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Mille Miglia: Vignettes & Non-Sequiturs · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing, technology sales rep that turned into
• 0:06
  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
• 0:08
  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:37
  Good day, good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to The Motoring
• 0:41
  Historian with me, Jon Summers.
• 0:43
  This is an extra episode, way shorter than all of the other ones.
• 0:46
  This is the vignettes and non sequiturs.
• 0:49
  Which didn't make the Ferrari at the Mille Miglia pods that appear on, on
• 0:56
  the Grand Touring Motorsport website here with William and Eric too.
• 1:00
  Yeah, so that's the contents of today.
• 1:02
  Music wise, whenever people talk about Ferrari, they're always of opera.
• 1:06
  Don't they?
• 1:07
  But I mean, to me, it's, it's not that.
• 1:09
  If you look at the cars, they were dirty and grimy in period
• 1:12
  and Modena was a industrial city.
• 1:15
  And although Ferrari liked Op, the things he built, they
• 1:18
  didn't seem that operatic to me.
• 1:20
  So we've got Motorhead.
• 1:23
  Basically, with Megadeth's homage to speeding, 502, but mostly Motorhead
• 1:28
  and, and mostly the sense of that wall of sound, which really sets, uh,
• 1:33
  set Motorhead apart years ago, and other bands, I think, have tried to
• 1:36
  emulate, but have not done, uh, not done successfully, because to me, right, 150
• 1:41
  miles an hour on the open road, my word, this is not for the faint hearted, this
• 1:48
  is not Rigoletto, this is Motorhead.
• 1:50
  It's not for the faint hearted.
• 1:52
  Iron Child out of Vulcan's Forge.
• 1:55
  Metal Screaming Thrash.
• 1:57
  Thank you, Drive Thru.
• 2:00
  Iron Child out of Vulcan's Forge.
• 2:03
  Metal Screaming Thrash.
• 2:07
  It's an interesting parallel that can be drawn with the Porsche family as well.
• 2:11
  Because if you think about it, you know, a lot of Germans, Austro Hungarians,
• 2:15
  uh, all the people from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, all those areas that
• 2:19
  are now, you know, under different names that were absorbed by Germany were forced
• 2:23
  to become part of the party or die.
• 2:25
  Right.
• 2:25
  It's sort of like the board resistance is futile, but Porsche, just like
• 2:29
  Ferrari kept himself at arm's length, although under contract to build the
• 2:33
  Volkswagen, to build a Beetle, right.
• 2:34
  That started in the thirties, the whole nother story there too.
• 2:37
  Interesting how.
• 2:38
  Two of the greats, their stories are so similar at the end of the day, right?
• 2:43
  And then took off post war in a very similar way because only car manufacturers
• 2:50
  could build agricultural equipment and get the countries back on their feet.
• 2:54
  Again, that's what really brought Europe back into fruition.
• 2:57
  And then from there, they were able to take the money from building the
• 2:59
  tractors, you know, don't watch the Lamborghini movie, but take it to the
• 3:03
  next level and build their empires.
• 3:05
  based on that agrarian society, which brought Europe back onto its feet.
• 3:10
  It's always interesting to compare Ferrari and Porsche, even though they've
• 3:13
  been rivals from the bitter beginning, but how similar their life stories are.
• 3:18
  I would say Eric, that's something of a strain because I feel like Ferrari.
• 3:24
  Yeah, sure.
• 3:24
  He did his machine tools and there's a line in his memoirs, isn't there, about
• 3:28
  how when the Nazis came and looked at it, they said that they carry on using
• 3:31
  his machine tools because his copy was as good as the ones that they were making.
• 3:37
  So, you know, there's, there's that.
• 3:38
  So he did the machine tools then when, when he was bombed the first time.
• 3:41
  Didn't he then move out to Maranello and then start doing ball bearings?
• 3:45
  There's ball bearings out there.
• 3:46
  So I, I would say that ball bearings aren't quite as significant a
• 3:50
  contribution to the war effort as designing the best tank of the second
• 3:54
  world war, a rotating gun turret, as well as the Volkswagen Beetle.
• 3:58
  I feel like that was, you know, somebody who was working under duress.
• 4:02
  He would seem to be very productive, tomato, tomato.
• 4:06
  Well, you know, it's interesting too, and the ball bearings,
• 4:09
  you know, he was making.
