FOUR DAYS
AND THREE NIGHTS ON THE ROAD The Monte Carlo Rally is an
immense and immensely difficult automotive test.
No other event of its type has so captured the
imagination of Europe. Scores of cars start from
eight scattered cities on a nonstop 2,500-mile
midwinter journey to the Rainier and Grace
principality on the Mediterranean. Pausing only
to refuel, change tires and make repairs, drivers
and co-drivers spend four days and three nights
on the road, and the last section, in the
mountainous terrain of southern France, is the
most arduous. Battling fatigue, the drivers have
to fight up narrow switchbacks and over lofty
passes in the French Alps, where precipitous
drops at roadside promise urgent danger of
"the loud silence," that time of dread
when a car hurtles off a ledge and soundlessly
down until it strikes the rocks below. But
because the highest honors arc won in the
mountains most of the drivers race through them
with desperate haste. The rally is demanding
enough when the weather is fine, but last week,
as Europe shivered into the second month of its
interminable cold wave, the rally routes were a
frigid horror. Once again Europe bent a
fascinated ear to the radio and television
reports of "this great human
adventure." And this time there was
something for Americans, too.
The new kings of
the mountains, in fact, are the Ford Falcon
Sprint and a sort of superman named Bo
Ljungfeldt. The Sprint is Ford's latest
high-performance model driven by a
260-cubic-inch, eight-cylinder engine. Ford
entered three of the cars in the rally, the first
serious American invasion in its 52-year history.
Le Grand Bo, as 40-year-old Bo Tage Georg
Ljungfeldt came to be known, is a tall, blue-eyed
and balding Swede of no previous rally fame. Last
week he stormed through the mountains in a Falcon
Sprint with such ferocious zeal that he would
have won the rally outright but for penalties
received elsewhere on the journey.
As a consequence
of these penalties, the highest awards were
captured by Ljungfeldt's compatriots, Erik
Carlsson and Ewy Rosqvist. A giant of a man
possessed of a potbelly worthy of St. Nicholas,
Carlsson achieved a rare double by placing first
overall for the second consecutive year. He drove
a little red Swedish SAAB, a three-cylinder,
front-wheel-drive car, and in the mountains he
used straight gasoline in his windshield washers
to fight freezing rain. Mrs. Rosqvist, la
blonde Ewy in the French press, is the
glamorous young woman who made headlines last
fall in Argentina by defeating 254 men in that
country's longest and most famous road race. Last
week she and her co-driver, Ursula Wirth, won the
esteemed Monte Carlo Ladies Cup, defeating all
other women's teams. It was not an easy triumph.
In Frankfurt, Germany, while on the rally route,
she had an aching wisdom tooth pulled, with
Co-driver Wirth holding her pretty head as a
hurriedly summoned dentist wielded his pliers in
a roadside restaurant. What's more, she had to
drive her big, gray Mercedes in the final rally
speed test on the Monte Carlo Grand Prix racing
circuit just an hour after suffering a painful
leg bruise when a rally car plunged off course
and sent a 100-pound protective hay bale flying
into her.
Despite the
magnificent skill and courage of the Swedes,
however, the Falcons were the biggest news of the
event. Said a London newspaper, "The Falcons
are part of a power and performance plan that
will shake up motoring in every country of the
world." In last week's shaking, a Falcon
(not Bo's) won first prize in its class when the
opposing British Jaguar failed to finish at all.
But there was not
and perhaps never has been anything quite like
the performance of the great Bo. Ljungfeldt said
aftterward, between gulps of his favorite
restorative, Scotch and Coca-Cola, that he
"never slept" during his 71 hours on
the road and was relieved at the wheel by his
co-driver and countryman, Gunnar Haggbom, for a
mere five hours of the journey. The Swedish, he
said, who do much of their winter driving on
tricky, snow-covered gravel roads, come naturally
by their winter driving skills. They dote on
night road competition, too. Casually, he
reported encountering fog so thick on the Col de
Perty, a chilly, 4,275-foot-high pass, that he
had to poke his head out the window to see 10
yards ahead. He estimated his speed along this
perilous, ice-coated route at 100 mph. Beside him
sat Haggbom, a man with nerves as cool as
Ljungfeldt's, calmly speaking directions from his
reconnaissance notes. "Hoger,"
he would call for an approaching right-hand bend,
"vanster" for a left.
Ljungfeldt's
daring is all the more remarkable since he knew
that his chances of winning the rally were
approximately nil. He already had lost 31
precious minutes before Chamb?ry, the
vermouth-producing city in southeast France from
which the final 470-mile mountain run began, and
in rallying a driver is penalized 30 points for
each minute he is officially late at a control
center (thus Ljungfeldt was down 930 points).
