Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Mille Miglia Madness - Racing Through Time with Enzo, Nuvolari, and the Gladiators of Italy (1927-1953)

Transcript

Mille Miglia Madness - Racing Through Time with Enzo, Nuvolari, and the Gladiators of Italy (1927-1953) · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  As part of Ferrari Fridays, William Ross from the Exotic Car Marketplace
• 0:04
  will be discussing all things Ferrari and interviewing people that live
• 0:07
  and breathe the Ferrari brand.
• 0:09
  Topics range from road cars to racing, drivers to owners, as well
• 0:13
  as auctions, private sales, and trends in the collector market.
• 0:37
  Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Ferrari Marketplace.
• 0:41
  This week we have crew chief Eric joining us again as our moderator
• 0:45
  and participant, but we also have the motoring historian Jonathan Summers
• 0:49
  participating in this episode and you will hear him on some more episodes
• 0:53
  consequently down the road as well.
• 0:55
  This man has a wealth of knowledge and he's got his own podcast as well
• 0:58
  that you will find on the Motoring Podcast Network MPN, motoringpodcast.
• 1:03
  net is the website, so check it out.
• 1:05
  We got a lot more stuff coming on the site, so so pay attention.
• 1:09
  So.
• 1:10
  This episode, this week for Ferrari Friday, we are going
• 1:13
  to talk about the Mille Miglia.
• 1:15
  Now, obviously, with the release of the Ferrari movie, everyone's
• 1:19
  eyes kind of got, you know, glued to this time period and, you know,
• 1:23
  what was going on in that era.
• 1:25
  But we're going to kind of go through the post war stuff, starting in about 47.
• 1:30
  John's going to talk a little bit about the pre stuff and that kind of
• 1:34
  give the basis for everything because It happened, you know, they were
• 1:37
  racing before the war, then it had the jump in the gap we started after.
• 1:40
  So John's going to kind of cover a lot of that stuff.
• 1:42
  He's going to get into a lot of the finer details of the Mille Miglia
• 1:45
  itself, the race, the route, the drivers.
• 1:48
  I'm here to discuss the cars and Crew Chief Eric is here just to kind of jump
• 1:53
  in and ask the questions that I'm sure a lot of you will want to know answers to.
• 1:56
  The first question is, John, how good is your Estelle Getty?
• 2:00
  Impersonation.
• 2:01
  Picture it, Russia, 1933.
• 2:03
  Oh, yeah.
• 2:05
  This is a really interesting place that you started, Eric, because
• 2:08
  this is part of the story of the Mille it's a very Italian story.
• 2:14
  And when we look at film and photographs of the Mille Miglia now,
• 2:17
  it's always in towns and there's always crowds of people, and it
• 2:21
  almost doesn't look like a motor race.
• 2:22
  It almost looks more like a fete or a festival or You know, we're going
• 2:26
  to talk about the cars and the motor racing, but, but really the mille
• 2:29
  miglia exists in this, in this shadow of the way that government was in
• 2:33
  Italy in the early 20th century.
• 2:35
  And as an Englishman, it's always quite amusing to me that the attitude
• 2:39
  of the British journalists that went there was that the really this
• 2:43
  showed that the Italians, you know, they, they could organize themselves.
• 2:46
  You know, it's quite impressive really that these Italian fellows
• 2:49
  could actually organize themselves.
• 2:51
  I'll take that as a compliment.
• 2:55
  Because that is what's going on here.
• 2:56
  And this is really where I want it to begin is we're going to talk a lot
• 3:00
  about the Mille Miglia in the post war period, but really as an event,
• 3:04
  the Mille Miglia looks and feels like those really early city to city.
• 3:09
  races.
• 3:10
  So in, in the early days, you know, the very first motor race
• 3:13
  was the Paris Rouen of 1895.
• 3:16
  It's considered the first motor race because the newspaper, a
• 3:19
  newspaper was like, we've got this newfangled technology.
• 3:22
  Let's try and tell some stories about it.
• 3:24
  Let's have all these peculiar vehicles.
