No Way To Treat A Mystique

There is a certain magic at work in sports, a quality that attaches itself almost at random to certain events, adding mystery, anticipation, vibration and often even delirium to them. Usually it attaches itself to—or perhaps grows from—a specific individual while bypassing other individuals who may have much the same talent or success in the sport. Joe Namath has it, Daryle Lamonica does not; Arnold Palmer has it, Billy Casper does not; Muhammad Ali has it, Joe Frazier does not. In endurance racing it is the magic of machines, and here Ferrari has it, but watch out, Liebchen, Porsche is looking up. Last weekend the German firm blitzed some of the fanciest opposition in years to finish one-two in the 24 Hours of Daytona.

But to the 35,000 speed freaks who descended on Bill France's Daytona International Speedway, it hardly seemed to matter who won the season's first world manufacturers' championship race. They seemed entirely content that Ferrari was back after a two-year sabbatical. All through race week you could feel the vibrations building, for Ferrari was dead serious: 10 cars worth, four of them the new, five-liter 512S model. A broad-shouldered, closed-cockpit car with a guttural voice several octaves lower—and thus more mysteriously masculine—than any other entry, the 512 snapped and snarled its way around the sinuous 3.81-mile course like some animated excerpt from a medieval bestiary. Downshifting into corners or lining it out at 200 mph through the speedway's backstretch, the 512 made sharp, threatening noises that sounded like claims to Italy's old gas-powered territorial imperative. At a loss for a nickname, the drivers dubbed it "the Mule."

Yes, Ferrari was serious: its list of drivers read like a Who's Who of speed. There were Dan Gurney, Jackie Ickx, Nino Vaccarella, the massive, graying Mike Parkes teamed with young Sam Posey and, of course, Mario Andretti, hero of Indy's Brickyard. Gurney's 512 wore a lumpy little bonnet atop the cockpit to permit his black bonedome ample room, and the man himself—all 6'2" of him—seemed in a continuous grouch. His mechanics called him "Mr. Grimsby" behind his back, but Gurney had cause for grimness. His car, and all the other 512s, for that matter, were having trouble breathing—fuel pump problems.

Gurney and his co-driver, Chuck Parsons, wanted to junk the Italian-made Marelli fuel pumps that were causing the trouble and "go down the block for a couple of Stewart-Warners." E Basta! Ees not possible. Instead, the Ferrari mechanics punched a few breathing holes in the fuel lines and, presto, the problem seemed to be solved.

On qualifying day, running through a chilly drizzle, Ferrari won the pole. Andretti's car turned the course in 1:51.6 for a record qualifying speed of 122.903 mph and all four of the five-liter Ferraris qualified in the top 10. The pole, of course, is only an indication of potential speed in a 24-hour race. "What's 100 yards in a race of 2,500 miles?" asked Andretti. Indeed, 11� miles is the closest a runner-up ever came to a winner at Daytona—that was when Parkes and the late Ludovico Scarfiotti came in behind Chris Amon in 1967.

For all the Ferrari mystique, there was still a race to be run. Franco Lini, the sapient Italian motor journalist who served as Ferrari's team manager during the 1967 Daytona (and brought his cars home one-two-three), knows something about attrition. "Big cars maybe no finish," declared Franco in his delightful English. "Winner, she be three-liter car."

True, there were some mighty quick little cars in the running. Matra, the French aerospace firm, had two of its blue-and-green Matra-Simca 650 Spyders qualified in the top 15. On the truck trek down from New York, the cars got loose and chewed up one another's fiber-glass bodies. The quick stripping of a spare car flown in from Argentina got them back in shape. During trials these open-cockpit cars, all curves and ululation, looked quicker through the infield Esses than the Ferraris. What's more, Matra had enlisted the services of Jack Brabham, three times the world Grand Prix champion. With the game,-quick Frenchman Jean-Pierre Beltoise in the other car, Matra was a real contender for the first time in its three years of endurance racing. "The key to winning long-distance races is metallurgy," Franco Lini said in his eloquent Italian. "And who knows better about metallurgy than an aerospace company?"

Porsche was twisting a different key. The defending world champion and odds-on favorite to repeat this year, Porsche's problem has been a lack of soul. Perhaps with that in mind, the Porsche people this year injected England's John Wyer (SI, Jan. 26) into their equation. The cool, rumpled, superbly human Wyer happens to be the best team manager in the business as well as a hell of a guy. In keeping with his understated ways, Wyer did not arrive at Daytona until qualifying day; he really-didn't have to get there earlier because his subordinate, David Yorke, is the second-best team manager in the business and a purgatory of a guy. When Wyer emerged from the London fog and alighted at the speedway, Porsche finally had panache, somewhat cool and dewy, but panache nonetheless.

Wyer asserts that the only way to concentrate fully enough on distance racing to produce a winner is to concentrate on the minimum number of cars. Where Porsche last year had as many as six machines entered in a given race, Wyer this year pared the number to three—one of them a training car that would preserve the strength of his main force while permitting his drivers plenty of road time in practice.

Standing in the Porsche pits you could feel the difference. Last year Porsche's cars were a corpselike white; this year they wore Gulf Oil's affluent hues, as blue and mild as the Cotswold sky cut through by a band of sunset orange.