An irascible motorcycle cop in a ’70s British TV advertisement for Renault pulled up next to the car he had been chasing and asked the driver gruffly, “Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?”  The man at the wheel just turned to the cop and grinned…because he was Stirling Moss! And that just shows the unprecedented popularity this hyper-energetic, extraordinarily efficient human being, who is one of the greatest racing drivers of the 20^th century has enjoyed since the early ’50s. Despite his being in his 80s, walk into a London restaurant with him today and the diners will start nudging each other and whispering, “That’s Stirling Moss.” He is an institution.

Britain was not the only nation that wrung its hands in anguish as its battered hero lay unconscious in hospital for a month after his horrific accident at St. Mary’s corner, Goodwood, on April 23, 1962. But the world heaved a huge sigh of relief when Moss eventually pulled out of it and began charging around the hospital’s corridors in a suspiciously fast wheelchair.

Stirling is a highly articulate man with a roguish twinkle in his eye, a love of life and a sense of fun that seems to know no bounds. He is also a man only the churlish would deny a place in their list of the five greatest racing drivers of all time.

His success rate was phenomenal in a sport that was not as kind to him as it might have been. I am sure Stirling is sick to death of reading about him being a king without a crown, the driver who was runner-up to four Formula One World Champions, and does not need me to say he long ago came to terms with this weird quirk of fate. But he did.

Anyway, one only has to look up his entry in any motor racing “Who’s Who” to be reminded of his stunning achievements.

Alfred Moss, Stirling’s father, was not only a successful dentist but was also a gifted amateur racing driver, who competed in the Indianapolis 500 in the ’20s: our hero’s mother Aileen was an enthusiastic rally competitor. As children, Stirling and his late sister Pat were outstanding show jumpers before both graduated to cars, in which Pat became the world’s top woman rally driver of her day.

Stirling started by racing a BMW 328, in 1947, and the following year broke into 500-cc F3 racing to become its undisputed star. From 1950-’52, he also raced for the under-financed and under-developed British HWM F2 outfit and was invited by Enzo Ferrari to drive one of his cars in the Bari Grand Prix, way down there on the heel of Italy. But after struggling across post-war Europe and down the length of Italy to claim his drive, Moss was told the car had been reassigned to Piero Taruffi without so much as a by your leave. A slap in the face if ever there was one that embittered Stirling towards Enzo Ferrari for years to come.

In 1953, Mercedes-Benz had let slip that they would be coming back to Grand Prix racing in a year’s time. American writer Ken Gregory, Stirling’s manager at the time, and Alfred Moss campaigned for a place in the German team for him, but wily old Alfred Neubauer was not so sure. He wanted to see Moss Jr. compete in a full-blown F1 car before he would say yes or no.

He got his proof. Stirling was pulling away from Juan Manuel Fangio’s state-of-the-art Mercedes W196 in the 1954 Grand Prix of Italy until waning oil pressure put his private Maserati 250F out of the race. But Neubauer had got the message and invited Moss to join the M-B team for 1955.

And what a year that was. Moss won his homeland’s British Grand Prix at Aintree in the Mercedes-Benz W196 and the ’55 Mille Miglia navigated by the late Denis Jenkinson in a 300SLR in which he set an unbeaten record average speed of 98.5 mph. He and Juan Manuel Fangio were battling Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar for the lead in the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans before Pierre Levegh’s disintegrating Mercedes killed over 80 people, injured many more and the German team withdrew from the event. And Stirling and Peter Collins drove the 300SLR to victory in the 1955 Targa Florio to give their Stuttgart employers the World Sports Car Championship. But Mercedes retired from racing at the end of 1955, so Moss moved to Maserati as their team leader and won the 1956 Monaco and Italian Grands Prix for them in the fabled 250F.

Steadfastly patriotic, Stirling achieved a long held ambition to lead an all-British team into combat when he joined Vanwall in 1957. He won the British Grand Prix at Aintree again that year with Tony Brooks, the GP of Pescara and relished beating the Lancia Ferrari D50s in the Italian GP at Monza to win. The following year it was more of the same, but this time Moss led Vanwall to the Formula One Constructors’ World Championship. The British team withdrew at the end of ’58 and Moss moved to Rob Walker’s private squad to score a string of Grand Prix victories in the gentleman entrant’s Coopers and Lotuses.

Stirling still had little time for Ferrari after their shabby treatment of him at Bari, but his mood was mellowing. He was down to drive a Ferrari Dino 156 for Rob Walker, in 1962, until the Goodwood accident shattered his career. Imagine what could have been—a privately entered Ferrari beating the works team!

Hardly a year after Goodwood, Moss tested himself at the wheel of sports racing car, but decided to retire. He felt he was not at the top of his game any more, but now believes his retirement decision may have been premature.

But what a glittering career he had had. Stirling Moss won 16 world championship Grands Prix at a time when there were nothing like as many F1 events as there are today: 20 non-title GPs; 12 World Sports Car Championship races, including the 1954 12 Hours of Sebring; 12 other major races, among them four Tourist Trophies, the 1956 Australian GP, the 1956, 1959 and 1962 Grands Prix of New Zealand; and 159 other less exalted but hotly contested races.

Stirling was knighted in 2000 and said at the time, “I can’t begin to put into words just how much receiving this honor and being able to share it with my wife Susie has meant to me. Motor sport and this country have given me so much. And to know that I am remembered 40 years after my forced retirement has to be the best feeling in the world.”