• 3:26
  Some of them are steam powered.
• 3:28
  Some of them are yeah.
• 3:29
  Buses, some of them are motorcycles, but let's have them go from one town to
• 3:33
  another and let's write a story about it.
• 3:35
  It was meant to just be like a demonstration, an exposition.
• 3:39
  What the newspapers wrote about was who finished first, and
• 3:42
  that gave birth to motor racing.
• 3:45
  And what they would do, certainly at the turn of the century,
• 3:48
  would be like, We're in Paris!
• 3:50
  First man to Bordeaux's the winner!
• 3:52
  And they would just get in the cars and go, and it was really madcap.
• 3:57
  And the Mille Miglia was born out of this kind of city to city road race, so
• 4:06
  even in the post war period, even when the cars could do 180 miles an hour, you
• 4:12
  still just closed the public roads and you got the soldiers and the policemen
• 4:16
  out to keep the farmers off the road, and you had this route which changed
• 4:22
  every year, but was approximately a figure of eight, which always began in
• 4:26
  Brescia and would run down one coast and then come across the country to Rome,
• 4:32
  and then it would turn north again and come back north and end in Brescia.
• 4:38
  Always in the spring, so often bad weather, changeable weather, often
• 4:43
  beginning in the small hours, so the cars are going to be flagged away
• 4:47
  from the start in the small hours, because they're going to be racing all
• 4:51
  day because this is a Thousand miles.
• 4:55
  So although the route changed, it always was a thousand miles.
• 4:59
  Probably should have done my research and be able to tell you why.
• 5:01
  That's what I'm here for is to translate all the Italian that's
• 5:05
  in the documentation, right?
• 5:07
  So for those that don't know the name of the race, the Mille Miglia actually
• 5:12
  translates literally to 1000 miles.
• 5:15
  Why a thousand miles in a country of kilometers?
• 5:17
  I only just thought of that.
• 5:18
  What's up with these Italians?
• 5:20
  You know, we can't make up our minds.
• 5:22
  The French may have invented motorsport, but we invented NASCAR.
• 5:26
  Think about I Circo Maximo in Rome, which you're familiar with, John.
• 5:31
  Isn't the chariot racing just NASCAR?
• 5:33
  At the end of the day, Eric, I even cut my teeth as a tour guide and I
• 5:38
  would show people around the forum and the Coliseum like the other
• 5:40
  guides would, but I had a good shtick for the Americans because I would
• 5:44
  position the Circus Maximus as NASCAR.
• 5:48
  It really was like NASCAR.
• 5:49
  The attitudes of the fans and the whole razzmatazz of it.
• 5:53
  Those of you who've not been to Rome and haven't studied.
• 5:56
  The chariot racing, the pod racing of the Star Wars universe is
• 6:02
  basically a pretty straight ripoff.
• 6:05
  If you watch the pod racing scene and thought, hasn't George
• 6:07
  Lucas recently watched Ben Hur?
• 6:10
  Yes, he had.
• 6:10
  The scene in Ben Hur, in Ben Hur where you've got the dolphins.
• 6:14
  There were these giant silver dolphins, and slaves would knock the
• 6:17
  dolphins for each lap that was done.
• 6:20
  Caligula, the Roman emperor, would bet a lot.
• 6:23
  He was big into betting on it.
• 6:24
  If you think of Nazca with betting now.
• 6:26
  We've digressed somewhat there, haven't we?
• 6:28
  In this sort of initial period, as we talk about the Mille Miglia, I really wanted to
• 6:33
  draw a distinction between the event as it was up to 1957 and the event as it is now.
• 6:40
  So the event as it is now is a really awesome open road race event.
• 6:47
  For many years it's been organized by a chap called Mark Gessler and
• 6:49
  I've had the pleasure of working with Mark on various different projects
• 6:53
  not to do with the Mille Miglia.
• 6:55
  But the notion of the modern event is Where you, we take cars that participated
• 7:02
  in the event years ago and we drive from town to town often with a police escort.
• 7:06
  It's in Italy.
• 7:07
  So that police escort might be motorcycles.
