August 4th saw another significant anniversary; it is fifty years since Fangio clinched his fifth World Championship with a fine drive at the Nurburgring.

He elected to drive on half a fuel tank and planned a pit stop for fuel and new rear tyres on lap 12 of 22. In those days, fuel was added via a funnel from churns. Mechanics used hammers to knock off wheel nuts and they botched the job. A lead of twenty eight seconds was reduced to a deficit of 45 seconds. Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins led in their Lancia-Ferraris. Mike and Peter were close friends and they had fun playing for the lead. They were driving hard, but they were also playing and entertaining the crowd who only saw the leader once every ten minutes.

Fangio set off and hauled them in. Lap after lap he broke the lap record and took the lead on the penultimate lap. Sir Stirling has told me that this was the greatest drive in history. He says that he asked Fangio after the race how hard he had been driving and the great man made a gesture which said he had been right on the edge.

Stirling will keep on about how great a drive it was. I may be the only person who has responded with, 'How would you know? You didn't see him after the start.' Stirling was driving a Vanwall and the team had never been to the 'Ring. The suspension settings were completely wrong and the cars were virtually undriveable. Tony Brooks was so dehydrated that, after the race, he drank 27 cups of tea.

Stirling knows about the race like the rest of us do, by reading about it. He finished fifth, five minutes behind. Jenks told him how good Fangio was on that day and Jenks only saw him once every ten minutes.

There is no filmed record of the race, no company could afford to film a lap of 14.1 miles. It was only in the early 1960s that a camera was developed where the film would last of a whole lap when mounted on a car. There was only one TV channel in West Germany in 1957 and it did not have enough kit and technicians to televise the race, nor would a German TV company have the resources until the 1970s.

There will be many accounts of Fangio's drive and practically all of them will be based on Jenks's account, written in the heat of the moment. It was a great drive by a great driver, aged 46. It was also Fangio's last win. He started in 51 World Championship races and won 24, the best start/win ratio in the history of the Championship.

What everyone writes about the race will miss what is the most important point. Fangio was the first driver in history to use a fuel/tyre strategy, it took the rest of Formula One more than thirty years to catch up.

There had been fuel and tyre stops before, but of necessity, not strategy. When Alfa Romeo withdrew from racing in 1949, Ferrari expected to have a field day. They were beaten by prewar Lago-Talbots. Ferrari had 1500cc supercharged engines while the Talbots, which had 4.5-litre normally aspirated engines, and much less power, didn't spend as much time having fuel poured in. Ferrari commissioned the 'big block' unsupercharged engine and came to terms with Alfa Romeo when that company returned.

Fangio did not have the data that a modern driver has. He thought about the race and made an educated guess. If the wheel change had gone smoothly, he would not have had to drive so hard. He had the strategy spot on. What everyone misses is the intelligence he brought to the problem.

It is my guess that he assumed that his main threat would come from Vanwall. There were three drivers on the grid who had mastered the 'Ring: Fangio, Moss and Brooks.

At the 'Ring in 1957, Moss and Brooks were side-lined. We speak of a time when a typical way of testing a car's suspension was to push down on the back and count the number of times it bounced before settling. Vanwall didn't take a range of springs to a race, nobody did, adjustments were made to the shock absorbers.

Let us look at the race rationally. Fangio started light and took the lead. There had not been pit stops in Grand Prix racing since the end of 1951 except for emergencies. Tyres had improved and cars could often last the distance on a tank of fuel.

There were occasional exceptions. Moss's Maserati ran out fuel during the 1956 Italian GP. He signalled to Luigi Piotti, who was in a rent-a-drive Maserati. Piotti pulled in behind and nudged Stirling's car to the pits. Moss won the race.

At the Nurburgring in 1957, Hawthorn and Collins were in the lead and were playing. They knew they were in the lead because they had passed Fangio in the pits. It was half an hour before they realised that Fangio was on a charge, and closing on them.

Work it out, they pass Fangio in the pits. Nearly ten minutes later they drive by their pits and there is no information about Fangio because he has yet to complete a lap. Ten minutes later, there is still no information, because Ferrari had only a time for Fangio on a lap from a standing start. It is only on the third time, nearly half an hour later, that they can get a message to stop messing around and to speed up.

Collins and Hawthorn could both be impressive, but their performances were inconsistent. Mike's often depended on how big a hangover he was nursing.