The post My Friend Stirling Moss appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Lloyd Ruby hailed from Wichita Falls, Texas, up in the north central part of the state, not far from the Oklahoma line. Born a year before the Depression, he was soft-spoken by nature — a wicked sense of humor notwithstanding — but not someone to be taken lightly. He began racing motorcycles at age 16, then enjoyed extensive success in midgets.

He might have focused solely on oval racing, but tested himself in sports cars as well, racing a Maserati 300S for his friend Ebb Rose in the old USAC Road Racing Championship. There he battled men with names like Shelby, Gurney, Miles and Pabst, winning three feature races over the course of four seasons. The first came in September of ’59 at Meadowdale in Rose’s Maserati 450S, the second at Indianapolis Raceway Park in ’61 with a 450S owned by J. Frank Harrison, and the last at Laguna Seca in ’62, aboard Harrison’s new Lotus 19-Climax. Even though Ruby was headed for Indycars, further success in sports car lay ahead.

The post Lloyd Ruby appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

I was introduced to Eddie in 1979 by our mutual friend Nigel Wollheim, a remarkable man who spoke at least six languages fluently, and I mean fluently. Digressing for an instant, I once saw Nigel hold an impromptu on his company’s products with a dozen foreign journalists in a field somewhere in Greece during the world championship Acropolis Rally, deftly answering complicated questions in perfect English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Greek!  

American born Eddie also spoke Italian fluently, because he had lived in Rome since he was a small boy and spoke the language much better than I did at the time. But I got my own back on the pair of them later.

That year, I was working full-time for Pirelli’s UK subsidiary and part-time for the Group’s headquarters in Italy, an odd arrangement on paper, but one that worked well in practice. Eddie, Nigel and I were at Zandvoort for the European Formula Two Championship race and that’s how I took my revenge: I had chosen to attend that event, from a year’s worth of F2 fixtures, out of sheer bloody mindedness. Neither Nigel nor Eddie could speak Dutch – but I could, thanks to my wife Els who was born a few miles from Eindhoven! One has to assert oneself in life occasionally, right?

After having to put up with those two language prodigies for much of the 1979 European F2 season, I took great delight in holding unnecessarily long conversations with Zandvoort hotel managers, track officials and race technicians in fluent Dutch, well within earshot of Nigel and Eddie. But they took the linguistic ribbing in good part and slipped into English for much of the rest of the season!

Eddie had already won two F2 races by that time, the British at Silverstone and the French at Pau, in Enzo Osella’s orange-colored BMW-engined FA 2/79 and was in with a chance of the championship. He was a very formal young man then, probably due to his tender age of 21, and kept calling me “Mr. Newman”, a bit like a red rag to a bull, to an informal individual like me, but he could not break the habit.

At dinner the night before the race, young Mr. Cheever was in deep conversation with Nigel, probably in Swahili but certainly not in Dutch, and, unable to get a word in however I played it, I was studying the label of the bottle of wine we were drinking with our food, one Nebbiolo D’Alba Ceretto. I turned to the Osella engineer in charge of Eddie’s car at the time, Giorgio Stirano, and asked if he knew that particular brew. “I should”, he said proudly, “Mr. Cerretto’s daughter is my fiancé”. There then followed a long dissertation on the excellent wines and other products of the Alba region of Italy, (the Nebbiolo, Barolo, white truffles, olive oil) and an equally long one on the clearly delightful Miss Ceretto.

Turning to matters more in the public domain, I asked Stirano naively if Eddie would win the next day and Giorgio simply said, “Yes”. And that is what happened. Mr. Cheever won the 1979 Formula Two race at Zandvoort but did not manage to become champion. He certainly made up for it at Indianapolis one day in May 1998, though.

A few years on, I could hardly recover from the shock after attending the 25^th anniversary lunch of the very exclusive Club International des Anciens Pilotes de Grand Prix, run by the tall, distinguished Swiss ex-racer Baron Toulo de Graffenried.  He was a kind of Marc Surer of his day, who won the 1949 British Grand Prix and competed in F1, on and off, from 1950 to 1956 in a series of Maseratis and Alfas without a world championship race win but with a number of creditable points performances. I attended the Club’s celebrations on September 12 , 1987, to conduct interviews for my late friend and film director Brian Robins, who was shooting a video of the day for the club.

It was like overdosing not on heroine but a plethora of my motor racing heroes, who stood drinking and swapping old motor racing stories before going to the table for their hearty lunch. Wherever I turned, there was a famous driver from the past; Fangio, to whom everybody deferred but who was the epitome of courtesy to them all, Stirling Moss, Maria Theresa de Filippis the first woman to compete in a championship Grand Prix, Jose Froilan Gonzalez the first man to win a world championship Grand Prix for Ferrari, Manfred von Brauchitsch the last of the pre-war Silver Arrow drivers, Phil Hill, Cliff Alison, Maurice Trintignant, Henri Pescarolo, Chris Amon, Duncan Hamilton, Gino Munaron and so many more. Unfortunately, I could not speak to them all, as Brian had given me the list of people he wanted me to interview in a limited amount of time. But I shall never forget extracting a few words of von Brauchitsch in my halting German, enjoying the boistrousness of 1953 Le Mans winner Duncan Hamilton, not to mention trying out my Italian on the great Fangio. McLaren driver Alain Prost represented modern Formula One that day with just the right blend of reserved style in the company of such giants of his sport. 

The club video remained a private memento of the day for members only, but my deal with Brian was that I would do the interviews for free if I could have a copy. It was well worth forfeiting the money.  