• 7:09
  We might be able to do more than 100 miles an hour on a piece of Italian autostrada
• 7:15
  or not on a piece of Italian autostrada.
• 7:17
  This modern event is.
• 7:19
  Not a procession, but nor is it the full on pedal to the metal cannonball
• 7:29
  that the original event was.
• 7:31
  The original event was non stop, this event you overnight in a
• 7:34
  nice five star hotel, and it's a wonderful way to commemorate.
• 7:38
  The original event, but the modern event has nothing to do
• 7:42
  with the original event in Intel.
• 7:44
  And the original event was around in the world sports car championship for
• 7:48
  three or four years of its existence.
• 7:51
  The modern one now too, I mean, it's actually route book to hold nine
• 7:54
  yards, time sections and everything.
• 7:56
  They kind of, I want to say, want to try and hold people back in regards to
• 8:02
  Excessive speed, but you know, you're going to have your outliers out there.
• 8:05
  They're just, you know, they're not in it.
• 8:06
  They don't care.
• 8:07
  They're just having fun.
• 8:08
  You know, it's kind of a different animal in regards to what it is back.
• 8:12
  What it was back then as compared to now.
• 8:14
  And they get, geez, I think they get like 300, 250 to 300 entrance,
• 8:18
  like right now, something like that.
• 8:20
  I know they get a large amount of participants.
• 8:22
  My understanding is he's a bit of a spool to get car.
• 8:26
  That you're going to be invited to enter with because on the face of it, we think
• 8:31
  about, you know, Maserati 450s or Ferrari 290mm, you know, these are the cars that,
• 8:37
  that we think about as Mille Miglia cars, but you look, I mean, there's lots of film
• 8:41
  on YouTube of the original events and you can see there, it's all like little Fiat
• 8:45
  1100s and much smaller cars in period.
• 8:49
  A few people could afford the Ferraris and there were lots of Fiat 1100s.
• 8:53
  Of course, nowadays, the people that want to participate in the event
• 8:56
  are the Ferrari and Maserati guys.
• 8:59
  So what they try and do is they try and have some of that, but they also
• 9:02
  try and allow, you'll see Bentleys in the event now, because Bentleys were
• 9:07
  eligible for the event in period, although no Englishman entered, no Englishman
• 9:12
  entered, nobody brought a Bentley.
• 9:14
  And my understanding is, and I don't know much about, I'm not
• 9:17
  like, I would never claim to be an expert on the Mille Miglia pre war.
• 9:21
  My understanding is that there are very, very few foreign entrants.
• 9:25
  Like I think there were no British entrants and one or two German entrants.
• 9:29
  So what you're looking at is really an event, which has the feel of the Isle of
• 9:34
  Man TT, that yes, this is an international motoring event, but it's something
• 9:38
  which the locals seem to excel at.
• 9:40
  And I think that's partly because you really need to
• 9:42
  have the local knowledge there.
• 9:44
  So in the case of the Mille Miglia, the Italians knew the road, so they
• 9:47
  could race better than the Brits or the Germans who, who went and tried to.
• 9:51
  Yeah, I think it was like 90, 95 percent of all, it's like.
• 9:54
  Pre-war were, it was all Italian.
• 9:56
  Yeah.
• 9:56
  You had your German here, couple French here.
• 9:58
  I mean, extremely minimal, but the majority, 99% were
• 10:01
  just all Italian and Ferrari.
• 10:03
  In that pre-war period, it was Eria, Ferrari, Alfredo's
• 10:09
  that were really the yeah.
• 10:11
  Winners for bulk of the 1930s at least.
• 10:13
  If, if we look at the thirties, not the twenties, and it's that classic alpha.
• 10:18
  1750 with the Zagato body, you know, when you picture the classic 30s,
• 10:22
  Alfa Romeo, that's, that's the car.
• 10:24
  And I always feel like it was Victory at Le Mans and Targa and the Mille Miglia
• 10:29
  that built Alfa Romeo's reputation and built Ferrari's reputation pre war.
