a connecting flight, he drives all night through the Alps, arrives exhausted just before the start, crashes on lap two and breaks his neck - reigning champion Farina visits him in hospital and presents him with his own winner's wreath. At the 1955 Argentine Grand Prix he drives the entire three-hour race alone in 40-degree heat while rivals swap drivers, suffering burns from the overheated chassis yet still winning and setting the fastest lap. His rivalry with Ascari speaks for itself: across the 37 grands prix between the 1950 British GP and the 1955 Monaco GP, all but two were led by one of the two men, who together held the lead for 66.6 percent of all laps. In February 1958 he is kidnapped in Havana by gunmen from Fidel Castro's movement, held for 29 hours across three houses, then released unharmed. He becomes a mentor to the young Ayrton Senna from the mid-1980s; on Senna's death in 1994 he says, 'I have lost my heir and successor.' Juan Fangio raced in Formula 1 from 1950 to 1958, across 8 seasons as an Argentine driver. He won the World Championship 5 times, in 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957. He scored a total of 245 championship points over his career.