Throughout the world championship’s 75-year history, there have been many unusual races, but they all broadly followed the same formula.
All except the 1959 German Grand Prix, which stands alone with a bizarre format used exactly once.
How Ferrari finished one-two-three twice in the 1959 German Grand Prix
For the most part, the world championship has consisted of races that sit somewhere between endurance events and sprints. That has seen the distance settle on one lap beyond the lap on which 300km is reached, making a modern grand prix around 305km for the most part.
During its early years, there was no such hard and fast rule. The first world championship race, the Grand Prix of Europe, was 325km long, while the final race of the inaugural season, the Italian Grand Prix, was 504km. Back then, the Indianapolis 500 was also part of the world championship.
In 1959, the established norm was a race that lasted a minimum of two hours or 300km. Though specifics have changed, the format is largely the same today: a single race from start to finish, with the first driver to the chequered flag the victor. However, organisers of the German Grand Prix in 1959 introduced an altogether different format.
A torrid start for an unpopular race
That year’s event was held at the unpopular AVUS circuit in West Berlin. First used in 1921, it utilised a highway in the southwestern district, between Stadtring and Nikolassee. Originally, the circuit ran the better part of 10km up one side of the motorway before a sweeping left-hander fed drivers back down the other side.
At the northern end, a high banked turn, made of bricks and angled at 43 degrees, was added in 1937. It quickly earned the nickname the wall of death. It made the AVUS the fastest racing circuit on the planet. In 1937, Luigi Fagioli averaged 284.3km/h at the wheel of an Auto Union Type C.
A ferociously fast circuit, it was also incredibly dull. Coupled with the dangers associated with the banked curve, it was hugely unpopular among drivers, especially so when the 1959 event came at the cost of the world championship visiting the Nurburgring.
By then, the AVUS had been shortened, reduced from 19.569km to 8.3km. It’s been claimed that was a result of the division of Berlin after the war, with the circuit lying across the border between West and East. Others suggest the truth is far more mundane, and a fair reflection of the circuit as a whole: even at half the length, it was more than enough.
In place of a comparatively sweeping loop at the southern end of the circuit, a concrete cut through was laid in the central divide. It made the circuit neither safer nor more popular, a point made by legendary journalist Denis Jenkinson for Motor Sport Magazine at the time. “The AVUS track bears no resemblance at all to a Grand Prix racing circuit, as exemplified by the Nurburgring,” he wrote.
“Being 90 per cent a pure speed track it was felt that holding a leg of the Drivers’ World Championship on the AVUS was to make an absurdity of the whole thing.”
Aside from being uninteresting to drive, the high speeds and terrifying banked corner raised the stakes significantly. During qualifying, Cliff Allison recorded an average speed of almost 240km/h at the wheel of a Ferrari Dino 246. It prompted action from organisers amid concerns that the Dunlop tyres wouldn’t live up to the thrashing they’d receive at such sustained high speeds.
The AVUS was already a killer. The day before the German GP, Jean Behra had been thrown from his Porsche 718 RSK when it flew over the top of the banking and impacted a concrete gun turret, a remnant from the previous decade, where it was nearly split in two as his lifeless body was flung into a flagpole.
Against the backdrop of such obvious dangers and concerns that the tyres would shred themselves to pieces over a full race distance, organisers trumped the standing rules for the world championship and elected to run the event as two heats of one hour apiece. That came on top of rules that prevented streamlined designs, such as the Mercedes W196 which had raced earlier in the decade.
Mercedes had entered a trio of its fabulous W196s in the Gran Preis von Berlin, a non-championship race at the venue in September 1954. It competed against a paltry field of rivals in featherweight machinery; Behra in a Maserati 250F arguably the pick of the seven others that took part.
That race, also held over 60 laps, was won by Karl Kling at an average speed of 212.79km/h, taking the flag just 0.5s clear of Juan Manuel Fangio, who was just 0.4s clear of Hans Herrmann in the third Silver Arrow. Andre Pilette, aboard a Gordini T16, was three laps down in fourth.