• 10:34
  So before we go too far down into the 1930s, between the two wars, right,
• 10:38
  as the Mille Miglia is ramping up and there's the iconic turn and kind
• 10:42
  of renaissance of the Mille Miglia in 1940, and we'll get to that.
• 10:46
  I want to take us just a step back to something you said
• 10:48
  earlier, John, and hopefully you can clarify it for the audience.
• 10:51
  You know, you talked about how motorsport started in the 1890s, you know, with
• 10:55
  the French and things like that.
• 10:56
  And then we joked about the Romans, but the first road race
• 10:59
  is credited to the Vanderbilt cup.
• 11:01
  I wonder is the Mille Miglia as we jokingly refer to it
• 11:05
  as the cannonball of Europe.
• 11:06
  Is it the first road rally?
• 11:08
  Is there a rally that precedes it?
• 11:10
  The Targa Florio dates from 1902.
• 11:13
  So the Targa Florio, which is, it's on Sicily, it was
• 11:16
  set up by an Italian nobleman.
• 11:18
  They used different routes, you know, they'd been all around the island.
• 11:21
  The classic route is I think 44 miles, eight miles along the coast, the rest of
• 11:26
  the time winding around the coast road.
• 11:27
  But it was always that, it was always on Sicily and they always
• 11:30
  had a uniquely Sicilian character.
• 11:33
  The Mille Miglia doesn't come along until 1927.
• 11:36
  And the Mille Miglia is this notion that it will be all Italy.
• 11:39
  So the Mille Miglia is this, very much this creature of the fascist age after
• 11:44
  Le Mans, because Grand Prix racing, the early era of the city to city races,
• 11:49
  and then from 1906, 1906 was the first.
• 11:53
  French Grand Prix, the first Grand Prix, and this introduced
• 11:55
  this notion of circuit race.
• 11:58
  But then the feeling was that certainly amongst the French, certainly when
• 12:02
  they were being beaten by the Italians and the Germans, the feeling was
• 12:06
  that perhaps we needed to get back to basics, and we needed to get away
• 12:09
  from these prototype racing machines.
• 12:11
  And we needed to create a challenge, which replicated real motoring.
• 12:15
  So the thought was we'll race for 24 hours and we'll race with touring car.
• 12:19
  And thus Le Mans was born.
• 12:20
  And my sense is that the four guys that created the Mille Miglia created
• 12:25
  something that was for similar cars as might race at Le Mans.
• 12:30
  This was not for prototypes.
• 12:32
  This was for what we would know today as sports car.
• 12:34
  Were the previous point to point races timed like the Mille Miglia was?
• 12:40
  Are they time distance rallies?
• 12:41
  Yes.
• 12:42
  You leave Paris, the Paris control, and then the key thing was to get
• 12:46
  your time card stamped at Bordeaux.
• 12:48
  And because the innovation that the Mille Miglia introduced, at least in
• 12:53
  the post war period and in the top classes, was the number tells you
• 12:57
  exactly the time that the car leaves.
• 12:59
  So if the car's carrying five, three, one.
• 13:01
  That means it left Brescia So if car 5.
• 13:04
  31 comes by, and then car 5.
• 13:07
  27 comes by, you know that not only is 5.
• 13:10
  31 past 5.
• 13:12
  27 on the road, but he's five minutes ahead in the race.
• 13:16
  And you know that from the side of the road, just by watching the cars come by.
• 13:19
  No complicated lights like they have at Le Mans, and certainly
• 13:23
  none of the, Who was that?
• 13:25
  And who's leaving?
• 13:26
  Confusion.
• 13:28
  Was motorsport years ago?
• 13:29
  No, you it's on the side of the car.
• 13:31
  It's interesting that magnificent shell movie on YouTube There's
• 13:35
  that AI enhanced version of it.
• 13:38
  Now, you can illustrate it illustrates exactly the point that I was trying
• 13:41
  to make Dan, although I We'll just have to search for it on YouTube,
• 13:45
  that's all Let's jump back into this.
