Doug Nye: Racing without a helmet

I think I said something like “Well, at its purest level it’s still an activity run on road-type circuits with solo drivers in motorized mechanical conveyances which are conventionally four-wheeled, and which therefore – unlike motor-cycles – can stand up on their own. Normally a full field of cars and drivers will be signalled to set off simultaneously at one point in time, over a previously specified distance or duration – and the first one home’s the winner…”

Other than those bare bones – well, times change.

We then got onto the subject, inevitably, of motor racing in safety.  My questioner mentioned in passing how crash helmet design has changed, from the early adopted type of thin-shell, cork-lined, laminated-linen hard hat really designed to save polo players from beaning themselves, or being whacked by the hard ball, or assailed by a rival player’s swishing mallet.

When I related how international regulations did not actually demand any hard-hat protection whatsoever until as late as 1952, the interviewer’s reaction was stunned-mullet amazement. In fact, until I demonstrated by showing some contemporary photographs through 1951 and the early part of ’52 that reaction was simple disbelief – “What? Is that right?  Are you sure of that?”… and more of the same.

Now it’s a well-known fact that Dads can be embarrassing for a young person. Stirling Moss’s Dad, Alfred, had himself been a racing driver pre-war, with experience not only at Brooklands but also in the Indianapolis ‘500’ in America. And when his young son announced his ambition to go motor racing in 1947-48 ‘Pa’ Moss was adamant. The boy could do it, but he would HAVE to wear a hard crash helmet.

“Oooh Daaad!”

On can imagine the reaction. All of the boy’s exemplars – the great contemporary “Continental cracks” like Jean-Pierre Wimille, ‘Gigi’ Villoresi, Alberto Ascari and more all wore extremely cool looking soft linen or leather flying helmets. They were used just to keep flapping hair out of their eyes and to minimise the fatiguing effect of constant battering around the scalp in races lasting three hours or more.

Spool back to the photos the boy had seen of the great pre-war aces – Rudi Caracciola, Bernd Rosemeyer, Dick Seaman, the imposingly named Manfred von Brauchitsch… Did any of them wear such a pansy accoutrement as a hard crash helmet? Naaah…

The vast majority wore linen wind caps or fabric ‘flying helmets’. Nuvolari preferred red leather. British Riley star Percy Maclure famously could not bear wearing a hat or helmet of any kind, and instead simply larded his hair with grease to stick it down and raced ferociously and effectively – and completely bare-headed…

‘Pa’ Moss would counter, by pointing out pictures of Earl Howe, Raymond Mays, Prince ‘Bira’. They all wore hard crash helmets through the 1930s. “Yes Dad – but they weren’t top drawer were they? The best of the best were the Germans, and the Italians, and when Dick Seaman drove with them he was an Englishman wearing the kit they wore…real racing drivers’ stuff…

“You are not going motor racing unless you wear a hard hat – and that is final!”

And so it was that on young man exploded onto our motor racing scene wearing a hard crash helmet instead of the perfectly permissible wind cap so favoured by the vast majority of those Continental stars he so admired and aimed to emulate.

As late as 1968 I remember reporting a Formula 2 race at Jarama which was supported by a saloon car event for local Spanish drivers. One of them in some kind of Seat saloon trundled round happily at the back of the field – wearing a deer stalker hat… We concluded he was probably a close friend or relatively of some local luminary or race organiser, who had been given a start for the buzz…

But what had really concentrated European officialdom’s focus upon the hard hat-versus-soft helmet issue had been the sad death of veteran driver Luigi Fagioli during the 1952 Monaco Grand Prix meeting. A hard crash-helmet requirement had already been launched but not properly enforced by that time. That Monaco GP was not a World Championship-qualifying open-wheeler race that year, but was run instead as a double-headed sports car event, with one race for up-to-2-litre cars, and another for over 2-litres. Each one was quite a challenge around the tight street circuit, and the factory Lancia team arrived for the lower-capacity race with a trio of carefully prepared B20 Aurelia Coupes.

These were fantastically effective racing GTs at the time, and Luigi Fagioli had just finished third overall with one in the Mille Miglia, ahead of pre-war Mercedes-Benz team-mate (and deadly rival) Rudi Caracciola’s works 300SL.

Tragically, during Monaco GP practice, Luigi Fagioli crashed his Aurelia in the famous Tir aux Pigeons tunnel on the seafront. Unrestrained by seat belts and with no hard crash helmet he was hurled around inside the car and was retrieved with a reported broken leg and hand, internal and head injuries.

Fagioli was 54 years old. He had been one of the famous ‘Three Fs’ team of Alfa Romeo Grand Prix drivers – Fangio, Farina and Fagioli – pre-war he had been a works driver for Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union as well as Maserati and for the Scuderia Ferrari. He became renowned for being hard as nails, tough, aggressive. He had once, memorably, attacked team-mate, but rival, Caracciola with a wheel-hammer in the pits at Tripoli. He was not a racing driver to be toyed with, and his nickname – ‘The Abruzzi Robber’ – pretty much told the story.

But that June day in 1952 the 54-year-old veteran’s luck ran out in the Monaco tunnel, and after a typically determined fight for life he died from his injuries, three weeks later. Amongst other measures, an FIA regulation was enforced thereafter at prominent level – hard crash helmets finally became compulsory.

And cissy or not – racing drivers at all levels finally had to adopt them as a tool of their trade, a mandatory item of sports equipment. The face of the sport was beginning to change – and one of the places we saw that happen was at the Goodwood Motor Circuit, of course.

Photography courtesy of The GP Library