Monstrous Was The Word For Sebring

The weather at daybreak perfectly set the stage for the critical hours of last Saturday's world championship 12-hour sports car race at Sebring, Fla. Fog hid the sun and gave the air a clammy chill. By 10 a.m., starting time for the race, the fog had thinned, but the gloomy dankness remained. The customary buoyant mood of the racing people had already been depressed by a week of heavy rain, which cut practice time drastically, and by the fatal accident in the night practice on the previous evening of a 30-year-old Detroit automobile salesman and weekend driver, E. P. Lawrence, whose three-liter Maserati had flipped and burned.

More tension resulted from a dispute between the powerful Ferrari team and the Sebring management. At one point Team Manager Romolo Tavoni threatened to withdraw the cars, insisting that he had orders from home to use Ferrari's contract fuel (Shell) and that he had been given prior assurance that the team would be excused from the traditional Sebring requirement that only one kind of gas be used ( Amoco, which promotes and contributes heavily to the Sebring operation). Race Director Alec Ulmann insisted that Amoco be used. Finally the chief U.S. representative for Ferrari, Luigi Chinetti, served as peacemaker and persuaded Tavoni to relent. Had the cars actually been withdrawn, the race, as the figurative saying goes, would have run out of gas.

Disappointing news came from the Connecticut sportsman, Briggs Cunningham, that he hadn't been able to work the bugs out of an experimental water-cooled braking system (S.I., March 16) in time for the race and that he had refitted conventional disk brakes on the English Lister-Jaguar concerned.

However, it takes more than bad weather and a disappointment or two to keep deep-dyed followers of road racing away from Sebring. The spectators who turned out last week had no reason to regret the trip, because the race held in store phenomenal driving and much suspense.

Britain's Roy Salvadori was first away in the Le Mans-style start, and behind him onto the 5.2-mile course came a noisy swarm of 64 sports cars—wasp-sized 750 cc. DBs from France buzzing along as aggressively as the maximum-displacement three-liter racers at the other end of the engine scale. Salvadori's green Aston Martin led at the end of the first lap but soon retired because of mechanical difficulties. As expected, the factory Ferraris swiftly poked their sleek red snouts to the front—those driven by France's Jean Behra and California's Dan Gurney at once and, within 15 laps, that of Belgium's Olivier Gendebien, which had made a poor start. In the pits the wonderfully gifted Californian, Phil Hill, awaited his driving shift in the No. 8 car driven by Gendebien, his co-driver in victory last year in the biggest sports car race of them all, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Two of the three Lister-Jaguars, the Ferraris' most formidable opposition among the big cars, rolled along in the first flight, Britain's Ivor Bueb leading New Jersey's Walt Hansgen, and in the pits the great British driver, Stirling Moss, waited to relieve Bueb. No chance for Moss to worry the opponents by making one of his customary sprints at the start of a long distance race. But he would be more effective in reserve.

SECURITY IN HIS SIXTH

Behra did the sprinting for Ferrari, stretching his lead over Gendebien to two minutes by the time he gave his seat to Co-driver Cliff Allison after 40 laps, but some work on the car's starter motor took a costly five and a half minutes.

Hill relieved Gendebien and, with traffic sorted out after the first round of pit stops, held a comfortable lead over California's Chuck Daigh, Gurney's co-driver, and a big margin over Allison. Driving with great security in his sixth race at Sebring, Hill took just over 20 laps to attain a full lap lead on Daigh's second-place Ferrari. Moss passed Allison but could not reasonably hope to catch the flying Hill from so far behind. As the sun shone brightly now, only to deceive, so did Hill's Ferrari dominate the race at midday. When it had done 78 laps, Hill heard "a helluva noise" at the rear and the car was retired with a damaged pinion bearing.

The Hansgen Lister-Jaguar had dropped out of contention with a broken De Dion tube, leaving the task of besting the Ferraris squarely with Moss. He seemed perfectly capable of it. Driving the streamlined new car with body designed by British Aerodynamicist Frank Costin, Moss chipped steadily at the lead of Chuck Daigh's Ferrari. When Daigh pitted to hand the car to Gendebien—free along with Hill to substitute in other team cars—Moss went ahead. But suddenly Moss, too, was out. He is said to have shrugged off a signal to go into the pits in order to turn just one more lap. At any rate, the fastest road-racing driver in the world stalled on the course. By riding to and from the pit, instead of walking, and then accepting a push by another Jag to get his car to the pit, Moss invited disqualification, and his mount was black-flagged off when he resumed the race.

As a crackle of thunder and a flash of lightning from a nearby electrical storm heralded Moss's departure, the Ferrari manager, Tavoni, glowered at the sky and at the amazing Porsche Spyders which zipped smartly past his command post. With Moss out, Behra held the lead, having relieved Allison; but a miscue could allow the 1.6-liter Porsche of Germany's Wolfgang von Trips and Sweden's Joakim Bonnier to slip ahead. This silver dart had already passed the other contending Ferrari, according to Tavoni's chart; two 1.5-liter Porsches were well-placed for a long run at the Ferraris—one driven by Germany's Edgar Barth and the Connecticut veteran John Fitch, the other by the U.S. Porsche experts, Bob Holbert and Don Sesslar.