• 13:47
  The Mille Miglia kicks off 1927, and then there's a major milestone
• 13:53
  in its history right around 1933.
• 13:56
  And then again in 1940, and we'll continue to move forward.
• 13:58
  So John, take us on that journey.
• 14:00
  You kind of set the stage.
• 14:01
  We've compared and contrast some other famous races that
• 14:04
  started within that decade.
• 14:05
  You talked about Le Mans, the Vanderbilt Cup.
• 14:07
  We talked about all these other races.
• 14:08
  Where does the Mille Miglia go in its first five years?
• 14:12
  Let's see it through Ferrari's eyes.
• 14:14
  Ferrari himself is born in Modena, which is on the route of the Mille
• 14:19
  Miglia, and the Via Emilia passes by not far from Ferrari's front door.
• 14:25
  So he sees motor racing on the Via Emilia.
• 14:28
  He sees the early Mille Miglia is very close to his home and for
• 14:33
  Ferrari, you know, late in life.
• 14:35
  He didn't want to leave that whole area of Northern Italy.
• 14:38
  He's often will make reference to he himself wasn't a
• 14:42
  great craftsman or artisan.
• 14:43
  He was an agitator of men, agitator of men line.
• 14:46
  We see over and over in this and the agitator of men.
• 14:50
  He has this success because of the craftsman.
• 14:53
  of Modena.
• 14:53
  So you have this sense in these early years that this burgeoning motorsport
• 14:59
  industry and this race which is centered around Brescia and Bologna
• 15:04
  and Modena and this auto strata connecting these cities together.
• 15:08
  Long before the German autobahn or freeways or motorways, the Italians
• 15:12
  had thought about connecting the race is natural, right?
• 15:15
  The Romans built these kind of roads and just linked to that Roman history there.
• 15:20
  The checkpoint for many years, the Rome checkpoint was at the Milvian Bridge,
• 15:25
  which is on the Northern bit of Rome where the Appian Way crosses over.
• 15:28
  But the Milvian Bridge was where Constantius defeated, I can't remember
• 15:33
  the name of the Roman Emperor that he defeated, but where Constantius
• 15:36
  defeats the last pagan Roman Emperor and makes Rome Christian in the year 312.
• 15:42
  You know, this is where you get your paper stamped before you race on.
• 15:46
  So always in Italy, right, we're steeped with this history.
• 15:49
  It would be fair to say early on, we have events that really are
• 15:54
  races of attrition and that benefit cars that are built like Bentley.
• 15:59
  So, you know, famously, the first foreign winner is Caracciola in the Mercedes SSK.
• 16:04
  People always, I think I would say overlook in regards to,
• 16:09
  you know, the pre war time.
• 16:10
  And so John was stating, you know, Enzo's enthusiasm for motor racing.
• 16:15
  And I think a lot of people overlook or forget, I mean, he wasn't world
• 16:19
  champion or that, but he was a decent wheel, man, when he was racing for
• 16:23
  Alfa Romeo, he did rather well.
• 16:26
  And so getting into that area and I know he batted around a bit in his
• 16:30
  youth and trying to find his way.
• 16:32
  But, you know, he did pretty well with alpha and helping them grow into, you
• 16:37
  know, I say being the dominant force twenties into the early mid thirties
• 16:42
  until they decide to pull out, you know, he had a big role in regards to creating.
• 16:48
  I guess you would say, you know, this dominating format in regards to teams
• 16:53
  are singular team, you know, and I, and he, obviously he carried that throughout
• 16:57
  his life, ups and downs, but obviously when he broke out onto his own post
• 17:02
  war, he was allowed to, you know, due to contract obligations, cause he wasn't
• 17:06
  allowed to for a set amount of time from alpha, but able to create his own,
• 17:09
  build his own cars and start racing.
• 17:11
  It did not take him long to become dominant in the racing arena.
• 17:16
  And as everyone knows, I mean, that was his thing, you know, he had
• 17:19
  one, nothing to do with road cars or anything that he wanted to build
• 17:21
  race cars for business aspects.