Five years on, and with a vastly superior field poised to offer a significantly more competitive encounter, the decision was made to split the race in two, with the results taken on aggregate.
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Ferrari stamps its authority
The field comprised of the usual names of the time. Having skipped the British Grand Prix at Aintree, Ferrari had three cars entered for Tony Brooks, Dan Gurney, and Phil Hill, with a reserve car in the hands of Cliff Allilson – called upon following the death of Behra. Cooper had Jack Brabham, Stirling Moss, Bruce McLaren, Maurice Trintignant, Ian Burgess in a Maserati-powered entry, and the irrepressible Masten Gregory.
Lotus too was present, with Graham Hill and Innes Ireland, while BRM fielded Hans Herrmann, Harry Schell, and Jo Bonnier. To fill out the field, two Formula 2 Porsche entries had been accepted; one belonging to the private entry of Behra, and the other a factory effort for Wolfgang von Trips – which was withdrawn following Behra’s crash.
While Allison had been fastest in practice – his time courtesy of a slipstream – he was relegated to the back of the grid owing to his position as a reserve entry.
That left Brooks on pole, joined on the front row of the four-three-four grid by Moss, Gurney, and Brabham. Pole sitter Brooks got the jump, followed by Moss and Gregory, who’d started well from the second row. However, the field remained tightly packed before beginning to break apart on the return leg from the southern loop.
Moss was an early retirement with a gearbox issue, while Gurney recovered from a poor start to surge beyond both Gregory and Brabham to sit second behind Ferrari team-mate Brooks. On the banking, an audacious move by Gregory saw the American slide his Cooper into the race lead, heading a pack that included Brooks, Gurney, Brabham, Phil Hill, and Bonnier.
Brooks reclaimed the lead and, as the opening leg wore on, the three lead Ferraris pulled clear. Allison, in the fourth, had retired with clutch issues.
Gregory did what he could to hold on, and even engaged with the Ferraris in a battle for the lead for a time, before the Climax engine in his Cooper lunched itself. Brooks therefore held on to lead a Ferrari one-two-three ahead of Gurney and Phil Hill at the end of the opening leg of the race.
With an interval between the first and second heats, Cooper repaired both Gregory’s and Brabham’s cars (the Australian suffered a gearbox problem in Heat 1), and they were lined up on the back of the grid. However, in the moments before the start, organisers instructed they be removed as they’d not completed the opening heat. It left just nine cars to take the start, with McLaren racing into the early lead.
The New Zealander’s time out front was brief, overhauled by the trio of Ferraris and Bonnier’s BRM which overpowered the Cooper on the long straights. Bonnier’s challenge quickly faded, leaving McLaren fourth, only for another gearbox issue to cruel his efforts.
With his retirement, Brooks, Gurney, and Phil Hill were unhindered out front, lapping some four seconds slower than they’d gone in the opening heat but still half a minute clear of Bonnier in fourth, who was battling with Trintignant.
Herrmann created the most spectacular moment of the race, and arguably one of the most iconic motorsport images in the process, when his BRM suffered a front brake failure.
He clouted the straw bales that lined the track edge at the southern hairpin, pitching the car into a roll, throwing its driver clear as it jettisoned its left-rear wheel. Herrmann escaped with little more than a scrape, while his car was utterly destroyed.
At the front of the race, the Ferraris continued to circulate with team orders dictating a finishing order of Brooks, Phil Hill, and Gurney. As their order at the flag was identical to that in the opening Heat, the overall results were thus confirmed, with Brooks twice leading a one-two-three to ultimately win the race.
Only seven cars saw the flag, with Ferrari’s success rewarded with the wrong anthem played by the organisers – an appropriate conclusion to an unpopular and poorly organised event, on a circuit that never reappeared on the world championship calendar.
The following year, the German GP returned to the Nurburgring as a non-championship race, before rejoining the world championship in 1961.
Like the AVUS, the two-heat format was also consigned to the history books, though similar aggregate style results have featured throughout the F1’s history.
The key difference is they were a result of the race being stopped and restarted, rather than planned as an aggregate race from the outset. The 1994 Japanese Grand Prix marked the last time such a format was used.
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