Juan Manuel Fangio won the World Championship 5 times, a record that stood for 46 years until beaten by Michael Schumacher.
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Juan Manuel Fangio nicknamed El Chueco (the bowlegged or bandy legged one) or El Maestro (The Master or The Teacher), was an Argentine racing car driver. Fangio was born on 24 June 1911 in Balcarce. From childhood, he abandoned his studies to pursue auto mechanics. Fangio dominated the first decade of Formula One racing. He won the World Championship of Drivers five times, a record that stood for 46 years until beaten by Michael Schumacher, with four different teams (Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, and Maserati), a feat that has not been repeated.
Juan holds the highest winning percentage in Formula One at 46.15%, winning 24 of 52 Formula One races he entered. Fangio is the only Argentine driver to have won the Argentine Grand Prix, which he won four times in his career, more than any other driver. After retirement, Fangio presided as the honorary president of Mercedes-Benz Argentina from 1987, a year after the inauguration of his museum, until his death in 1995. In 2011, on the centenary of his birth, Fangio was remembered around the world and various activities were held in his honor.
When Fangio was 13, he dropped out of school and worked in Miguel Angel Casas auto mechanics’ workshop as an assistant mechanic. When he was 16, he started riding as a mechanic for his employer’s customers. Fangio served compulsory military service at the age of 21. After finishing his military service, Fangio opened his own garage and raced in local events. He began his racing career in Argentina in 1936, driving a 1929 Ford Model A that he had rebuilt. During his time racing in Argentina, he drove Chevrolet cars and was Argentine National Champion in 1940 and 1941.
In 1941, he beat Oscar Gálvez in the Grand Prix Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, which was a 6-day, 3,731-kilometer public road race starting from and ending at Rio de Janeiro. For the second time, Fangio was crowned champion of Argentine TC. In April he won the race “Mar y Sierras”, and then had to suspend activity due to World War II. His successes in Argentina caught the attention of the Argentine Automobile Club and the Juan Peron-led Argentine government, so they bought a Maserati and sent him to Europe in December 1948 to continue his career.
Fangio’s first Grand Prix race was the 1948 French Grand Prix at Reims, where he started his Simca Gordini from 11th on the grid but retired. For the first World Championship of Drivers in 1950, Fangio was taken on by the Alfa Romeo team alongside Farina and Luigi Fagioli. With competitive racing cars following the Second World War still in short supply, the pre-war Alfettas proved dominant. Fangio won each of the three races he finished at Monaco, Spa and Reims-Gueux but Farina’s three wins at races Fangio retired from and a fourth-place allowed Farina to take the title.
| Races | 51 |
| Wins | 24 |
| Poles | 29 |
| Podiums | 35 |
| Points | 278 |
Read more: Five drivers with the most world championship wins in Formula 1 history
According to the sources, Juan Manuel Fangio net worth is approximately $1.5 Million as of 2022.Throughout Manuel’s days, Fangio worked hard and collected huge accolades and earnings. Back then, when Juan Manuel started his career, there were not many racers or racing competitions. So, we can say that Juan has significant input in expanding this business. Similarly, during formula 1’s first decade, Fangio went on to win five consecutive races. After that, slowly, the audience for the Championship and Formula 1 started to grow.
Fangio never married and always claimed not to have had any children. Andrea Berruet, did have a long-lasting relationship with the five-times world champion with whom she broke up in 1960. They had a son named Oscar ‘Cacho’ Espinosa (1938) who was acknowledged as the unrecognized son of Fangio in 2000. Five years later, in 2005, Rubén Vázquez (1942) also claimed to be the son of Fangio through a relationship with Catarina Basili, whom Fangio had dated during a brief separation from Berruet.
In July 2015, an Argentine court ruling ordered the exhumation of Fangio’s body after Espinosa’s and Vázquez’s claims to be the unacknowledged sons of the former race car driver. The court in December 2015 confirmed that Espinosa was indeed Fangio’s son, and in February 2016, it was confirmed that Rubén Vázquez was also Fangio’s son. In June 2016, a DNA analysis concluded that Juan Carlos Rodríguez (1945) was the brother of Espinosa on paternal side with a 97.5% certainty. He was born from another brief relationship with Susana Rodríguez, who was 16 years old at the time.
Alfa Romeo
Ferrari
Mercedes-Benz
Maserati
