How Argentina’s forgotten sporting hero earned Fangio’s admiration

It’s 22 January 1956, minutes before four of a warm and cloudy Buenos Aires afternoon. Juan Manuel Fangio, Eugenio Castellotti and Luigi Musso have lined up their Lancia-Ferraris on the first row of the grid for the start of the Argentinian Grand Prix, alongside Jean Behra’s Maserati 250F. Behind them – in the middle of row two on the 4-3-4 grid – is Carlos Menditeguy aboard one of the five works-entered Maseratis, sandwiched by team-mates Stirling Moss and Jose Froilan Gonzalez.

Down comes the flag and, as the field accelerates away, Menditeguy edges past Fangio, Castellotti and Behra, trailing Musso and Gonzalez into the right-hand swerve at the bottom of the main straight. Third place becomes the lead four laps later, and this is where he’ll remain during the next 70 minutes or so (nearly 40 laps), until a broken half shaft violently pitches Menditeguy into the outer wire fencing of that same right-hander.

A 10-handicap polo player, scratch golfer, and a well-ranked tennis player at home, Argentinian shooting champion, good at fencing and boxing and, also, a talented driver. No doubt, Menditeguy was a gifted sportsman.

He first hit the headlines by winning the Argentinian Polo Open. He repeated this on six more occasions between 1940 and 1960, as part of the El Trebol outfit, with his brother Julio and the two Duggan brothers also part of the dominating quartet on most occasions.

From 1950 his life also began centring on a different type of horsepower. The local motor racing crowd began to take notice of him after his initial outing, when he scored a dominant victory aboard a loaned Ferrari 166MM barchetta in the support race prior to the (Temporada) Grand Prix at Mar del Plata in January 1950.

A year later, Mercedes-Benz took over a three-car team of its pre-war single-seaters for a two-round programme on Buenos Aires’s Costanera street layout. Menditeguy drove a borrowed, pre-war Alfa Romeo 308 (a 3.8-litre example) in both events, and his performance aboard a car with plenty of miles under its belt served notice of his abilities at the wheel of a single-seater – especially in the second race, during which, with Gonzalez already miles out in the lead and the three Mercs in trouble, Menditeguy progressed to second place.

Menditeguy spent just a single season racing in Europe, in 1957, preferring instead to take on the internationals on home turf

Photo by: LAT Photographic

Ten laps from the finish he ran out of fuel and, despite switching over to the reserve tank, an air vacuum meant the car would go no further. Fifth place, as the first classified non-finisher, was a meagre reward for his efforts that afternoon.

Between 1952 and 1960, he lined up for every one of the Temporadas – essentially events for F1-style single-seaters – that took place in Argentina. Contrary to countrymen Fangio, Gonzalez and Onofre Marimon, all of whom had cut their teeth on dust tracks and also in open-road races, and had later gone on to concentrate on racing in Europe, Menditeguy’s idea of the sport was about taking on the visiting stars on home ground during the summers in Argentina, and then spending the rest of the season campaigning his Ford V8 coupe in local Turismo Carretera events.

“Undoubtedly, the TC races were the ones I most enjoyed,” he once mentioned, after his retirement.

Little did he realise that Fangio was over a lap behind him at the time, and during his struggle to keep ahead one of the Maserati’s half shafts broke, pitching the car off at a very fast sector of the track; he emerged unscathed

A huge contrast in machinery this – although those TC tin-tops were by no means slouchy (he averaged 117.25mph for fastest lap during one of the 1954 TC rounds, the open-road Vuelta de Tres Arroyos), they were the complete opposite to the grand prix pur sangs he also drove.

Encouraged by those outings aboard the Alfa Romeo at the Costanera, Menditeguy found himself a drive for the opening of the Buenos Aires Autodromo in March 1952. Again he drove a good race, this time managing second behind Fangio’s similar (albeit larger-engined) Ferrari in the second event. The following year he drove a works Gordini in Argentina’s – and also his – first world championship GP, a broken gearbox spelling early retirement.

As usual seeking new and sport-related challenges, he kept pulling his friends’ legs about their game of golf, and bet them that in about 12 months’ time he’d be playing the game as a scratch. And yes, he won the bet before a year had gone by.

His sportscar world championship debut followed, in the first edition – 1954 – of the Buenos Aires 1000Km, sharing a Ferrari 625 TF with countryman Roberto Bonomi until the car’s minced transmission meant retirement near the finish, while battling for second with the Ferrari 250 MM of Harry Schell and Alfonso de Portago. He non-started that year’s Argentinian GP, after qualifying ninth, due to Maserati having run out of engines.

As part of the multi-car Maserati works line-up for the 1955 Temporada races, there was little in the way of results for Menditeguy (an early retirement in the Argentinian GP, and sixth in the non-championship Buenos Aires GP). But in 1956 he came ever so close to scoring what would have been his one and only grand prix victory, which is where we came in.

Menditeguy led from recovering Fangio in 1956 Argentinian GP, but didn't realise he was a lap ahead and a half shaft failure sent him off

Photo by: LAT Photographic

On that occasion, he led his home round from lap four and proceeded to stay ahead of the field for well over an hour, until noticing a recovering Fangio (who’d taken over Musso’s Lancia-Ferrari) looming in his mirrors. Little did he realise that Fangio was over a lap behind him at the time, and during his struggle to keep ahead one of the Maserati’s half shafts broke, pitching the car off at a very fast sector of the track; he emerged unscathed. The following Sunday, he and Stirling Moss shared the winning Maserati 300S in the Buenos Aires 1000Km, the Anglo-Argentinian duo recording the Trident’s first success in a the sportscar world championship.

