Doug Nye: Behind the scenes of Ferrari: Race to Immortality

One promotional blurb for the movie – which is a 92-minute documentary covering real people, real events – reads as follows:

“The 1950s – the iconic Scuderia Ferrari battle to stay on top in one of the deadliest decades in motor racing history. Cars and drivers were pushed to their limits, and the competition for the World Championship meant racing on a knife edge where one mistake could take a life. At the centre of it all was Enzo Ferrari, a towering figure in motor racing who was driven to win at any cost. Amidst the stiff competition within his Ferrari team, two of its British stars, Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn, put friendship first and the Championship second. ‘Ferrari: Race to Immortality’ tells the story of the loves and losses, triumphs and tragedy of Ferrari’s most celebrated drivers in an era where they lived la dolce vita during the week and it was win or die on any given Sunday.”

The British Council film synopsis reads:

“The late nineteen fifties were known as golden years in the world of motor racing, champions were made and lost on a Sunday, and no losses were greater than those of Enzo Ferrari’s Scuderia.

A towering figure in motor racing, Ferrari’s reputation went before him, yet when he spoke of himself he simply said “I am an agitator of men”.

British racing heroes, Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins were fearless young drivers who eagerly joined the other glamorous playboy drivers who pushed themselves to the limit to satisfy Ferrari’s appetite for glory. Peter and Mike were highly competitive on the track but their bond was so unshakable they often felt compelled to let the other win.

Based on Chris Nixon’s bestselling biography 'Mon Ami Mate' this film tells the story of the loves and losses, triumphs and tragedy of a turbulent era that shook the motor racing world…”

Yes, well, all that is as maybe – but as we all saw on Monday evening from our vantage points in the plush and comfy Curzon cinema seats there is much, much more to this British production than any 100-word puff can really reflect.

The Duke of Richmond & Gordon introduced the Curzon Premiere, explaining how the British driver duo of Hawthorn and Collins – well-remembered from their Ferrari drives at Goodwood on Easter Monday, 1958 – were not the only devil-may-care young athletes who put their lives on the line with and for Ferrari in that singularly intense motor racing era. 

Amongst their team-mates were the Italian champions Eugenio Castellotti and Luigi Musso, and the entirely charismatic Spanish nobleman, the Marquis Alfonso ‘Fon’ de Portago.  Each of them – like Hawthorn and Collins – raced, and won, in Ferrari cars. 

The tragic side of their epic joint story is that four of these five ultimately died in Ferrari cars, trying just that little bit harder than perhaps was prudent, leaning perhaps further out of the window to see just how far one could go before actually falling out… And the fifth was Mike Hawthorn – by the end of 1958 not only the sole survivor of this so-colourful and so-charismatic quintet – but the man who ended that season as Britain’s first-ever Formula 1 World Champion Driver. But just twelve weeks after having clinched that title – by just one single, solitary point from Stirling Moss – Mike himself lost his life, in his Jaguar 3.4 saloon, in a crash on the A3 Guildford By-Pass just close by Stag Hill with its summit cathedral…

At this point I must declare an interest. In period I was a schoolboy fan of both Moss and Hawthorn, and – for that matter – of almost every other British driver, such as Tony Brooks, who was then featuring at top level. In my memory, that was the way what today seems to be known as ‘fandom’ worked. 

One was more in awe of the activity than of one individual versus another. This doesn’t appear to be the case in these maybe less awestruck and less-nuanced days. Today something akin to soccer attitudes seem to have engulfed motor sports fans to the point at which their common breadth of vision has narrowed down to supporting one individual star not just instead of – but actively against – another. In this brain-dead, to me scum-fan world, maybe Lewis Hamilton can do no wrong, but only at the expense of Seb Vettel being absolutely vilified and dismissed as a rival who can do no right…and vice versa. In the age of social media sound-bite opinion maybe young fans feel they have to compete in their degree of public dismissal to demonstrate the level of their personal-favourite support. My goodness. How dumb. How dim…

Well that was, in no way, part of my outlook back in the 1950s, nor of those fellow schoolboy fans I knew. To us – naïve innocents though we might have been (but doubt we were) – all proper Grand Prix drivers were simply Men from Mars. It was a question of respect, respect, respect – all the way. It was truly a death-defying activity in those days – and we heard, or saw or read about the truth of that description almost every other weekend.

I should also declare an interest in that I have been quite deeply involved in the making of ‘Ferrari: Race to Immortality’ – as has Goodwood and the GRRC in assisting with Revival Meeting shooting, sound-track recording and now promotion.

For me it all began with a call from would-be producer Julia Taylor-Stanley who had been trying to get the project off the ground for some years, having bought the movie rights to the late Chris Nixon’s book about the Hawthorn and Collins duo, ‘Mon Ami Mate’. 

She had concluded her efforts with some collaborators were going nowhere, and then – poor lady – she accepted someone’s advice to talk to me. A London luncheon failed to impress me. Of course everything was super positive, darling, Universal Studios backing, name-drop is involved, another name-drop has given their backing, darling it’s all going to be wonderful… The fly in the ointment here was that celeb name-drops seldom work with me – because I have either never heard of the celeb cited, or if I have then the selective filter of disinterest has wiped my memory – completely. Super-positivity also rings alarm bells. I had encountered that several times before in the world of motor racing movie-float promises – and every time there finally proved to be absolutely no washing machine, no coconut, no end product – and no pay day. It was all – as they say – BS.