Hawthorn and Collins were not of the top drawer and the Lancia-Ferrari did not win a Grand Prix in 1957. Fangio broke the lap record many times in his pursuit, but a lot of drivers broke the lap record.

The circuit had been in disrepair, but improvements had been made during the Winter of 1956/7. There is no way of comparing the lap times of 1957 with those of 1956. In 1957 every finisher down from seventh posted a higher average speed than Fangio recorded when he won in 1956.

Some point to the fact that Fangio took 24.2 seconds off his own lap record and cite this as amazing. Fangio set pole in both races and, in 1957, his time was 25.6 seconds better than the previous year. The top seven in practice were all under the lap record. We have forgotten factors such as road surface.

One thing I have often read is that Fangio made no impression on Collins and Hawthorn for the first couple of laps after his pit stop as he came to terms with new tyres and a fully-laden car. This is nonsense. Tyres were not then as complicated as they are today. You did not have to get them up to temperature, for example. A car was not tuned to the tyres. In 1958 Rob Walker wanted free tyres from Dunlop and Dunlop was unwilling. Moss won the Argentine GP on Continental tyres, Dunlop paid attention.

The really daft thing that people repeat, I think I have discovered the source, it is not Jenks, is that Fangio had to come to terms with a fully-laden car. The whole point of his strategy is that he never ran on full tanks.

I challenge anyone to produce comprehensive lap times for the race. They do not exist. We know Fangio's fastest lap, because it became the new record. Nobody knows what was the best time set by Hawthorn (second) and Collins (third).

One other thing that people forget is, sure, Fangio made up a deficit of 45 seconds, but the distance was 130 miles and the time was just under an hour and a half. I seem to remember Michael Schumacher doing better than that on the odd occasion, and Moss, Clark, Stewart, Lauda, Prost, Senna.... Remember, the closer we get to today, the more equally matched are the cars. In comparative terms, a Spyker is closer to a Ferrari or McLaren than the second Maserati or Vanwall was to the team leader's car.

Most of what we receive as 'history' is myth. Americans do not believe me when I call the rumpus in 1776 a civil war. It divided on party lines, Tories versus Whigs. Every historian knows that, but it is denied by the need for a national mythology.

If we look at Fangio's drive from an historian's point of view, I suggest it was not the amazing event that the hacks will say it was. Moss's opinion is worthless, he never saw it. Fangio won by 3.6 seconds, but Hawthorn and Collins had not been given accurate information for nearly half an hour.

I think a parallel is Senna at Donington in 1993. The second rate claim that was his greatest drive, but I know that Ayrton did not. He had made the right tyre choice and his McLaren had all the kit to allow him to drive smoothly in very wet conditions. In a downpour at Estoril in 1985, with no gimmicks, he won by more than a minute in a Lotus that was the equivalent of today's BMW Sauber or Red Bull.

My hunch is that Fangio's drive in Germany is a consolation prize because had nobody quite grasped what he had done in the 1957 French GP at Rouen.

Rouen was a series of high-speed curves on a hilly circuit. In its various forms, the Maserati 250F was a sweet car, Fangio scored its first WC win, and its last. It is almost certain that, when you think of the 250F, you think of Fangio holding one in a perfect four-wheel-drift in a downhill curve at Rouen in 1957. It is one of the few photographic images in the history of motor racing which may described as 'iconic'.

It is likely that you believe that 'four-wheel-drift' is an old term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded instance is in a book called 'In Track Of Speed', an introduction to motor racing apparently written by Stirling Moss. It is likely that the term was used verbally among motor racing people, but its appearance in print dates only from 1957.

In the same book is the first recorded use (by OED) of the term, 'slip-streaming'. Moss was the first driver to record it, he may have been the first to have cracked the idea (1950 San Remo GP.) Find an earlier reference and OED will be glad to hear from you. These days, OED is up-dated every three months and can be accessed on-line.

Fangio's drive at the Nurburgring was pretty good. It was not, however, the miracle that pseudo-historians will have you believe. The exceptional thing about the drive happened beforehand when Fangio became the first driver to start a race with a fuel/tyre strategy.

Nobody actually saw the race, they merely got a glimpse of it every ten minutes. There was then no 'sector times', there were guys with stop watches and pencils and there was probably a kid running to the commentary box with a piece of paper.

Fangio's greatness was not demonstrated at the 'Ring. The image that we remember is the perfect four-wheel-drift at Rouen. It is the essence of motor racing, the balanced combination of man, machine and road.