Argentina

Fangio's Country and the Sunday Asado

Argentina staged 20 Grands Prix in Buenos Aires and gave Formula 1 its first five time champion, and at home the table revolves around beef, pasta and company.

Every Argentine Grand Prix, all 20 of them between 1953 and 1998, was run at the same Buenos Aires autodrome, named for Oscar and Juan Gálvez. The venue never changed, though the calendar kept changing its mind: the race filled most of the 1950s, came back for much of the 1970s and the early 1980s, and enjoyed a last spell from 1995 to 1998. Juan Manuel Fangio won his home race four times, and one of those victories, in 1956, was shared with Luigi Musso.

Fangio towers over Argentine racing, and the view from up there takes in five world titles. He took the title in 1951 and then four seasons running from 1954 to 1957, winning 24 of his 58 starts. José Froilán González won twice in the same era. Later, Carlos Reutemann collected twelve victories from 146 starts between 1972 and 1982, and since 2024 Franco Colapinto has carried the flag on the current grid.

The Argentine kitchen starts with Indigenous ingredients such as potatoes, cassava, peppers, beans and yerba mate, then folds in Spanish colonial habits and the vast Italian and Spanish immigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beef from the plains sits at its center, and nothing captures the country better than asado, a meal that treats patience as an ingredient: meat grilled and eaten course by course, often beginning with offal, sausage and grilled provolone. Beside it comes chimichurri, green with herbs, sharp with garlic and vinegar.

Italian food is as much a part of daily life as beef. Pizza in Buenos Aires arrives with a layer of chickpea fainá, and gnocchi are traditionally eaten on the 29th of every month. Eating here is a shared affair: Sunday family lunch is the most important meal of the week, empanadas turn up at every party, and a single gourd of mate travels around the circle. Dulce de leche fills cakes, pancakes and alfajores, and any of them would close a race weekend sweetly.

A taste of Argentina

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