However, diminutive little Julia of Artemis Films stuck to her guns. She proved resilient, and insistent. One fact which rapidly became apparent to me was that she absolutely knew the subject. She proved simply incredibly knowledgeable. She understood our world – and she evidently cared. She stayed in contact, kept the assurances of progress flowing – and progress she did. She proved as solid gold as her word. In every respect. Beneath this lady’s movie-world theatrical luvvy shell was a get-things-done force of nature…

We got on well and so it all ended up with a full crew at my home filming a talking-head interview which extended over two or three days last year. At one point my jam-packed, book-cluttered undercroft office bunker was filled with water-vapour smoke, a theatrical light shining in through the vertical venetian window blind from the garden outside, radiating visible shafts of light into my work space. I found myself being filmed in this Dickensian scene by director Daryl Goodrich with a vintage Bolex 16mm movie camera…while blethering away downloading what I have absorbed over donkey’s years of Ferrari, Hawthorn, Collins, Musso, Castellotti, de Portago study… Would-be movie viewers today need have no fear – all this stuff has ended-up on the cutting-room floor. It made room for brilliant contemporary footage, freshly found.

Meanwhile, accomplished director Daryl and I just got on like a house on fire. Specialist movie researcher Richard Wiseman – working with the crew – likewise. Cameraman Dave Meadows I had worked with previously on a Targa Florio shoot – and various Goodwood events – so still more comfort zone, mutual fun with like-minded good people…working towards a shared end vision.

And from the reaction of the Curzon cinema audience at the Monday-evening premiere that end has been achieved. With tremendous help and input from another old friend and Goodwood movie contributor David Weguelin, Richard Wiseman had secured for the project some of the most stupendously jaw-dropping, gloriously high-def colour quality contemporary movie footage any enthusiast can ever hope to see.

Daryl Goodrich explained: “We aren’t only making a motor racing movie for the pure enthusiast; this is an extraordinarily tightly-woven story of real people, real young sportsmen engaged in an incredibly dangerous activity, and all driving for this extraordinarily charismatic team, run by this one dark, brooding, manipulative man at the top – Enzo Ferrari. In fact – what a story!

“We wanted to tell it, and tell it well – and the challenge to do that within an hour and a half proved immense…”

He continued: “We ended up with a mass of archive footage – much of it either not shown publicly for many years, or indeed never ever shown at all. And much of what we found was just of unbelievably superb quality – as the audience will see. We have to chime with the present-day YouTube youth audience, and also with the female audience. And when it comes to motor racing footage from the period the youth market is accustomed to poor-quality black-and-white. Here in stark contrast they can see – maybe for the first time – genuine footage from the period in gorgeous colour and fantastic high-def resolution – looking as if it was shot at the very latest Grand Prix, just yesterday… not sixty years ago.

“But that apart – what we really needed to complete our story was that something extra – the background to racing itself, some insight into the lives these young men all lived away from the track.

“And then we found it in the Wolfgang von Trips archive – another Ferrari works driver – who had a Bolex cine camera and who shot all kinds of candid contemporary footage of himself and his fellow drivers, crossing the Atlantic on an ocean liner, larking about on a Florida beach, sun bathing at Monte Carlo, or swimming and diving in a hotel pool near Le Mans or Rouen or somewhere similar. And that is what really made the difference – and what enabled us to complete the picture…and to tell the story…”

Because I have been quite close to this project – and I count its makers today as valued friends – it’s not for me to express an opinion on whether their movie pulls it off or not. But the half of the premiere audience who were not from our motor racing world applauded just as enthusiastically as anyone else and afterwards proved just as fulsome in their vocal praise. For me the shot selection and sequence pacing demonstrated by movie editor Paul Trewartha seals the deal – on his part a brilliantly crafted piece of work.

I had accompanied Tony and Pina Brooks up to the Curzon for the occasion and the former Vanwall, BRM, Connaught and Cooper star driver was equally enwrapped by this very human movie, which does as much to celebrate his former rivals’ young lives as it does to document and make some sense of their fates. 

Tony told me: “Pina and I enjoyed yesterday evening. The movie certainly captured the atmosphere of the fifties, creating a generous portion of nostalgia with a good ten seconds of my blazing BRM at Silverstone! It was an hour and a half living in my past world, winning three GPs in 1958 to Mike’s one for the Championship which led me to recall my close miss in 1959 following a longer than average run of ‘genuine’ hard luck. However, the movie provided some consolation in reminding me that my career total of GP wins was better than the combined total of Mike and Peter…”.

Bless ’em all – you see, you take take the man out of competitive driving but even at 85 the otherwise faultlessly modest and discreet Tony Brooks – in part – really remains the driven competitor. 

And that, perhaps, is what really sets these remarkably committed and totally courageous sportsmen of the 1950s apart from their modern successors. With the burden of violent death parked somewhere near the surface of their psyche, these men – truly – were Warriors all. And ageless warriors at that – where one is talking of those very few who have survived. The few whom Goodwood events most celebrate…

In short, I very much recommend ‘Ferrari: Race to Immortality’.  Get to see it, and decide for yourselves whether or not it captures the essence of that age. 

For those involved – whom I now count as valued and respected friends – the movie’s public release marks mission accomplished.