• 17:23
  You know, he had to get into building road cars for rich people because
• 17:26
  it helps fund his racing endeavors.
• 17:28
  You'll see, as we talk in this episode, getting 1953.
• 17:33
  You'll see, I guess you would say the gestation, the growth of the
• 17:36
  cars themselves is not real like big monumental leaps, you know, yeah.
• 17:41
  Maybe the body shape and this way the engines built and, you know, some of
• 17:44
  the parameters and characteristics of the motors and everything like that, how
• 17:48
  they're made, you know, internal wise and just bore stroke, all that kind of stuff.
• 17:51
  There isn't this massive, like, jump that you'll see 54 and on, say, into 57.
• 17:57
  It evolved pretty slowly, and obviously the war had a big effect
• 18:01
  on progression in regards to these cars kind of jumping quickly.
• 18:05
  War's over, and you'll have all these engineers and whatnot
• 18:08
  starting to come back into play.
• 18:09
  But, It's pretty interesting to look at the cars themselves pre war and then
• 18:14
  after the war when they started getting, you know, started to race back up again.
• 18:18
  It's a leap from when they stopped to when they started
• 18:20
  again, but not like monumental regards to horsepower and speed.
• 18:24
  It all hovered around 150, 200 some horsepower and going
• 18:29
  and maybe top speeds of 120.
• 18:30
  130, nothing crazy, because you think about that today, like, well, that's
• 18:34
  nothing, but you know, you got to look at what the cars were back then, you know,
• 18:37
  that was pretty sketchy in regards to what these cars were going at that rapid rate.
• 18:42
  But then it's interesting to see what that jump that happens post
• 18:44
  war in regards to how these cars just all of a sudden go, phew!
• 18:47
  Just kind of took off horsepower and everything.
• 18:49
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's also something here that William touched on
• 18:53
  that we can unpack for just a second.
• 18:55
  Enzo was a driver.
• 18:56
  He was part of Alfa Romeo's racing team, the early days of Formula One, right?
• 19:01
  Obviously huge influences there, not only from Alfa Romeo, but Maserati.
• 19:05
  When you look at some of the early Ferraris, They're modeled after those
• 19:09
  cars that he was familiar with, but he was also one of the four horsemen
• 19:13
  of the famed Quadrifoglio, right?
• 19:16
  These shamrock that you see on the side of the Alfa Romeos, those four
• 19:20
  leaves are for the four drivers.
• 19:22
  One of those being Enzo, another one Tazio Nuvolari and so on down the line.
• 19:26
  There are some interesting stories and characters and big name
• 19:28
  drivers during this period of the early days of the Mille Miglia.
• 19:32
  Let's unpack that for a moment as we get closer and closer
• 19:36
  to the 1940s and the war.
• 19:37
  You know, the two big names, you know, the non Italian winner, they've only ever been
• 19:41
  driving Mercedes and one with Caracciola.
• 19:43
  So, so we should credit Caracciola really.
• 19:46
  And if there had been a Formula One World Championship in the 1930s, Caracciola
• 19:51
  would have won it more than anybody else.
• 19:53
  So there seems little doubt that he was the complete driver of the 30s.
• 19:58
  I feel like the historians of Ferrari himself.
• 20:02
  Nuvolari really stood out as a guy who in the book Ferrari wrote about drivers.
• 20:07
  He has a line about how the first time he ever sat next to Nuvolari, the
• 20:11
  first corner they got to, he thought he wasn't going to make it around
• 20:14
  because Nuvolari's whole cornering style was not to lift off the throttle.
• 20:19
  You just turn the car into a slide and skidded the car around the corner.
• 20:24
  In other words, you know, he was very much from the Ari Vatanen.
• 20:27
  Beau Duke school of cornering.
• 20:30
  The first newspaper mention, this is from Count Johnny Lurani's
• 20:34
  Polka Biography of Nuvolari.
• 20:36
  The first mention of Nuvolari anywhere in literature is a newspaper that
• 20:41
  describes him as an audacious young man.
• 20:44
  So huge, huge cojones.
• 20:46
  And look, along with Ferrari, right?