Twenty-seven other drivers, including the
remarkably steady Carlsson and Mrs. Rosqvist,
came into Chambery clean, although of the 296
rally starters only 216 reached Chambery at all,
and of these a mere 102 completed the final lap
to Monte Carlo. The atrocious weather conditions,
not the drivers or the cars, were at fault.
The events that
caused Ljungfeldt's penalties might have crushed
a less zealous spirit. On the first night Bo hung
his Falcon out over an embankment in the south of
France. After getting hauled back onto the road
he was delayed in a jam-up of rally cars on a
relatively gentle but snow-choked hill road west
of the town of Lodeve, still in the south. Like
the Falcons, these cars had begun the rally where
they were to finish it, at Monte Carlo. The snarl
was so bad that it ended then and there any hope
for two-thirds of the 32 Monte Carlo starters. It
also prompted, as we shall see, a spate of
ridiculous press reports blaming the Ford
"wagons," so termed because they are
big by European standards (if compact by ours),
for the mess.
The jam came
dangerously near to scuttling the Falcons
altogether. Delayed beyond the one-hour time
limit for reporting to the next control, and thus
put out, were Mrs. Anne Hall, Yorkshire's famed
motoring mum, and her pretty, perky co-driver,
Margaret Mackenzie of Dundee. Mrs. Hall, mother
of three children, of whom the eldest is 18, is
equally at home pouring tea in a decorous English
parlor or standing on the throttle of a powerful
rally car. She was the Monte Carlo Ladies Cup
winner of 1961 and was thought to have a fine
chance this year.
The tie-up also
cost the Falcon of British Racing Driver Peter
Jopp and Co-driver Trant Jarman, a British-born
Detroit advertising man, 13 penalty minutes.
Though they ultimately were the crew to win the
class trophy for Ford, they were penalized
ruinously in the overall standings, finally
placing 35th.
Ljungfeldt himself
lost only one minute at Lodeve, but next day in
the north of France a tire blew as his Falcon was
skimming along at 100 mph or so. There was no
damage, and the tire was quickly changed. But
then the clutch failed because, despite the
generally superb preparation of the Falcons, a
mechanic had forgotten to install a 1"
cotter key. For 50 miles Ljungfeldt screamed on
without the use of the clutch. Repairing it at
one of the 37 Ford service points along the route
cost Ljungfeldt the precious penalty minutes that
lost him the rally. During the second night the
fan jounced around and ripped Ljungfeldt's
radiator hose, emptying the coolant. He had to
replace the hose with a spare and wake up a
farmer at 3 a.m., hustling him out into the cold
to pump a replenishing supply of water from his
well. Even so, he was able to reach the control
at Rheims on time. He could not, however, recoup
what he had already lost.
On the last leg
from Chambery the already defeated Ljungfeldt was
magnificent. Driving without sleep, taking only
Coca-Cola with a dextrose additive and a few
cookies for nourishment, he negotiated six
special speed stages below Chambery, 90 hideous
miles of snow, ice, freezing rain and fog on
high, twisty trails, some too narrow for two cars
to pass abreast. The Great Bo beat Erik
Carlsson's time by no less than four minutes and
24 seconds. With a handicap figured in, one
unfavorable to the big-engined Fords, Ljungfeldt
still defeated Carlsson on the special stages by
nine points. Had he arrived at Chambery clean,
Ljungfeldt, who finished 43rd overall, would have
beaten Carlsson by those nine points and
increased his advantage in the Grand Prix speed
test. For he was faster there, too, and for that
last event no handicap was scored.
The reader may
have concluded by now that rallying, Monte Carlo
style, is a form of lunacy. Even when it is clear
that a third of the cars are entered by
manufacturers whose sole aim is to give their
products glamour, what of the cars driven by
amateurs. Against the factories their chances for
major prizes are incalculably small. These
amateurs spend a great deal of money, but only a
fraction of the $2 million invested in last
week's Monte Carlo. Perhaps the British magazine,
The Motor, was right when it declared that
the Monte Carlo "is for many people the last
avenue of escape from the deadly normality of
daily life."
Among the escapees
was a rare variety of men and women: Church of
England clergymen, a major in the Queen's
Household Cavalry, a pair of motoring journalists
past 50, the French Prince of Bourbon-Parma, in
whose veins flows the blood royal, a former
French women's tennis champion. Professionals and
amateurs alike take the risks for granted, as
this writer quickly discovered. "If we
thought about driving off a mountain," said
one rallyman before the start, "I don't
suppose we'd be here in the first place."
The question was
not why people went rallying but who might win.
Who was best prepared? Which starting place,
Lisbon, Monte Carlo, Glasgow, Paris, Athens,
Warsaw, Frankfurt or Stockholm, would be the most
favorable? The consensus was that the Stockholm
route, flat for many miles and with two ferry
crossings permitting a little serene sleep, was
very good, and the one from Monte Carlo among the
worst. Events proved the prophets right. Both
winning Swedes had started from Stockholm. Ford
chose Monte Carlo, despite the mountains on the
outbound route, because the Falcon Sprints were
first unveiled there and because there would be
no red tape crossing frontiers; the entire route,
apart from the principality itself, lay in
France.
