His private life was, on the surface, just as undemonstrative, side-affairs notwithstanding. He may have had a fling with Evita Perón (yes), but for twenty fairly monogamous years he lived with ‘Beba’ Espinosa, a buxom, raven-tressed divorcee (her ex had been a potato farmer), with whom he had an illegitimate son. ’ But when things got awkward, he walked away from her just as he walked away from Alfa Romeo and Ferrari: ‘She said if I didn’t like being with her I could leave. ’ There you go. The only things which wholly engaged his passions were being in a racing car and winning.

And he had shuffled back to the financially wheezy Maserati équipe for the endgame, in a much-developed 250F, the car in which he had started his ’54 Championship year. If Alfa Romeo had been Teutonic, then Maserati were, by all accounts, authentically, chaotically Italian. The three-year-old 250F, with its unsupercharged straight-6, its conventional (but sweet-handling) chassis, and its classic good looks, was in many ways the definitive post-war front-engined machine. But the Lancia-Ferrari 801s driven in ’57 by Peter Collins and Mike Hawthorn, although equally mature, were more powerful, and had much younger men to drive them.

It was a terrible way to end. But the legacy was this: in those two seasons, Mercedes had shown what a modern Grand Prix team could look like: well resourced, highly motivated, thorough, disciplined, properly structured, boasting two stellar drivers, and wholly intimidating. Just as in the late 1930s, they had turned out to be a glimpse of the future. 4 FANGIO II: 1956 AND THE NIGHTMARE OF THE PRANCING HORSE Ah, but Ferrari. How did Fangio ever win the ’56 Championship, given the truly terrible relationship between him and the Ferrari team?