1960 Argentine F1 Grand Prix Race Report & Results

Event: Argentine Grand Prix
Track: Autódromo Oscar Alfredo Gálvez

Weather: sunny, dry, hot

Bruce McLaren won his 2nd F1 World Championship race at the 1960 Argentine Grand Prix. The Cooper-Climax driver started from 13th on the grid and won on the Buenos Aires circuit for the 1st time. It was also his 1st win of the season and the 8th win for the Cooper-Climax F1 team.

Buenos Aires, opening round

The world champion Jack Brabham and Cooper Cars set sail from Surbiton for South America in the early new year of 1960 with a quietly confident programme: defend the constructors' title, defend the drivers' title, and use the long flat layout of the Buenos Aires Autodromo to build an early points cushion. The Argentine Grand Prix on Sunday 7 February, the championship's first round in the South American summer, was where the new season would begin, fifteen weeks before the Monaco Grand Prix opened the European leg.

Eighty laps of the Number 2 layout at the Autodromo Oscar Galvez (3.912 km) made for 313 kilometres of work in the kind of summer heat that Buenos Aires was famous for. The grid was filled with the European front-runners, works Coopers for Brabham and McLaren, the Walker Cooper for Stirling Moss, the new Ferrari Dino 246 for Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips and Cliff Allison, BRMs for Bonnier and Graham Hill, the new Lotus 18 making its debut for Innes Ireland, supplemented by a strong contingent of Argentine privateers in older Cooper-Maseratis and customer chassis.

Innes Ireland on the front row

Practice produced the most surprising front row of the year. Innes Ireland, in the brand-new Lotus 18 making its debut, qualified second behind Stirling Moss's privateer Cooper. The Lotus 18, Colin Chapman's first proper rear-engined grand prix car, was an instant transformation of the team's competitiveness; the front-engined Lotus 16 of 1959 had been an honourable but slow afterthought, but the 18, a clean small parallel-tube spaceframe with the engine behind the driver, was suddenly genuinely quick. Brabham qualified third in the works Cooper. McLaren, struggling with chassis setup and fuel-system problems, was 13th.

From the green flag Moss led from Ireland, with Bonnier's BRM third and Brabham fourth. The opening dozen laps featured Ireland holding pace with the Walker Cooper, an extraordinary debut performance for the new Lotus, before the chassis began to pick up the kind of small problems that always afflict a brand-new grand prix car. Ireland gradually fell back to the second group.

Moss out, Brabham out, Allison leads

Moss's race began to unravel on lap 36 when his Walker Cooper picked up a suspension problem and dropped down the order. Brabham, having taken the lead, suffered an engine failure shortly after, the works Cooper coasting to a halt with a serious vibration. The lead passed to Cliff Allison's Ferrari, the steady English-speaking Englishman in the third works Maranello car producing the drive of his life. Allison led for some 22 laps with McLaren now closing rapidly through the field on his recovered Cooper.

McLaren took the lead from Allison on lap 67 of 80 and held it to the chequered flag for his second consecutive F1 victory after Sebring three months earlier. Allison's brilliant Ferrari second place was the only podium of his career; the Englishman's grand prix story, just beginning to unfold, would be cut short by a horrendous accident at Monaco four months later that effectively ended his career.

Moss and Trintignant share third

Stirling Moss had abandoned the broken Walker Cooper and taken over Maurice Trintignant's third Walker car around mid-distance. The shared entry was classified third on the road and at the chequered flag, the points were divided as per the rules of the time, with neither driver scoring any. Carlos Menditeguy was fourth in a private Cooper-Maserati. Wolfgang von Trips fifth and Innes Ireland sixth in the new Lotus, the latter result the first championship point for the rear-engined Lotus chassis.

The new shape of the season

One race in, the picture was clearer than the unfamiliar grid had suggested. Cooper had won; the new Lotus 18 had made the front row; the Ferrari Dino was running competitively at last in the rear-engined-friendly conditions. Argentina would not host another world championship round until 1972, the FIA's Buenos Aires arrangement falling apart over the political turbulence to come in the country, and the Argentine Grand Prix passes from the calendar with a sense of regret on all sides. McLaren had eight points; the season would now wait fifteen weeks for Monaco.

Classification 1960 Argentine F1 GP

Pos	#	Driver	Team	Time	Laps	Grid	Pts
1	16	Bruce McLaren	Cooper-Climax	2:17:49.500	80	13	8
2	24	Cliff Allison	Ferrari	2:18:15.800	80	7	6
3	38	Stirling Moss Maurice Trintignant	Cooper-Climax	2:18:26.400	80 80	8 8	0 0
4	6	Carlos Menditeguy	Cooper-Maserati	2:18:42.800	80	12	3
5	30	Wolfgang von Trips	Ferrari	+1 lap	79	5	2
6	20	Innes Ireland	Team Lotus	+1 lap	79	2	1
7	40	Jo Bonnier	BRM	+1 lap	79	4	0
8	26	Phil Hill	Ferrari	+3 laps	77	6	0
9	46	Alberto-Rodriguez Larreta	Team Lotus	+3 laps	77	15	0
10	32	José-Froilán González	Ferrari	+3 laps	77	11	0
11	4	Roberto Bonomi	Cooper-Climax	+4 laps	76	17	0
12	2	Masten Gregory	Behra-Porsche	+4 laps	76	16	0
13	14	Gino Munaron	Maserati	+8 laps	72	19	0
14	10	Nasif Estéfano	Maserati	+10 laps	70	20	0
DNF	34	Harry Schell	Cooper-Climax	Fuel pump	63	9	0
DNF	18	Jack Brabham	Cooper-Climax	Gearbox	42	10	0
DNF	36	Stirling Moss	Cooper-Climax	Suspension	40	1	0
DNF	42	Graham Hill	BRM	Overheating	37	3	0
DNF	22	Alan Stacey	Team Lotus	Physical	24	14	0
DNF	44	Ettore Chimeri	Maserati	Physical	23	21	0
DNF	12	Antonio Creus	Maserati	Physical	16	22	0
DNF	8	Giorgio Scarlatti	Maserati	Overheating	11	18	0

Fastest lap: 1:38.900 min by Stirling Moss (Cooper T51) in lap 37

✅ Check out 1960 F1 Championship Standings
✅ Check out 1960 F1 Teams & Drivers

✅ Check out All Time F1 Drivers Rankings
✅ Check out All Time F1 Driver Records
✅ Check out All Time F1 Teams Rankings

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Leopold

Leopold Pleijsier founded F1-Fansite.com in 2001 and has followed Formula 1 since the early 1980s. He writes about daily F1 news, race weekends, drivers and the sport’s history.

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