• 4:11
  He copied off of, um, what's his name in the UK?
• 4:14
  Oh, Vandervelde.
• 4:15
  Yes, that's it.
• 4:16
  Vandervelde.
• 4:17
  He copied those.
• 4:18
  Yeah, that's all he did.
• 4:20
  He's basically just copied those.
• 4:21
  That's all he did.
• 4:24
  Whilst we're down this sort of little rat hole, I only learned this very recently.
• 4:27
  Tony Vandervelde creates the Van War.
• 4:30
  The Van War becomes the first successful British Formula One car.
• 4:34
  It gives rise to the whole garagista culture of the 60s and the 70s.
• 4:40
  That Van Wall engine, it was four Norton motorcycle engines fixed together.
• 4:46
  Vandervelde watched Norton, the Italians doing all these MV four
• 4:50
  cylinders and so on, and Norton still beating them by tuning the bejesus
• 4:55
  out of this single that they'd got.
• 4:56
  And he thought, well, I'll just put four of those together.
• 4:59
  And see if that can beat Ferrari in a Formula One car as well.
• 5:01
  And after a little bit, sure enough, uh, sure enough, it did.
• 5:06
  Lucky Brits with your ingenuity, making gold out of garbage.
• 5:12
  But what that, doesn't that speak to sort of what we're, what we're thinking
• 5:17
  about almost with ourselves and, and the Chinese at the moment that really what
• 5:22
  we're talking about is that in Britain.
• 5:26
  At that time, there was engineering thought leadership, right, or at
• 5:31
  least Vandervoort had engineering.
• 5:33
  Thought leadership, which other nations look to copy.
• 5:36
  And since that time, that engineering leadership battle has passed how and
• 5:42
  when that passes and what causes that to pass, that's really interesting.
• 5:46
  And it means that this conversation about Ferrari's about more than.
• 5:49
  You know, just fast cars and, and, and motor races or tractors,
• 5:53
  but yes, or track or tractors.
• 5:55
  Yeah.
• 5:58
  Ferrari never made tractors though.
• 6:00
  Did he made the ball bearings?
• 6:01
  Porsche made tractors Lamborghini.
• 6:04
  There are Ferrari tractors from way back when.
• 6:06
  Yes.
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  Just like Lamborghinis.
• 6:08
  And the whole story about Lamborghini with Ferruccio is that he couldn't
• 6:13
  buy a tractor from Ferrari.
• 6:14
  He wouldn't sell him one.
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  So he said, basically go shove it up your tailpipe and he made his own.
• 6:19
  Right.
• 6:20
  And then it became the car thing.
• 6:22
  Oh, I thought it was the business lunch in Bologna.
• 6:25
  Ferruccio's bought a Ferrari.
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  Approaches.
• 6:29
  Sees Ferrari at the business lunch.
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  Approaches him.
• 6:33
  Yeah, that's the whole story they told in the movie about
• 6:36
  how the clutches were terrible.
• 6:37
  Yeah.
• 6:38
  The story that I learned, that I read and was told was that.
• 6:43
  Perruccio had gone to Enzo to buy a tractor because Ferrari and Fiat and
• 6:48
  whatever, because they were existing under the fascist regime, designated
• 6:53
  manufacturers, engineering companies, whatever, just like Porsche was, they
• 6:57
  were allowed to build the equipment to get Europe back on its feet.
• 7:01
  That's why I'm saying it draws a parallel between Ferdinand Porsche and Enzo because
• 7:04
  Ferrari and Porsche were building tractors and that's where they made their money.
• 7:08
  And at the time Lamborghini had gone to Enzo to buy a tractor
• 7:11
  and he wouldn't sell him one.
• 7:12
  Whatever's truth, fact, fiction, or myth, or otherwise, I don't know, but
• 7:16
  that's the story that I learned versus the other one, which I've also heard.
• 7:20
  And I'm just like, really?
• 7:21
  Seriously?
• 7:22
  Okay.
• 7:24
  So my understanding of that one is, of the Bologna business meeting
• 7:28
  story, is that Lamborghini complains to Ferrari about the clutch.
• 7:32
  Ferrari says something along the lines of what do you know about cars tractor maker?
• 7:37
  It may have been more polite.
• 7:39
  It may have been less polite than that, but it was.