The post Talking with the Grand Prix Greats appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Even so, Stirling knew nothing of his surprise 60^th birthday party as he and Susie strolled into the sumptuous ballroom of The Berkeley Hotel in London on September 4, 1993, to a wildly enthusiastic chorus of applause from the more dignified among us and cat-calls, wolf whistles and other boisterousness from that other faction of the unofficial Stirling Moss fan club.

I could see he was taken aback at the sight of 400 shouting, whooping, clapping men and women in dinner jackets and twinkling dresses, especially as he thought he and Susie were going out for a quiet dinner with a couple of friends. But Stirling is quick at everything. He soon recovered and, as he neared my table, his face wore one of those “I’m gonna get someone for this” expressions. To make his point, he gave me a crippling slap on the back as he passed my table, as if he had seen straight through me and knew I’d had a hand in the proceedings by supplying the filmed tribute to him, which was to be shown later that evening.

Once the guest of honor had sat himself down at the top table Stirling, who loves a joke, broke into a rather suspicious grin and muttered something to Susie sitting to his right. That seemed to be the signal for dinner to be served and, apart from the odd bread roll flying through the air and outbursts of ribald laughter from a table or two, we ate and drank in relative peace. Filet de Sole Balmoral, Noisettes D’Agneau Pèrigourdine and Gateau Bon Anniversaire were washed down with some exquisite wines as I enjoyed the company of the attractive Pat McLaren, Bruce’s widow, who was sitting on my right.

But coffee had to be served sooner or later and most of us, not least Stirling, feared the worst. Things got off to a dignified start, right enough, when Rob Walker, a true gentleman and Stirling’s team boss for many years, gave an eloquent tribute to the man many of us regard as the greatest all-round racing driver Britain has ever produced. Rob said all the right things in the right way and was warmly applauded for his efforts.

The trouble started when the night’s second speaker rose to his feet and let rip. The irreverent Innes Ireland kept everyone, including Stirling, reeling in their seats with 45 minutes of gut wrenching fun, at one point describing Moss as a man with “one of those tight little arses that the girls always go crazy about!” People laughed until they ached, so much so that many were relieved when Innes called it a day and toasted Stirling’s health with his customary glass of whiskey. It was a wonderful night.

A couple of years later, I suggested to Susie that we should begin a campaign to encourage the British government and Queen Elizabeth II to bestow a long overdue knighthood on my schoolboy hero. But, within months, I was ‘posted’ by my company to the United States and the campaign never got off the ground.

So you can imagine what a kick it gave me eight years later to sit at my computer and write an e-mail of congratulations to Sir Stirling and Lady Moss!

The post A Surprise Party for Moss appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

But in spite of all that reading, one thing remained a mystery to me: the gold tortoise that became Nuvolari’s trademark.

Of course, I knew the Italian poet and dramatist Gabriele D’Annunzio gave a little gold tortoise to the driver, but that’s all. I did not know how a man from a totally different world (literary and political) came into contact with the motor racing star. Or the significance of a gold tortoise to D’Annunzio. Or whether the one he gave Nuvolari was a one-off, a kind of heirloom. Or why he gave one to the fastest man on four wheels in the first place.

For years, those questions nagged away at me every time I came across Nuvolari’s name, but I was always too busy to track down the answers. Then my friend and ex-Lancia world rally championship co-driver the late Maurizio Perissinot, who knew of my admiration for Tazio Nuvolari, gave me a small golden tortoise with the initials TN on its back. The tables had been turned: a racer (Perissinot) giving a writer (Newman) a small golden tortoise.

Right, I thought. I’m going to sniff out the answers to those questions once and for all. And I did.

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1867-1938) was an Italian superstar, an internationally famous dramatist and poet of the ’20s and ’30s. He was also a fervent nationalist and the commander, a rank by which he was known to many, of his own private army of black shirts. He even led a successful military attack on Rijeka, a town in north west Yugoslavia, which he believed belonged to Italy: but after taking the town he was ordered to surrender it.

D’Annunzio also loved tortoises, to the point that he would often weigh his own instincts and inclinations against those of the prudent, slothful little beasts and act accordingly.

The writer grew fond of tortoises when he was a child; he raised two of them from babies in the garden of his family home and loved them like others love their pet dogs. The two eventually died: the years slipped by until 1924, when D’Annunzio received a curt telegram from one of his rather bossy lady friends, the Marchioness Coré Luisa Casati Stampa. It said:

Hamburg, April 1924

You will receive a tortoise from Hagenbeck: put it in your garden.

Coré

Eventually, a huge tortoise arrived at D’Annunzio’s palatial manor, called Il Vittoriale, on the banks of Italy’s Lake Garda: the playwright was beside himself with joy. He promptly released the big lumbering reptile so that it could roam his large garden and took great pleasure in watching it go about its business. But the new arrival was not a well tortoise and died soon afterwards of what the vet described as “tubular indigestion”; the Commander was grief stricken.

In memory of his pet the poet D’Annunzio wrote to Renzo Brozzi, an expert in casting animals in precious metals, and asked the jeweller to cast the soft parts of the big tortoise (head, legs, tail) in bronze, which was done. Sometime later, the dead tortoise’s shell and the bronze castings came together and the result, measuring a massive 31 x 14 inches, became the centrepiece of the huge dining table at Il Vittoriale.

That, plus the two tortoises the Commander had raised as a boy, gave him an idea: he would share his love of the shelled ones with others. So he took to presenting his friends and prominent people with either small solid gold, gold-plated or silver tortoises as a mark of his esteem or friendship or both. According to my investigation, the poet went through well over 100 of the expensive little beasts; the first two, history records, went to Il Duce Benito Mussolini, leader of the black shirts and Hitler’s Fascist friend, who later brought Italy to its knees.

