LETTER FROM BRITAIN

John F. Burns writes of his youthful fascination, Grand Prix racing

Letter from Britain

LONDON: When Grand Prix motor racing stages the first of the 18 Formula One races across the world this year in Australia on Sunday, the focus of attention will be on a 23-year-old Englishman driving for the McLaren team, Lewis Hamilton. Phenomenally talented, he is the first black driver to break into the sport at the highest level, and will be seeking to win the world driver's championship he lost to Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen by a single point in his rookie season last year.

Only those with a strong interest in Formula One history will note that the race in Melbourne will be run 50 years after a tumultuous Grand Prix season that cost another young Englishman battling for the world championship his life, one of three drivers who died in a year that was one of the most closely contested and brutal in the history of a sport that dates back to the first Grand Prix, in France in 1907. If the 2008 races produce the drama of 1958, without the deaths, it will have been some season.

For me, the events of 1958 are as yesterday. I was 14, climbing fences to reach the pits at races across Europe, and I had that debonair English driver for an idol. His name was Peter Collins, and he drove for Ferrari.

Like Hamilton, he broke into Grand Prix racing young, at 20, and narrowly missed winning the driver's championship at 25, when he handed his car to his teammate, the incomparable Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio, during the 1956 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, after Fangio's steering collapsed. "It's too early for me to become world champion," Collins said at the time. "I'm too young."

The 1958 season was a time of light and dark, of triumph and tragedy. In early July, Collins's Italian teammate at Ferrari, Luigo Musso, was killed in the French Grand Prix at Reims. Two weeks later, Collins won the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, setting the circuit's first 100-mile-an-hour, or 160-kilometer-an-hour, lap. On Aug. 3, he was fatally injured when his Ferrari somersaulted off the track during the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring.

He was 27. The third Ferrari driver, the Englishman Mike Hawthorn, won the championship in the last race at Casablanca in October, but he was killed in a road accident, speeding his Jaguar in the rain on a highway near London, three months later.

As a schoolboy, I saw Collins's victory at Silverstone, and learned my first Italian word - "Olio, olio!" - when he made a pit stop needing oil. Two weeks later, I was at the Nürburgring, and the first sign of what happened was a helicopter taking off a few hundred yards away with a blanket-wrapped stretcher on its flank. My father, a World War II fighter pilot then serving with NATO in West Germany, told me later he knew Collins was dead.

But I refused to accept it until we tuned into the BBC. It was the lead item on the 9 p.m. news. "The British racing driver, Peter Collins, has died of injuries received during today's German Grand Prix," the announcer said.

The experience left a deep impression. For all I know, it may have had some inchoate influence on the path I followed later, when, as a foreign correspondent at war, most recently during five years in Iraq, I made my own choice to live on the edge, with death never far away. That, of course, was vicarious, since a reporter is never a protagonist, as a Grand Prix driver or a soldier must be, and never as exposed to risk. Lest I should ever get confused, I have always carried with me in my wallet a copy of Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum about critics - reporters, as much - being in the bleachers, never in the arena. "Cold and timid souls" he called us.

Perhaps we are, and perhaps my passion for Formula One is no different than that of the millions of others who follow the sport. There is the spectacle: the shattering, 200-mile-an-hour speed, the exquisite sound of high-revving racing engines - not Mozart, but still the most sublime noise to enter the ear of sporting man. There are the venues - the lush Melbourne parkland in March, the winding streets of Monaco in May, the tree-shaded rush through the former royal park at Monza in September, the plunging sinuousness of Spa-Francorchamps in the Belgian Ardennes, also in September.

F1 qualifying to be modified
for safety reasons

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• A youthful fascination with Grand Prix racing

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