• 7:41
  Something along those kind of, of lines, and Lamborghini's so incensed
• 7:46
  he decides he will go out and build something better, which is a wonderful
• 7:49
  creation myth, but has the feel of a creation myth rather than a true story.
• 7:54
  My aside to that was that Ferrari himself, apparently when there was
• 7:59
  heavy traffic, he wouldn't sit in it.
• 8:01
  He would just park the car at the side of the road, get a coffee,
• 8:05
  and wait for the traffic to clear.
• 8:07
  The point being that, yes, of course you would just fit a ra you would
• 8:10
  fit a racing clutch, wouldn't you?
• 8:12
  A racing clutch is better at any point when you're not in traffic,
• 8:16
  if you don't sit in traffic.
• 8:18
  So once again, I'm building cars for a racing driver.
• 8:20
  I'm not building cars for a road driver or a tractor maker.
• 8:25
  It's that beautiful Italian logic, right?
• 8:28
  That's why, don't you need a racing clutch in your street car?
• 8:31
  Of course.
• 8:31
  It just makes sense, but that all jokes aside,
• 8:50
  Bugatti had forgotten where he buried all his cars too.
• 8:53
  Right.
• 8:53
  So they were still trying to figure all that out.
• 8:56
  I didn't know about that.
• 8:57
  The story of the 57 G tank.
• 8:59
  It was buried underground.
• 9:00
  Then they forgot where they buried it.
• 9:01
  Yeah.
• 9:04
  That's a whole different.
• 9:05
  That's all different podcasts.
• 9:07
  William and I were talking about a guy called Lou Brero, some contact with
• 9:12
  some years ago and, and famously Lou Brero supposedly had a car that Ascari
• 9:18
  had used in the 1953 Mille Miglia.
• 9:20
  So after that, it had come to America, been bought by Brero's father.
• 9:24
  And then Brero had raced it.
• 9:26
  And then in the eighties, when there was the classic car boom, lots of people
• 9:29
  had come trying to buy it off him.
• 9:31
  And every person who came to see him, he agreed a higher price.
• 9:35
  And then when the truck turned up, price had changed and this
• 9:37
  just went on and on and on.
• 9:40
  You'll, you'll see this forums talking about a crazy guy on a beach in California
• 9:45
  with a Ferrari and a D type Jaguar.
• 9:47
  That's Lou Brero.
• 9:48
  Those cars were supposedly buried.
• 9:50
  He supposedly got so beat off.
• 9:52
  He buried the, and then the classic car crash happened.
• 9:55
  And then the Ferrari was only disinterred 25 years ago or something like that.
• 9:59
  And those are all the ones I'm sure everyone knows the famous with that Dino
• 10:02
  that was buried in the backyard as well.
• 10:03
  So I see people say I have a penchant for burying Ferraris for some reason.
• 10:08
  People in California maybe 'cause that that Dino is down in la
• 10:12
  Wasn't it something to do with him?
• 10:13
  I dunno.
• 10:32
  one thing I did wanna ask you.
• 10:34
  I had noted that the 49 winner was a barta, yet the same chassis.
• 10:42
  was sold to Lord Selsden, and then Selsden and Kineti used that
• 10:48
  car to win Le Mans that year.
• 10:49
  Yeah.
• 10:50
  That was a closed car though, wasn't it?
• 10:52
  The Le Mans, like it was, so it was open when it won the Million Million,
• 10:55
  then it had a closed body put on it.
• 10:56
  If memory serves correctly, because they re bodied the car, the Vignale.
• 11:00
  I have to go back and look.
• 11:01
  My, I I, I'm terrible about remembering this stuff.
• 11:04
  I think it's tour.
• 11:04
  I think it's a touring, isn't it?
• 11:06
  Yeah, touring.
• 11:07
  But yeah, they, they get it.
• 11:08
  So, and that actually happens a few times in regards to like a, a, a car
• 11:13
  winning this and then get changed up and I don't know if it just 'cause it
• 11:16
  damage and so they get it re bodied and do it, but yeah, it's um, it's
• 11:21
  kind of impressive how that happens.
• 11:23
  And you, and you know, it's same engine, everything.
• 11:26
  Obviously they rebuild it and whatnot, but it kind of goes to tell you.
• 11:31
  In regards to, you know, some of these cars are pretty durable.