And that opened the floodgates, so to speak. D’Annunzio ordered another batch of little gold tortoises, in 1928. A couple of years later, he wrote and asked Brozzi to make him still more, but this time so that they could be worn as pendants. Two years after that, the poet asked the proprietor of a Milan jewellery shop, Mario Bucellati, to make him more with this letter:

15, February 1932

Dear Mario

Thank you for your note and for the exquisite objects, in particular the small tortoises. I would like many more; around fifty.

Gabriele D’Annunzio

This tortoise giving became such a regular occurrence that some people thought D’Annunzio had his own resident goldsmith working away at Il Vittoriale sculpting the little fellows.

The effervescent Commander was always on the lookout for new excitement, new experiences, and when he heard that Nuvolari had won the Grand Prix of Monaco, in an Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Monza on April 17, 1932, the playwright felt he had to meet this son of the wind, as the Italian press had taken to calling the driver. So D’Annunzio immediately wired the chief executive of Alfa, Prospero Gianferrari, and invited him and Nuvolari to lunch which, the writer being a national icon, thrilled the Alfa boss no end and he accepted. Not slow in realizing the PR advantages of a national hero being seen driving his product, Gianferrari also decided to present the poet with a brand new Alfa Romeo Berlina 6C 1750, which was joyously received, not least because D’Annunzio was experiencing a slight cash flow problem at the time.

The visit took place on April 28, 1932, and should have taken three hours but it lasted seven. The Commander, resplendent in navy blue blazer and flannels, and Nuvolari, wearing a rather tight single-breasted suit and with his Brilliantined hair parted in the center, got on famously. After Gianferrari presented the poet with his new car on the Vittoriale’s magnificent terrazza overlooking Lake Garda, D’Annunzio and Nuvolari became so engrossed in conversation that they absent-mindedly wandered over to the new Alfa, sat down together on its running board and continued their deep discussion. Gianferrari, his test driver Pietro Bonini and the others just chatted among themselves.

Eventually, the two rejoined their friends: a few minutes later, everyone climbed aboard the Commander’s shiny new Alfa and left for a well-known watering hole called the Ristorante Cenacolo, where they enjoyed a splendid lunch.

Replete with the glow and good will that fine dining and inspiring conversation can often encourage, D’Annunzio gave Nuvolari a photograph of himself in a somewhat Fascist pose, on which he wrote:

To Tazio Nuvolari, he of good Mantuan blood, who, in the tradition of his people, blends courage with poetry, quiet self-assurance and technical knowledge with the most desperate daring; and, finally, life with death on the path to victory.

Gabriele D’Annunzio

Back at the Vittoriale, the happy party relaxed for a while in the manor house’s sitting room – also known as “the room of pure dreams”, as it was the writer’s place of meditation – and there D’Annunzio tried to get Nuvolari to promise that he would win the upcoming Targa Florio.

The wily driver simply said, “When I race, I race to win. I swear it. You will see how fast I drive.”

As the visit was drawing to a close, the Commander took Nuvolari to one side and presented him with a gold tortoise, believed to have come from the 1928 batch, with his famous aside: “For the fastest man in the world, the slowest animal.” He told the diminutive Tazio the good luck charm would accompany him on his quest “for higher and beyond.”

Never one to miss a trick, after the visit Gianferrari had the Alfa Romeo PR department put out this press release:

Commander Gabriele D’Annunzio hosted at the Vittoriale Tazio Nuvolari, the driver, who was accompanied by Prospero Gianferrari, chief executive of Alfa Romeo. D’Annunzio expressed great satisfaction for the sporting successes achieved by Italian motor racing and, in particular, that which has been achieved by the Alfa Romeo workforce.

The Commander congratulated Tazio Nuvolari.

Ten days later, Nuvolari won the 1932 Targa Florio in his Alfa Monza, a victory that gave him particular satisfaction because it meant he had also kept his “promise” to his influential new friend.

[button link=”https://sportscardigest.com//subscription-account/subscription-levels/” color=”blue”]Like this story? Click here to subscribe and have access to over 7,000 more, just like![/button]

D’Annunzio immediately wired Sicily:

To Tazio Nuvolari

You remember that, when we said our goodbyes, I was only smiling with one side of my face, ordering you to win in Sicily. You did not forget our agreement. When we left each other, we were both certain of your victory, thus our parting was the best I can remember among comrades. Your obedience makes you a legionary twice over. I am with you and your people in the land that the great emperor called the most beautiful. A warm embrace.

Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Nuvolari liked the irony of being the fastest man on four wheels whose mascot was a cumbersome tortoise: so he had another, larger gold tortoise made and engraved with the intersected TN logo he designed himself.

Soon, the TN tortoise was everywhere: it was embossed on Nuvolari’s headed note paper, embroidered on his racing overalls, painted on the fuselage of his private aircraft, at his throat or on his chest every time he raced, in photographs in the world’s press and he wore a smaller version of it in the lapel of his coat. It was a copy of the TN lapel badge tortoise that I received from Maurizio Perissinot.

After what can only be described as a miraculous career, a great deal of it accompanied by his little gold talisman, Tazio Nuvolari died early on August 11, 1953, his lungs destroyed by incessant exposure to acrid engine fumes, fuel and cigarette smoke: but his mascot lived on.

From 1954 to 1957, a small gold tortoise was given to the quickest driver through the Cremona-Mantua-Brescia stage of the Mille Miglia and it is one of the trophies Stirling Moss, the fastest winner of that historic race, treasures most of all.

