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Feb 10 - Feb 17, 2002 |
The most exciting car race in history
The Legend of Mille Miglia still lives on in memories of Italians around the world
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-01-20
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Tazio Nuvolari celebrates his win in 1930
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Tazio Nuvolari had just won the Tigullio race with two of his feats: after his car had flipped over he had managed to flip it back and restart it all by himself, and when he crossed the finish line the spectators saw that he had been steering it by using a wrench, since the steering wheel had broken in the crash.
He was, therefore, considered the most favourite pilot; but he did not win the first of the Mille Miglia ("one thousand miles") races. In that year, 1927, "the most exciting car race in history" was won by Mannoja and Morandi. Nuvolari, racing with Capelli, only finished in tenth place. A few years later, however, he would more than compensate.
The fact that Mille Miglia was to be a benchmark of pilot recklessness became apparent as soon as the race was launched. It did not take place on a closed racetrack but on the open roads. If one considers that two thirds of those roads were dirt roads, if not outright country paths, and that car technology consisted more or less in putting an engine on four wheels, one understands that pilots had to be inventive as well as reckless. Those qualities propelled that race into the history and legend of world car racing.
The Mille Miglia was born at a point in time when car makers had mostly abandoned the races and turned to mass production, and when the Le Mans racing course was strangling all other European competitions. "We must come up with something that will attract the attention of the manufacturers for its originality and technical appeal," Aymo Maggi said one night in 1925 to Renzo Castagneto, Giovanni Canestrini and Franco Mazzotti. Canestrini was the most famous Italian journalist who wrote about motor races; the other three were pilots: Mazzotti was a plane pilot, 23-year-old Maggi drove cars, and Castagneto rode motorcycles.
They were friends, enthusiastic about those motorized boxes that with increasing frequency broke the silence along Italy's roads. They had been cherishing the idea of launching a long and difficult motor race that would focus on matching men and engines. The formula they had designed was simple: cars of any size, each driven by a couple of pilots on open roads; departure was from Brescia - cradle of Italian cars, motorbikes and aeroplanes - and finish in the same city after touching Rome. The only missing detail was the name: the friends looked at the distance on a map and saw it was about 1,600 kilometres. "Let's call it the One Thousand Mile Race," they decided.
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