Ferrari's 500th GP

Lest you think me perhaps addled by the heat and questionable wine of Hungary, allow me an explanation. Until 1960, for reasons more symbolic than logical, the Indianapolis 500 was a round of the World Championship. Through those years, Mr Wallard ran it only twice, but his victory in 1951 leaves him with a record unlikely to be equalled: he won precisely 50 percent of all his World Championship races. Not even Fangio - with 24 from 51 - quite matches up. Statistics can indeed be misleading.

This came to my mind at the Hungaroring, where Ferrari handed out a nice little booklet, in celebration of the company's 500th Grand Prix. Except that it was actually the 499th, for they had chosen to include the 1952 Indy 500, where a car was entered for Alberto Ascari. Ferrari's 500th Grand Prix comes at Spa-Francorchamps, and if you think me pedantic, perhaps I feel that so memorable an anniversary could have been more properly celebrated in a place of appropriate history. In June 1952 Ascari won there, and in June '53 he did it again.

You want to talk records? In those 12 months, Ascari was unbeaten in any World Championship Grand Prix. Like Lee Wallard's, this one seems likely to stand.

Ascari's car, the 500, was on display at the Hungaroring, one exhibit in a collection of Grand Prix Ferraris, from the 4.5-litre 375 of 1951 to this year's F92A. Like half the paddock, I spent a long time wandering around them, and remembering.

Frank Dernie was entranced by the brutish '51 car, etched in legend by the countless sideways shots of Froilan Gonzales at Silverstone, en route to a first victory over the Alfas.

It has been fully restored now, immaculate in a way it never was in its working days. And at the weekend Luigi Villoresi, 81 years old and a little frail now, took it out on a circuit built when he was a mere stripling of 74.

Many former Ferrari drivers were in Budapest, including Tony Brooks, who drove the Dino 246, Maurice Trintignant ('Squalo'), and Giancarlo Baghetti, who took out Niki Lauda's B3, the man himself declining to drive it. Baghetti is another from the record books. Will anyone else ever win his first Grand Prix? I doubt it.

His presence made me lament anew that not a single 'shark nose' car from 1961 survives. That year Ferrari had the kind of advantage that Williams-Renault has enjoyed in 1992, but all the 156 cars were broken up, as was Enzo Ferrari's way. Almost grotesquely sentimental in some respects, the Ingenere had no such feelings for his cars. For him, they were there merely to win races, and when they stopped doing that, they went to the knackers' yard.

Which did he like most of all his cars? "The next one," the Old Man invariably grunted.

I met him on only three occasions, and always fancied he thought us fools, we who drooled over his gorgeous red cars, who got dewy-eyed at the yellow and black shield, the stencilled 'PROVA MO' on the tail. But if I dislike much of what has happened at Maranello these recent years, I remain helpless at the sight of a Ferrari, and trust I always will.

Patrick Tambay was there with his own C3, the car in which he memorably won at Imola in 1983. "Look around here," he said. "Living proof of 44 years of history. We should preserve these things - McLaren and Williams should do the same. The sport is becoming so technical, so professional, it's also becoming dehumanised. We have to keep the magic in sport, respect the past, remember what people have done."

At a dinner on Friday evening there was a gift to Ferrari from Honda of a samurai helmet. "Wonderful, isn't it?" Patrick murmured. "The ultimate recognition of respect, in Japan, of one warrior by another."

Before last weekend, Tambay had last driven the C3 at Kyalami in 1983, his final race for Ferrari. "I was on the pole, and the night before the race they said I should play the team game, help Rene Arnoux win the championship. I said, 'What? You give me the sack, and now you want me to think only of the team? OK, let's make a deal - you ask me something as important as that, well, I want you to sell me the car.'" They said no.

"However, during the winter I negotiated with the Commendatore - I still have the telexes - and he agreed. The car has sat in my garage for nearly nine years. A couple of my old mechanics came down, changed the oil, put some fuel in it, then towed it - and it fired straight away! It's in the same condition as it was - even if I am not! The only real problem has been finding enough adjustment in the seat belts...

"It's my car, and I don't want to hurt it, of course. I don't think I could afford to have it rebuilt. But yesterday I couldn't resist taking it briefly up to 3.5 bar. No misfire at all, same beautiful gearbox, steering perfect. Emotionally, it was nice. I just wanted to savour every second of it."

Elsewhere in the display there was the 1.5-litre flat-12 car from 1965, as driven occasionally by John Surtees and Lorenzo Bandini, dwarfed by everything around it. Indeed, perhaps what struck me most about this collection of Ferraris, gathered together in one place, was the size of the cars, relative to one another.

From childhood, I remember the Dino 246 of 1959-'60 as a monster, yet, next to Tambay's turbocharged C3, it looked tiny and trim. I noted again the left-hand gear lever, the upholstered seat - and the fuel tank in the cockpit, on the driver's right.

Safety, when you speak of a Grand Prix car, is always a relative term, of course, but seeing a 40-year span of Formula 1 design within an hour or so is a salutary experience. You look at the front-engined cars, with their huge cockpits, imagine how easy it was to be thrown out, and then remember Stirling Moss's observation: "That was what you wanted, boy. If the thing was going over, you wanted to be thrown out.

"You didn't have a roll-over bar to protect your head, and you didn't want to be trapped inside, because probably there was going to be a fire, and you didn't have fireproof overalls. That was why you didn't want to know about safety belts..."

I confess to a particular affection for the front-engined 246, which is bracketed in my mind with the Maserati 250F of 1957. It was in this era that I fell completely for motor racing, and these two cars, more than any others, crystallise for me a relatively innocent time, when avarice rarely went further than a bit of fiddled starting money.

Over in the paddock, huddled in motorhomes, they were arguing about the number of noughts on the contract, the fuel expenses for the jet, and all the trinkets of success demanded by bloated self-esteem. Tacky, of course, but in these surroundings not terribly important.