Each year, the Ferrari Club of Mantua still presents a little gold tortoise to an ex-Scuderia Ferrari driver of distinction. The first was awarded posthumously to Gilles Villeneuve and was presented to his widow, Joanne, in Mantua on 23 April 1983. Others have gone to Juan Manuel Fangio, Clay Regazzoni and Michele Alboreto.

One of Italy’s most exclusive motoring organizations is the Automobile Club of Mantua, partly because Nuvolari was its president for the last seven years of his life, and partly because its rather large car badge has the coveted TN tortoise as its centrepiece. The club also runs the small, tasteful museum in the city dedicated to the son of the wind and filled with his trophies, medallions, badges of distinction, formal honours and, of course, a little tortoise.

The post Nuvolari and the Tortoise appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Tucked away in a little potato-farming town, 250 miles south east of Buenos Aires, is one of the most important motor racing museums in the world, a tribute to the little town of Balcarce from the man whose life story it tells. It is the Centro Tecnologico-Cultural y Museo del Automovilismo Juan Manuel Fangio, which the five times Formula One world champion fought to establish in his home town as his way of thanking the town’s inhabitants for their financial and moral support during in his racing career.

The center, which looks out over Plaza Libertad, the town’s main square, tells the story of the great Fangio’s life and victories from his very first South American marathon to his retirement as the undisputed king of Formula One motor racing in 1958. And it does so with a wealth (literally) of cars, trophies and memorabilia the abundance of which I have seldom seen in other places of commemoration.

The post Fangio and His Museum appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

He was a spectacular Formula 1 driver and the first Polish addition to the F1 circus, who had it all going for him after six years in the top echelon of motor racing. He even won the 2008 Grand Prix of Canada in a BMW Sauber F1.05 and finished the year fourth in the F1 world title chase. But Robert also had a predilection for rallying and entered the unimportant 2011 Ronde di Andorra Rally, in a Skoda Fabia S 2000, partly for fun but, as always, to win.

But that was the day everything went wrong. Part way through the Andorra event, the Skoda flew off the road and smashed into a guardrail near the town of Testico, not far from its San Sebastian Church. It took rescuers over an hour to ease the seriously injured Kubica out of the mangled Fabia, after which he was taken to a helicopter and flown to the Santa Corona Hospital in Pietra Ligure, Italy, There, it was clear that he had suffered the partial amputation of his forearm, compound fractures of his right elbow, leg and shoulder, most of which were repaired during a three-month period, although there wasn’t much movement in his right hand. Having been retained by Renault GP earlier in the year, Robert was forced to sit out the balance of the 2011 and 2012 Formula 1 World Championships due to that hand injury. And the situation wasn’t helped by him breaking a leg again after slipping on an icy footpath near his Italian home. Toward the end of 2012, Kubica, his hand still feeling the effects of the Andorra accident, decided his way back to the top in motor racing was to again go rallying. So he entered in the year’s Ronde Gomitolo Di Lana rally in a world championship Subaru S128 WRC with Giuliano Manfredi. They won by almost 10 seconds – and Robert was at the start of a long road back to circuit racing.

The post Robert Kubica appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Today, Franco Cortese is, perhaps, one of motor sport’s forgotten stars and he shouldn’t be. He was the driver who put Ferrari on the map in a career that spanned 156 races, 20 victories and top placings as long as your arm. During more than four decades, from 1926 to 1958, he raced for the cream of the Italian and British constructors, among them Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Ferrari and Britain’s Frazer Nash.

Born in 1903, in the tiny Piedmont village of Oggebbio, Italy, which even today only boasts a population of 845 souls, Franco began his long, distinguished motor racing career when he was just 22-years old. He competed in the very first Mille Miglia in 1927 and made the top 10 that year by taking 8^th place overall in an Itala Tipo 61, while stars of the day like Gastone Brilli Peri and Luigi Fagioli dropped out. In fact, he competed in 21 Mille Miglias, finished a record 14 times, made the top 10 seven times between 1927 and 1951 and won the 1938 over 1500-cc class.

The post Franco Cortese appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

He is literally the fastest man on the planet, and has been since October 15, 1997. That was when Andy Green set the current World Land Speed Record of an average 766.035 mph taking him to Mach 1.02, which also made him the world’s first supersonic car driver. And he did it in the jet-engined Thrust SSC at the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA.

Born in Warwickshire, England, on July 30, 1962, Andy went to St. Clave’s Grammar School in Orpington, Kent, where he turned out to be brilliant at mathematics. He was noticed by Britain’s Royal Air Force and they later gave him a RAF scholarship to Westerbrook College, Oxford, from which he graduated in maths with first class honors. Later that year, he was appointed a RAF acting pilot officer, which was soon confirmed.

The post Andy Green appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Fathers and their sons who have each won the Formula 1 World Championship are few and far between. There are only two dads and their lads who have pulled it off. The first to climb that particular Everest were the Hills: Graham won the 1962 world title driving a BRM P57 and the 1968 title in Colin Chapman’s Lotus 49 and 49B. Thirty years later, his son Damon won the 1996 world championship in a Williams FW18 with a series of stunning drives.

The post Family Affair—The Hills and The Rosbergs appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

The last time a car featured in my Heroes column was months back, when I wrote about the 1935 Alfa Romeo Bi-turbo, a fast if erratic machine with an Alfa P3 engine, front and rear. It was dreamt up by Enzo Ferrari and his designer Luigi Bazzi in a desperate search for a post-P3 Grand Prix winner – which it never was – but could, arguably, be called the first ever Ferrari.