• 11:34
  You would think that they'd be fragile, but like going to Le
• 11:36
  Mans racing for 24 hours straight.
• 11:38
  But, you know, obviously the race of the million million, you know, going
• 11:41
  through, it can take some abuse.
• 11:42
  Obviously you got two totally kind of different, I guess, tracks, I
• 11:46
  guess you would say, in regards to the Le Mans to the million million.
• 11:49
  It's kind of interesting when you delve into the chassis itself and
• 11:53
  look at its total history, what it did and who raced it and where.
• 11:58
  That's a whole different conversation in regards to going.
• 12:01
  I mean, you could have, we could have podcasts on, on single cars, you
• 12:05
  know, each one, one chassis number.
• 12:07
  I think it's interesting, though, when you look at the 1 6 6 design language, the
• 12:12
  cues that it has, it is the precursor to the 2 50 Testa Rosa pontoon fendered car.
• 12:20
  And you can really see it in the nose where, let's say, shy of 10 years later,
• 12:25
  1957, when the Testa Rosa comes out where they got the inspiration for that car.
• 12:30
  So, I think that's interesting.
• 12:32
  I mean, that's very typical of.
• 12:34
  You know, a lot of the designs back then is let's continue to refine that idea.
• 12:37
  Let's continue to, you know, pull from that playbook to
• 12:39
  correct ourselves or correct me.
• 12:42
  Chinetti, they didn't rebody that car.
• 12:44
  No, he won it with as a barketta.
• 12:46
  Uh, it was the second place car of Bonetto that got rebodied.
• 12:50
  So when Chinetti got it and Stelza got it, basically the same car,
• 12:54
  they didn't change anything.
• 12:56
  I was still barketta and that's the one that he drove 23, whatever
• 13:01
  hours it was and everything too.
• 13:03
  So.
• 13:04
  Which was, you know, impressive itself, but again, that's
• 13:06
  a whole nother discussion.
• 13:07
  Yeah, you get, you get the impression.
• 13:09
  I mean, Selsden, I know nothing about him beyond that.
• 13:12
  It's not like he was a figure in British motorsport.
• 13:15
  You get the impression that he bought the car and, you know, did a few laps and
• 13:20
  then let this Italian Johnny win the race.
• 13:22
  Oh yeah, then he ties his name to it.
• 13:24
  You know, hey, I won.
• 13:25
  Yeah.
• 13:26
  I drove for 10 minutes.
• 13:27
  Yeah.
• 13:28
  Yeah.
• 13:29
  Yeah, but, but, but, you know, and I think, uh, I don't think, Eric, it was,
• 13:33
  wasn't it, Le Verre that drove for 23 and a half hours and then Misty Gear and had
• 13:38
  to retire one year, 1950 or something.
• 13:40
  But yeah, Kennedy did.
• 13:43
  I don't think, I think sales did only, he drove a couple of times,
• 13:47
  but only for a total of about an hour or something in the, in the course
• 13:51
  of the, uh, in the course of the, so
• 14:04
  it's interesting you bring up the staggered start with the faster cars
• 14:08
  in the back a couple of years ago, we were going to participate in a.
• 14:11
  Endurance race that was actually set up with that same strategy in mind.
• 14:16
  And the idea was that if the slower cars started first, it gave the faster
• 14:21
  cars obstacles to have to overcome along the way, but in theory created
• 14:26
  enough distance between the vehicles that they would potentially finish
• 14:31
  all about the same time and therefore create this almost artificial dramatic.
• 14:38
  Photo finish, right?
• 14:39
  We're going to have to tidy this all up in the last two laps
• 14:41
  because now everybody's on the lead lap basically at the same time.
• 14:45
  And so I wonder if that was the idea in the spirit of competition
• 14:50
  to stagger the start that way.
• 14:52
  And if you think about it, the slowest Fiat that rolled off the line being
• 14:55
  first was probably a solid hour ahead of the fastest Jaguar that was
• 15:00
  starting, you know, 400 cars back.
• 15:03
  Oh, more than.
• 15:04
  More that they would start the cars in the later years, they would start them leaving
• 15:10
  like at nine or ten o'clock at night.
• 15:12
  So, you know, Moss and, you know, the year they won Moss and Jenkinson went to bed as
• 15:18
  the race was starting and then got up and sorted themselves out ready for their 722.
• 15:25
  You know, ready for that seven 22 style time.
