When Juan Manuel Fangio flung his Maserati around the Nurburgring, or his Ferrari down the Sicilian roads of Syracuse, mortal peril stalked his every turn. The calloused hands common to an era before steering aids were the least of his worries.

Reflecting on the 1955 disaster at Le Mans, when his team-mate Pierre Levegh’s car launched into the crowd, killing the driver and 83 spectators, Fangio was thankful for how his own life had been saved by a hand-signal from the doomed Frenchman to avoid the danger ahead.

And yet even amid such horror, he perceived great nobility in death behind the wheel. “To race is to live,” Fangio once said. “But those who died while racing knew, perhaps, how to live...