Another oddball racing car layout is the six-wheeler, four at the front and two at the rear or vice-versa. There has been – and would still be – stabs at developing just such a wild card since 1939, according to my records. The first was the Mercedes-Benz 80, but that never saw the light of day because the Second World War got in its way and it died a death on the drawing board, with not even a prototype being built. And the idea was dropped by Stuttgart after the war, when Germany was eventually allowed to compete in Grands Prix again in 1951.

The post Tyrrell P34 six-wheeler appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Bugatti had won the Targa Florio three consecutive years from 1925 – 1927 by the time their new recruit, Albert Divo, was flagged away from the Cerda start of the 1928 Sicilian classic. And he didn’t disappoint: Divo not only won the island epic that year, he made it two years running by taking the win in 1929, too. That gave Bugatti five consecutive Targa wins, a record that was never broken in the 57 times the that the annual race took place.

Which is one hell of an achievement for a kid from a working class neighborhood like Belleville which, together with Montmartre, is the highest point in Paris. Albert was born there on January 24, 1895, and was an undistinguished pupil at school, wanting nothing more from life than to become a car mechanic. So he went to work at a local garage when he was just 12-years old as an apprentice and did his best.

The post Alberto Divo appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Mike Hailwood had won no fewer than nine World Motorcycle Championships before he ever competed in his first Formula One motor race. Not to mention 14 victories in the heart-in-your-mouth Isle of Man TT. So he quickly earned himself the nickname of “Mike the Bike.”

If the truth were told, he was nothing like as successful racing cars as he clearly was on motorcycles, but he did win the 1972 European Formula Two Championship driving a car built by the only man to win world titles on both two and four wheels, his friend John Surtees. That year, Mike scored six podium placings, two of them victories.

The post Mike Hailwood appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Giuseppe Campari discovered 17-year-old Giulio Ramponi in 1919, when the youngster was working as a trainee for a Milan fuel pump manufacturer. The great driver was looking for a keen young man who he could mould into an effective riding mechanic. And that was the start of Giulio’s brilliant career as a “rider,” racing car technician and, eventually, a car designer.

Campari got Ramponi a job as an apprentice at Alfa Romeo’s Portello factory on the outskirts of Milan. The lad immediately showed promise, so much so that, a few months later, Giuseppe asked Giulio to become his riding mechanic for the first time, in the 1920 Parma-Poggio di Berceto hillclimb. And it was a gamble that paid off, because, within the sight of the finish, the bonnet of the duo’s Alfa Romeo 40-60 hp flew off, so the driver had young Ramponi run after the missing bodywork, bring it back, then lie along the side of the car holding onto the errant bonnet for dear life as they won the classic Italian hillclimb.

The post Giulio Ramponi appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

So we have lost Dan Gurney, a few months shy of his 87th birthday. Dan was one of the sport’s internationally famous and successful icons: he was a motor racing driver, car constructor and team owner, whose outstanding good looks could just as easily have qualified him for an acting career in Hollywood. But motor racing drew him like an irresistible magnet. To begin with, at a mere 19 years old, he built and raced his own car, which turned in a top speed of 138 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats

After Phil Hill, Dan became the second American ever to win in a Formula One race, and is considered the equal of that other American superstar, Mario Andretti. He is also the first driver to have won in F1, World Championship endurance racing, NASCAR and Indycar.s As a constructor his Eagle-Toyotas won 14 consecutive IMSA GTP races and back-to-back drivers and manufacturers titles.

The post Dan Gurney appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

It had been a long, hard ride from winning masses of kart races when he was a kid to winning the 2009 Formula One World Championship. But, like so many other kart stars of the last 30 years or so, Jenson Button did it, with a lot of team changes and disappointments in between.

Born in 1980, Jenson—named after his late father John’s great friend and rallycross opponent Erling Jensen of Denmark—was given his first kart when he was eight-years old, won the 1989 British Super Prix a year later, the 1997 Ayrton Senna Memorial Cup and all 34 races in the 1999 British Cadet Kart Championship, when he was 10. And if that’s not promise, I’d like to know what is!

The post Jenson Button appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Ask anyone who was the first American to win a Grand Prix and chances are they will say Phil Hill or Dan Gurney, heroes of the ’60s. But it was, in fact, much earlier than that. The first was David Bruce-Brown, a strikingly handsome young New Yorker and son of a fabulously wealthy family, who won the 1910 American Grand Prize—same thing, different language—on November 12, 1910, over a century ago. He was 23 years old at the time and had proved himself to be a towering natural talent with a glittering career in front of him. Yet he hardly had a career at all, because it was cut pitifully short on October 1, 1912, when he crashed and was fatally injured during practice for that year’s Grand Prize at Milwaukee.

At 18, the lantern-jawed David loved anything to do with the relatively new sport of motor racing, and wrangled himself a job as a junior mechanic with the Fiat team at Daytona. After the professionals had had their fun, the amateurs were allowed to compete in a one-mile event, for which Bruce-Brown was loaned one of the racing Fiats—and he won.

The post David Bruce-Brown appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

An Alfa Romeo car mechanic who rose to become one of the greatest endurance drivers of his generation, the man responsible for establishing Ferrari in the United States and patron of his own highly successful motor racing team. Almost too much to be rolled into one man, but that, in a nutshell, was Luigi Chinetti.

A man worthy of so much more than such a threadbare cliché, so let’s at least try to do some kind of justice to him.