• 15:27
  Some of that still carries today, but anyway, the milli milli, they had, they
• 15:30
  had to structure the millimeter that way because they could only close the country
• 15:33
  for a day if they had done it the other way around with the fastest cows, first,
• 15:37
  the event would have taken two days because he was taking, it would take the
• 15:41
  small cars like 18 hours to do the route.
• 15:44
  So it would have, because one of the issues was.
• 15:47
  If you were one of the faster cars and then had problems, the roads would reopen.
• 15:53
  So if you had a problem, you couldn't like, and you fix the car at the
• 15:56
  side of the road, there would then be normal traffic on the road while
• 15:59
  you were still trying to race.
• 16:01
  If you can just imagine how eye popping that must've been.
• 16:05
  So I have a, I have an interesting question about this.
• 16:08
  So you talked about Marzotto's car, right?
• 16:12
  And the Italian word for it is Luovo, right?
• 16:15
  Or the egg, right?
• 16:16
  Which is the nickname for this re bodied by Fontana, 166 MM, what
• 16:22
  also known as the 212 export.
• 16:24
  And so why didn't he run his own car?
• 16:26
  That was technically an older chassis by a couple of years, you know,
• 16:29
  modified all this kind of stuff.
• 16:31
  Where was it at this point?
• 16:33
  You know, obviously they owned it.
• 16:34
  It was their car.
• 16:35
  So wherever, because they obviously industrialists, everything like that.
• 16:40
  So obviously it was sitting wherever they would keep it.
• 16:44
  Problem was it was I want to say it's almost what a three
• 16:46
  or four year old car, right?
• 16:48
  Slow, I mean, you're talking the street 40s got 300 horsepower That 212 I think
• 16:54
  had less than 200, you know, I had to go back really fast So, I mean you're just
• 16:58
  talking I say night and day but there was a huge jump in performance In regards to
• 17:03
  the two different cars what a point of pride it would have been for him to win in
• 17:07
  his own car Even if it was underpowered, I mean Granted, the Italian ethos doesn't
• 17:13
  really allow for the whole underdog story.
• 17:15
  It's a very American concept.
• 17:16
  I think the moment you got out on the highway and felt, I mean, those, the
• 17:21
  53 car that he used, those Vignale convertibles, they really, I mean, I, I
• 17:28
  love a big capacity V12 Ferrari sports racing car, but The early car, the
• 17:34
  early fifties cars with the narrower tires and less than 250 horsepower.
• 17:39
  It doesn't by this era, certainly with the veale body, by 53, this is
• 17:45
  when for me, they, it's transitioned, it's transitioning into this period
• 17:50
  of the, the greatest cars ever made.
• 17:52
  I'd put Martos as there.
• 17:55
  Otto's Milli winner is as the beginning of that.
• 17:57
  This is the, this is the era when Vignali did the portholes that Buick copied,
• 18:03
  you know, the fender portholes in the, in, in the side of, of, of the car.
• 18:07
  And, and this is the era where Ali's thinking about, I'm gonna make the
• 18:11
  gorilla's largest possible and I'm gonna sink the headlights down.
• 18:15
  I'm gonna make it kind of squinty.
• 18:17
  It's, it's like it was Peter Schreyer before Peter Schreyer did it for Audi.
• 18:23
  and they've done it more recently for Kia.
• 18:24
  It came first with, uh, with Vignale in, in my opinion.
• 18:28
  You know, there's a absolutely magnificent book about Lancia and it talks about
• 18:40
  how Lancia and, and it's the engineer that Lancia had, or Lancia, you should
• 18:46
  pronounce it correctly, yes, yes, please.
• 18:48
  You know, the Lancia himself.
• 18:51
  Was, was gone in the, uh, by the post war period, but we have this wonderful
• 18:55
  engineer Di Virilio and, and from it, we have this reborn Lancia that has, Lancia
• 19:03
  that has so much engineering, innovation and, and promise and excitement.
• 19:10
  And the book that, that's, that's published Jeffrey Goldberg.
• 19:16
  I want to say it's called Di Virilio, at the center, and that's really
• 19:22
  what I feel like the Mille Miglia is.
• 19:24
  It's at the center.
• 19:26
  Of all of, of automobility really, but certainly European
• 19:31
  automobility and, and motor racing.
• 19:53
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