In contrast, two months later it could have been the end of the road for him, during the Sebring 12 Hours. At the wheel of the Maserati 300S he was sharing with Cesare Perdisa, Menditeguy was baulked by a backmarker, overturned at the Esses and was thrown onto the track, his motionless body then narrowly missed by another car, seconds before a rescue crew dragged him clear.

That left him recovering from a skull fracture for the rest of the year, until a return to the circuits in his country’s 1957 season-opener saw him finish third – his best F1 world championship result – behind his Maserati team-mates Fangio and Behra. The following weekend, Moss’s recovery drive to second, after taking over the Maserati 300S Menditeguy was sharing with Behra, nearly led to victory once again in the Buenos Aires 1000Km, the trio finishing half a minute behind the winning Ferrari 290 MM of Masten Gregory, Castellotti and Musso.

The final event of the Temporada was, as usual, the non-championship Buenos Aires GP. Moss and Menditeguy took turns to drive a Maserati 250F to sixth on aggregate in the two-heat event. Those three results in the 1957 Temporada races showed promise for what would be Menditeguy’s only attempt at a whole season in Europe. His only previous outing there had been in the 1955 Italian GP, where fifth had rewarded him with his first two world championship points.

His 1957 European sojourn began with Maserati entering a car for him at Monaco where, despite some late-night partying (which, it is said, marked the beginning of a brief romance with a local starlet), he managed a third-row slot on the grid, from where he climbed to fifth before hitting a stretch of kerbing and stopping for a wheel change.

He made his way up to third by mid-distance, until he hit the straw bales at the exit of the chicane and finished his race against one of the bollards on the quay, a few metres from the spot where Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins had ended their races in spectacular fashion just over an hour before. Retirements followed in the French, British and (non-championship) Reims GPs; albeit he recorded third, behind Fangio and Gregory, in the Lisbon GP, at the wheel of a Maserati 300S.

Unhappy with the way the season was turning out, at mid-year he packed his bags and headed home; after all, there were plenty of open-road Turismo Carretera events plus the local polo season to keep him busy. He completed the year with third in the division’s blue-riband Gran Premio aboard his Ford V8 coupe, ending the eight-leg, 3050-mile event in spectacular fashion, on three wheels.

In the 1958 F1 season-opener in Argentina he made his way to seventh aboard a works-supported, Scuderia Sud Americana-entered Maserati 250F, again as Fangio’s team-mate. At least there was some reward in the non-points-paying Buenos Aires GP two weekends later, run in monsoon conditions, sharing the third-placed (on aggregate) Maserati 250F with Francisco Godia.

Menditeguy frequently retired from races during his solo world championship season and didn't see out the 1957 campaign

Photo by: LAT Photographic

Menditeguy’s admiration towards Fangio was immense. The latter, in turn, was not short in praise of his countryman, on one occasion even expressing belief that Menditeguy had not become a world champion simply because he had never really tried to.

With no Argentinian Temporada races in 1959, it was all about Turismo Carretera racing that season. But when Argentina returned to the F1 calendar in 1960, Menditeguy’s first outing in a rear-engined car provided a spirited drive aboard one of the Scuderia Centro Sud Cooper-Maserati T51s.

He ran as high as third, and in the end gave one of the Anglo-Italian hybrids its best-ever result in a world championship Grand Prix with fourth, behind Bruce McLaren’s winning Cooper-Climax, Cliff Allison (Ferrari 246) and the Rob Walker-entered Cooper that Moss had taken over from an unwell Maurice Trintignant during the race. That torrid Buenos Aires afternoon, on which Team Lotus debuted its first rear-engined Grand Prix car, was Menditeguy’s final world championship GP appearance.

On one occasion Fangio expressed belief that Menditeguy had not become a world champion simply because he had never really tried to

Between that day and his retirement from motor racing – seven years later – he would concentrate on the Turismo Carretera series, also taking in selected rounds of the country’s touring car championship, forming part of the local works-supported Volvo and Alfa Romeo teams, and guesting as a works Mercedes driver in the 1961 and 1962 editions of the marathonic Gran Premio Standard for Touring Cars, also on home soil.

His seven victories in Turismo Carretera rounds – be it on gravel mountainous roads, or on paved routes – were ample proof of his versatility. But he suffered major heartbreak in the event he had yearned to win since the beginning of the 1950s: the season-ending, 1963 Gran Premio de Turismo Carretera, which he comfortably led until 11 miles from the finish, when his Ford’s engine suddenly let go after nearly 2500 miles of racing.

After 1960, there were no GPs in Argentina for over a decade but, in February-March 1964, a four-round series was organised for the by-then defunct Formula Junior cars, following three years during which no foreign single-seaters had visited the country. Menditeguy (by then 48) was invited to drive a Lotus 22, one of the much-raced cars that had been temporarily imported for a group of local drivers.

He practised at the first round in Buenos Aires and on Saturday, having set the sixth-fastest time in qualifying ahead of all his much younger countrymen, and among the likes of Silvio Moser, Bruno Deserti, ‘Geki’ Russo, Carlo Facetti and Karl Foitek, he came into the pits and decided against competing in the series.

Not yet 60 years of age, Menditeguy died in 1973. Unparalleled as an all-rounder in his country’s sports history and usually pursuing new challenges, he had lived life to the full.

Pictured chasing Maurice Trintignant and Dan Gurney, Menditeguy put in a valiant drive in the 1960 Argentinian GP, eventually placing fourth

Photo by: LAT Photographic