• 20:50
  There's this deep tragedy around Nuvolari.
• 20:54
  When we talk about the post war, Millet Millius, we'll see that the guy drove
• 20:58
  out of his skin, arguably the greatest drives ever, you know, of anybody in
• 21:04
  any motor race ever kind of thing.
• 21:06
  I think you could make a case for Nuvolari in the 47 and 48 Millet Millius, but he
• 21:10
  had two sons and lost them during the war.
• 21:13
  So this post war Nuvolari is a Nuvolari who does not want to die in bed.
• 21:19
  He wants to die on the road.
• 21:21
  He wants to send it.
• 21:22
  How do you race that guy?
• 21:24
  How do you race somebody who is publicly sta And this is not This
• 21:28
  is not some crazy Andrew Tate guy.
• 21:31
  This is a middle aged guy who will look the interviewer straight in the eye
• 21:36
  and say, I'll race your car, Ferrari, and I really hope I die on the road.
• 21:40
  I will race so hard.
• 21:42
  I mean, it is Just maybe he was Sigmund Freud's inspiration for
• 21:46
  the whole death wish study, right?
• 21:48
  And he was all around talks.
• 21:49
  You know, we'll, we'll talk about the 1952 winner Giovanni Bracco later.
• 21:54
  And I read that Bracco's phrase was either it goes or I'll crash it.
• 22:00
  That's so Italian.
• 22:02
  This is not some Anthony Gobert, like crazy teenage motorcycle rider.
• 22:07
  This is a middle aged man.
• 22:10
  And so I feel like this is being a part of the, a product of the fascist era.
• 22:14
  So, so Novelari's great foil at Scuderia Ferrari in the
• 22:18
  Mille Miglia is Achille Vazzi.
• 22:20
  And Vazzi has a very different manner where, you know,
• 22:23
  Novelari has this kind of.
• 22:25
  Bodo handling, cornering style, Achille Vazzi, very precise and
• 22:30
  very together and very structured.
• 22:33
  Both come from motorcycles and at this point, almost everybody we're going to
• 22:37
  talk about began their career racing motorcycles before turning to cars.
• 22:42
  The really famous post war story of Nuvolari and Vazzi is towards the
• 22:48
  end of One Mille Miglia, I think.
• 22:50
  33 or 34.
• 22:51
  Nuvolari spots Vazi ahead and in order to pass him he switches his lights off
• 22:58
  and comes up behind him and then passes suddenly and unexpectedly so Vazi can't
• 23:04
  see him coming and is is defeated again.
• 23:07
  Yeah, I mean that's pitch dark.
• 23:08
  You're not talking like, now you got streetlights, and like, lit up, and
• 23:11
  like, no, I mean, you're, you're talking pitch dark, and a road that's maybe,
• 23:15
  what, eight feet wide, ten feet at best?
• 23:17
  Yeah.
• 23:18
  I mean, that's some cojones.
• 23:20
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 23:21
  Absolutely.
• 23:22
  And, and what we're talking about here is, this was, the only, the only
• 23:26
  person who saw that was Vazi, right?
• 23:28
  Vazi, there's only the four of them, the two co drivers, and the drivers out there,
• 23:32
  and there is the sense of epic gladiators.
• 23:35
  Battling here.
• 23:36
  If you look at the pictures of them, uh, uh, images of them, n is so sort of small
• 23:42
  and, and wiry, sort of prune like man.
• 23:45
  And, and TSI has this very sort of fascist slicked over hair and usually has a, has
• 23:51
  a cigarette on, had an affair with another driver's wife whilst he was at Auto Union.
• 23:58
  She introduced him to heroin.
• 24:00
  Oh, and over ended the car at 180 miles an hour.
• 24:03
  Now he did come out of that.
• 24:05
  whole process again.
• 24:07
  But I visited his hometown.
• 24:09
  It's just north of Turin.
• 24:11
  There's a wonderful museum there.
• 24:12
  You need to like talk to a librarian and so on and get in there.