Ford spared no
expense to outfit a superior team. Under
Competition Manager George Merwin and Team
Manager Jeffery Uren, a seasoned British
rally-man, the three Falcons were tuned and
equipped by John Holman, the race-wise American
who prepares Ford Galaxies for stock car events
at home. For night driving each Falcon had two
fog lamps and two brilliant
"flamethrowers" of searchlight
candlepower, one forward and the other planted
firmly on the roof. A huge supply of spare parts
was carried in each car.
Starting in
November, each team of drivers practiced the
route endlessly, logging 15,000 to 18,000 miles
of practice. Besides the 37 service depots, there
were special support Falcons, each driven by a
rally veteran and manned by two mechanics. These
cars were to leapfrog the rally route and be
ready to assist the team at designated points. If
Britain's Sam Croft Jones had not gone sprinting
in his service Falcon for a wrecker to pull
Ljungfeldt out of his first mishap, Bo might now
be just another Swede.
I rode with a
Falcon support car. From the first the weather
was bitter as our car climbed steeply into the
mountains from Monte Carlo. By dinnertime, after
we had seen Anne Hall and Peter Jopp flash
through the silent, frozen streets of Serres, the
slightest grade was an obstacle for our ordinary
tires. But next morning, after a night in a tiny
inn, we discovered that we could move reasonably
quickly. While the two surviving Falcons were
speeding northward in the west of France, we
hurried north to catch the rally at St. Loup,
near the German border. That night we left two
bottles of drinking water in the car. Both froze
and one burst by morning.
Farms lay under a
thin blanket of snow. Cyclists, with their
cargoes of French bread, pedaled the roads
wearing enormous gloves that looked like hockey
goalies' mitts. At midmorning Jopp and Jarman
stopped to chat. We gave them some chocolate and
cheese. They told us about the tie-up beyond
Lodeve. "We'd have been home and dry if
there hadn't been such a bloody lot of rally cars
in trouble ahead of us," said an irate Jopp.
By then there had
been vague reports that Falcons had blocked the
Lodeve road. We later saw such accusations in the
press, but back in Monte Carlo the Falcon drivers
were furious. Said Jarman: "We had to stop
on a little easy col because eight or nine other
rally cars ahead of us were stuck. Bo was in
front of us. We could not go on, so we changed
from normal tires to spiked tires. Changing took
a few minutes, but we sat for half an hour or so,
unable to move. Then a car ahead got clear. Bo
charged a snowbank and got through. We did the
same." Later at St. Loup we heard other
tales: "All Athens starters stopped by
snowdrifts in Yugoslavia," "All Lisbon
starters out." Stockholm and Paris starters
in the meantime obviously were doing well. We saw
them go by in large numbers.
From St. Loup we
pushed south to Chambery. Patches of ice were
succeeded by slick, hard-packed snow. Chamb?ry
was unbelievably cold. Hot waffles were served
from an open van. Mechanics worked mightily,
changing tires and making repairs. Drivers were
bone-weary. Britain's Peter Harper, who had taken
a works Sunbeam Rapier on a 120-mile side trip in
Germany because a rally road and alternate roads
were closed, nevertheless came into Chambery
clean. He said: "I feel as though I've done
two rallies already." He looked like a dead
man.
Another Sunbeam
driver, Peter Procter, had got to Chambery with
no time demerits only because he sealed off a
leaking cylinder-head gasket by using an old
trick, dropping the whites of two eggs into the
radiator. Later his heater failed and he used
another, more expensive trick, pouring brandy on
the windshield to clear the quickly forming ice.
During the hard
Chambery, Monaco run many drivers gulped what the
British call wakey-wakey pills. The Rev. Rupert
Jones, curate of Rochdale, offered his sidekick,
the Rev. Philip Morgan of London, a small pill.
"Will you have a cup of tea?" asked
Jones. "Thank you, I shall," replied
Morgan. "It was," said Morgan, back in
Monte Carlo, "a very nice outing."
Snow fell all
through the third night. My car traveled the
safer, main roads. They were hairy enough, and I
could imagine as we slipped and slid up and down
mountains the frozen hell of the rally itself,
traveling the highest and worst roads. But then
rally drivers are another breed. "After
Chambery it was wonderful," said Bo
Ljungfeldt's partner, Gunnar Haggbom. "What
a fabulous car! What a wonderful ride from
Chambery!" said Trant Jarman.
"A beautiful
car! I would start another rally tomorrow,"
said The Great Bo Ljungfeldt, pouring Coca-Cola
into his Scotch.
Written by: Kenneth
Rudeen
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