The post Luigi Chinetti appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

The only time I ever met Eddie Cheever was one weekend when we were at the Hockenheim circuit, in Germany, for the 1979 Formula Two race. He was a tall 21-year-old American who had lived in Rome for much of his early life and spoke immaculate Italian. I felt very much the underdog, because just four months earlier I had been invited by Pirelli, in Milan, to take on the responsibility for their public relations activities outside Italy. I was trying hard to learn Italian, but when Eddie, his team’s technical director Giorgio Stirano and I went to Heidelberg for dinner the night before the race, conversation had to be in English—Eddie speaking like a real Yank, Giorgio’s heavily accented pronunciation. I felt inadequate, but I made it eventually.

Eddie was driving Enzo Osella’s BMW-engined A2/79 on Pirelli tires in the year’s German round of European Formula Two Championship, and he drove well. He had won the first round at Silverstone, then Pau and Zandvoort. He came 4th at Hockenheim that day, all of which contributed to him taking 4th place in the championship at year’s end with 32 points.

The post Eddie Cheever appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Juan Manuel Fangio Biography

Affectionately known as “bandy legs” by his many fans, Juan Manuel Fangio was born in Balcarce, Argentina the son of an Italian immigrant in 1911. After military service he opened his own garage and would race in local events. These “local” events were not the weekend meetings that occur all over England but long-distance races held over mostly dirt roads up and down South America.

Fangio’s first race at eighteen was in a Ford taxi. One particular race, which he won in 1940, the Gran Premio del Norte was almost 10,000 kilometres long. This race between Buenos Aires, up through the Andes to Lima, Peru and back again took nearly two weeks with stages held each day. No mechanics were allowed and any repairs would have to be completed by either the driver or co-driver at the end of each stage.

The post Juan Manuel Fangio appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

You might well ask “Who the hell’s he?” when you read the name at the top of the page. Well, he’s the man none other than Niki Lauda described as The 20th Century’s Greatest Rally Driver.

Not the most popular branch of motor sport in America, but rallying is the one in which Walter shone like a billion-watt searchlight in the ’80s and ’90s. Yet his motor sport was not “limited” to rallying, in which he became a double World Champion; he won major World Sportscar Championship events and, believe it or not, even won the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb at record speed. When he retired, he became Porsche’s fastest ever test driver and product spokesman. Yes, there’s a lot more to Mr. Röhrl than you might think.

The post Walter Röhrl appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

I have a Minichamps model of the legendary Lancia Stratos HF rally car in Alitalia’s green and white colors sitting on my desk and every time I look at it, Italy’s “Il Drago” or “the Dragon” comes to mind. That was world rally champion Sandro Munari’s nickname because, according to fan and foe alike, he breathed some well-targeted fire either verbally or from behind the wheel of a rally car.

Regardless, in my book, he is Mr. Lancia Stratos. After rally boss Cesare Fiorio saw Bertone’s fanciful, unlikely looking concept Stratos at the 1970 Turin Motor Show, he resolved to turn it into a rally mobile for his company. The Dragon had already won the European Rally Championship and was on the road to greatness so Fiorio, the legendary multi-world rally and endurance racing championship winner as boss of Lancia’s motor sport department, enrolled Sandro as the car’s exclusive tester. Il Drago became one of a small coterie of men, which included Fiorio and Nuccio Bertone, who created the car that won three Constructors World Rally Championships and no fewer than 18 rounds in the world title fight.

The post Sandro Munari appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Louis Delage may have been born to a humble assistant station master and his wife in Cognac, France, in 1874, but he rose to become a dominator of world motor sport. Yet he died in poverty, in 1947, at the age of 73, bankrupt, swamped by mountainous debts and destitute.

I don’t use the term world dominator lightly. Louis’ fabulous Albert Lory-designed Delage 15 S 8 won four of the five Grands Prix—at Montlhéry, Lasarte, Monza and Brooklands—to bring him the 1927 World Championship for Car Constructors, all four of them won by France’s highly talented and courageous Second World War Resistance fighter, Robert Benoist. It wasn’t so easy though, because the 15 S 8’s exhaust system ran along the right side of the cockpit and singed the drivers’ feet so badly that their shoes were often heard to sizzle in the pits after a stint as they plunged them into bowls of cold water!

The post Louis Delage appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Bob Wollek was a champion many times over before he even got  into motor racing. He won no fewer than three gold and two silver medals in the World University Games—second only to the Olympics—in downhill, slalom and combined skiing events in 1966 and 1968.

When he exploded onto the motor sport scene it looked like he was going to do the same thing or better. He started his motor sport career in a rally car and promptly won France’s 8th Rallye National in a Renault 8 Gordini. But disaster was just around the corner and in 1968 Wollek was badly injured in a skiing accident that meant he had to retire from the sport. So, after a lengthy recovery period, he decided to become a full-time racing driver. His first event after hospitalization was the Volant Shell Scholarship race on the Le Mans Bugatti Circuit, which uses part of the 24 Hours track and a purpose-built section, on which he came 2nd in an Alpine A210 to winner François Migault. There soon followed another victory in the Alpine Trophy Le Mans race at the Sarthe in the A210, co-driven by Christian Ethuin. That gave Bob an automatic entry into the 1968 24 Hours of Le Mans, in which he and co-driver Ethuin put up a remarkable performance for virtual novices by coming 2nd in class and 11th overall driving a works Société des Automobiles Alpine A210. The following year, he was not so lucky at Le Mans, in which he competed with famous French skier and glamour boy Jean-Claude Killy as his co-driver. The pair managed to cover 242 laps before an engine problem meant they had to retire their little Alpine.

