Racing Is All in His Family
Before driving in the Camel Grand Prix of Greater San Diego for the first time, Juan Manuel Fangio II took a flight from his Miami home to Los Angeles. I met his plane at the airport.
“Could you give me a ride to the rental-car place?” he asked.
“Sure. Which one? Hertz? Avis? Budget?”
“International,” he said.
I thought maybe Juan, being Argentine by birth and a driver of Formula race cars all over the world, mistakenly thought there was a special auto-rental company for international customers.
“No,” he said. “That is the name of it.”
“Well, where is it?”
“Do you know Century Boulevard?” Fangio asked.
“Sure.”
“Just take Century Boulevard until you come to the sign that says, ‘Nudes.’ ”
Sure enough, we turned left at the striptease joint’s marquee, and there it was, International Rent-a-Car.
Leave it to a Fangio to know exactly where the cars are.
Juan Manuel Fangio II, who, strangely enough, is not the son of Juan Manuel Fangio I, has been around wheels all his life. As a child, he raced bikes and go-karts. Together with his father, Ruben (Toto) Fangio, he constructed a sedan piece by piece and raced that. At 24, he was competing in Formula Two road racing in South America.
It was in his blood. Not only did Juan’s father design and build one classy chassis after another, but his uncle, the five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio I, took a personal interest in his namesake’s driving career and passed along much of his passion.
As Juan put it: “Now my family, especially my uncle, lives my career as if it was theirown.”
The younger Fangio, 34, is a charming and disarming little character who enjoys anything with wheels. At times in Florida, when he wants to do a light workout but his sore leg is troubling him too much to jog, he goes out onto the neighborhood sidewalks on roller skates. He’s still a kid at heart.
His friends think so, too. After Fangio had a bicycle accident not long ago that left him with a broken collarbone, they sent him a gift.
Training wheels.
Never so much as scratched in an automobile race, Fangio’s most serious mishaps have involved motorcycles and bikes. The lesson he is learning from this is to stay away from vehicles with two wheels.
In a car, Fangio feels safe, comfortable, very much at home. Speed becomes him. It is increasingly difficult for Juan to keep the pedal off the metal out on the freeways near Miami, because sometimes that 55-m.p.h. thing can be a drag. Yet he understands that it is better to be safe than sorry. Professional or not, he wouldn’t want Florida traffic cops considering him another Jose Canseco.
Driving comes naturally to someone of his background. It does to many young men in the Balcarce district of Buenos Aires, the cradle of road racing. Balcarce produced Juan I, as famous as any name in international motor sports, and Juan II, who was christened thusly because the attending doctor, a family friend, made it a personal favor.
When I asked Fangio whether the hot-rodders in his hometown compete at race tracks or in the city streets, he said with a laugh: “In my town, one is the same as the other.”
At first, Fangio studied engineering and meant to design automobiles, as his father had done. When an itch to drive returned to him--”I discovered that I crave speed,” he said--he came for guidance to Dan Gurney, who was only too happy to counsel the nephew of his great friend, Juan I.
Young Fangio drove for Gurney at Riverside in 1986. Quickly but surely, he progressed on the American Racing Series circuit, driving for Team Toyota. For fun, Juan even raced against Gurney, as well as Parnelli Jones and others, in Toyota’s popular pro-celebrity race at the Long Beach Grand Prix.
Fangio won, but what he remembers best was giving an amateur celebrity roadhog a littlelove tap to get him out of the way.
“After the race, I see him walking toward me--very tall, very athletic and very serious,” Fangio said. “I think perhaps he comes to beat me up.”
Instead, all the guy wanted to know was, “Show me how you did that, so next time I can do it to somebody else.”
Relieved, Fangio was more than happy to provide a racing tip for former Angel baseball player Bobby Grich.
Since then, Juan has kept in front of the competition as much as possible. Before Sunday’s season-ending GT championship series race, he won events at Topeka, Kan.; Sears Point, and San Antonio. He was greatly looking forward to negotiating the ultra-tight turns of Del Mar’s 1.6-mile street course.
“The last race of the year is like the last flavor of a meal,” Fangio said beforehand. “The taste stays with you the full winter.”
It will, too. Fangio won Sunday’s race by 71.29 seconds in his Toyota Eagle, averaging 78.836 m.p.h.
This is faster than he went in his rental car, I trust.
“That one there is mine,” Fangio said after we rounded the treacherous Nudes bend and sped down the backstretch. He was pointing to a car parked by the curb, and smiling.
“ Which one is yours?”
“The Volkswagen,” he lied.