The post Bob Wollek appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Major Anthony Peter Roylance Rolt, Military Cross and Bar, had a philosophy. After surviving the Second World War, in which he almost died several times and won two Military Crosses, one of Britain’s highest awards for bravery, he reasoned that the rest of his life would be a bonus. So, he put his bonus to good use by becoming one of the UK’s most successful post-war sports car drivers.

With his friend Duncan Hamilton, Rolt won the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans in a works Jaguar C-Type, but he always disputed Hamilton’s version of what happened the day before the race.

The post Tony Rolt appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

The boys from Brazil just keep on coming: Emerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet, Ayrton Senna and, since 2002, Felipe Massa. The others won eight Formula One World Championships between them, but even with 11 GP victories to his credit, Felipe hasn’t made it yet. He almost did in a 2008 mind blower, but not quite.

Massa came so very close in front of his adoring homeland fans that year. The Brazilian Grand Prix was the last race of a closely fought season, and he was just seven points behind leader and motor racing genius Lewis Hamilton, in his debut year driving a McLaren-Mercedes. To take the title, Massa and his Ferrari F2008 either had to win or come 2nd, with Lewis outside the top five. It all looked good as Felipe took pole and led, dominating the entire race as the field switched from intermediate tires to slicks and back to intermediates again under a temperamental Brazilian sky. Even so, Felipe won by 13 seconds and the crowd went wild, thinking they had another World Champion on their hands. Hamilton had run a ragged race and had dropped to 6th, so the World Championship looked as good as Felipe’s—especially when the young Brazilian crossed the finish line victorious. But a nerve-tingling drama was being played out farther down the field, on the penultimate corner of the entire Grand Prix. That was where Lewis squeaked past a struggling Timo Glock and his Toyota TF 108 and slipped the McLaren into 5th place and then 4th just before crossing the finish line. So the world title went to off-form newcomer Hamilton by a single point from “deputy champion” Felipe. If they had tied on points, the title would have gone to the diminutive Massa, with his six wins to Hamilton’s five. But they didn’t, so Felipe is still looking for that elusive world title.

The post Felipe Massa appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Luigi Bazzi Biography

He was called the soul of Ferrari. He had been there from the beginning and Enzo Ferrari recalled his trusted friend as “the founding member of the old guard of collaborators. Working at Ferrari till he was over eighty when health finally forced him to leave Ferrari’s side. Due to his quiet and unassuming nature to those on the outside he had the appearance of a mechanic or test driver but those with a better knowledge of the inner workings at Ferrari knew that no engine ever left the racing factory without having come under his watchful eye.

It is estimated that while working with Ferrari he had a hand in over 160 different engines in multiple configurations including his famous Bimotore that had two in a single car! No degree or diploma could fully convey his knowledge of what makes a racing engine “go” that instead was based on many years of experience first at Fiat then Alfa and finally at Ferrari.

The post Luigi Bazzi appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Johnny of the ready smile and blonde hair was a motor racing shooting star who might have aspired to becoming the new Jim Clark. His rise to fame, however, came to a sudden—even if temporary—standstill after a horrendous 10-car, 150 mph Formula 3000 accident while driving Jordan Racing’s Reynard-Ford Cosworth at Brands Hatch, England, in 1988 that left Herbert with crushed lower legs, ankles and feet. It looked like the end of his racing career, never mind his mercurial rise to fame. He would never be the same again.

At that Brands International Formula 3000 weekend, Johnny took pole position in his Camel-sponsored car, but started badly and was 3rd into Paddock Bend, just ahead of Gregor Foitek. The two of them banged wheels at Druids, charged on to the Graham Hill and into the Grand Prix circuit, where Gregor tried to pass with two wheels on the grass at around 150 mph. Foitek’s right-front wheel hit Herbert’s left rear and that set off the 10-car explosion during which Johnny’s car slammed into a nearby bridge head-on, and that shattered the car’s nose, as well as tearing off its front suspension. All of which left Herbert’s feet hanging out of where the nose had been as the Reynard then crashed into a barrier.

The post Johnny Herbert appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

It’s not often that a Formula One driver can turn his hand to World Championship rallying. Look at 2007 F1 world champion Kimi Raikkonen. He cut his Grand Prix career short in 2010 to join Citroën, but could only turn in mediocre results, before returning in 2012 to what he did best, F1.

Carlos Reutemann? Now that’s a different—if not very long—story. He did two World Championship rallies in Argentina for Fiat and Peugeot and came 3rd twice—not bad, when you consider he was up against a pack of established World Rally Champions.

The post Carlos Reutemann appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Saying someone is/was the world’s greatest racing driver is a mug’s game. So many circumstances —not least of all technology—change so quickly, so how can anybody possibly say that Tazio Nuvolari was a greater driver than Lewis Hamilton, for instance?

Based exclusively on results, however, I feel perfectly safe in saying that Tom Kristensen is the greatest endurance racing driver of his generation, if not of all time. Reason? Because Tom has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans more than anyone else by a country mile. A record nine times, six of them in succession, all between 1997 and 2013, which gives him a 50-percent rate of success. He competed 18 times at Le Mans, and if his car finished, rather than crashing or suffering mechanical ills, he was always on the podium—14 times to be exact. Another statistic for you to ponder: by the time he retired on November 19, 2014, Kristensen had won 11 percent of all the Le Mans races ever held between the first in 1923 and his last victory in 2013.

The post Tom Kristensen appeared first on Sports Car Digest.