• 24:16
  But the way that the Alfa Romeo Formula One team got themselves ready for Vazzi
• 24:23
  post war was absolutely incredible.
• 24:25
  He was all set.
• 24:26
  To be the formula one world champion and then rolled the car in burn and knocked
• 24:32
  himself on the head and was, and was gone.
• 24:35
  And that was really interesting.
• 24:36
  In a lot of photographs, the team took on Fangio, poor lad from South America.
• 24:41
  He's come from South America and now he's this prodigy.
• 24:43
  In a lot of the photographs of the car, he even looks like Vazi.
• 24:46
  You can only tell the difference because Varzi always had the
• 24:48
  cigarette and Fangio doesn't.
• 24:51
  So you've this sort of sense that when Varzi went, the family and the team
• 24:55
  in, in, I can't remember the name of the town in Italy that he was from,
• 24:58
  but they've sort of adopted him.
• 25:00
  And the museum, it's hard to tell when the driver that we follow was Varzi.
• 25:07
  And when it was, he did transportation stuff in the war,
• 25:10
  Varzi, he was much wealthier.
• 25:12
  The Novelari could always buy a better car sooner.
• 25:15
  And this is important for Ferrari and the sports cars, because with Ferrari, we
• 25:19
  very much get this sense that he has to take the money from the customers, from
• 25:23
  the noblemen who are buying the cars, to keep the lights switched on, even though
• 25:27
  what he really wants to do is give the car to people like Novelari, who he knows
• 25:32
  are going to drive the Begisus out of it and potentially win the race with it.
• 25:35
  On that point, you know, in regards to selling the cars to noblemen, You know,
• 25:39
  you look at post war, we get to that point, we get there, but you'll see
• 25:44
  there's a large contingent of Ferraris.
• 25:46
  I mean, you have 20, there's 20 plus Ferraris in it, but there's only maybe
• 25:49
  two or three, maybe four max factory cars that, you know, are, are, you know,
• 25:54
  being now these gentlemen drivers and whatnot, you'll have some factories for
• 25:58
  whatnot, but there's really not like.
• 26:00
  Normally you kind of have the opposite where you have like this big factory
• 26:02
  team, four or five factory guys, and you got like two or three private.
• 26:05
  It was, you know, complete opposite.
• 26:06
  And I mean, they had a massive contingent of privately entered Ferraris in the
• 26:11
  race year in year out, which is really interesting because we have come.
• 26:15
  Full circle on that paradigm in sports car and endurance racing.
• 26:19
  There is no Ferrari factory team.
• 26:22
  There is no Corvette factory team.
• 26:23
  There is no Porsche factory team.
• 26:25
  They're all privateers under license from the factory.
• 26:28
  So we've come a hundred years later, full circle on all that.
• 26:32
  So that's really, really interesting.
• 26:33
  As we speak about these drivers, you know, the ones that win and participated.
• 26:37
  I always find very interesting, I don't know, have to do with maturity
• 26:41
  or what have you, but again, also the mentality, because as you know, you get
• 26:43
  older, you get more cautious, you think more in regards to what can happen.
• 26:48
  You put that in your head.
• 26:49
  A lot of these guys were in their late thirties, forties, even some of these
• 26:53
  guys, you know, 50 plus that were racing in these events and just going balls out.
• 26:58
  You would think you'd get that age.
• 26:59
  You're kind of like, I'm gonna be a little hesitant because I know what could happen.
• 27:01
  You know, if I hit this these guys were not young.
• 27:05
  There's a couple of instances here and there, but I don't know if it was back
• 27:07
  then, you know, you know, as you age, you know, maturity, what have you.
• 27:10
  And they kind of looked down on these youngsters, you know, that
• 27:13
  all, they don't have the maturity.
• 27:14
  You don't have, you know, they looked at them differently, but you
• 27:17
  know, I always found it interesting.
• 27:18
  It's like the age of these people, these gentlemen erased.
• 27:21
  You know, they were up there, you know, they were no spring chickens
• 27:24
  and like, you know, speaking about varsity smoking These guys smoke trade.
• 27:27
  It's not like it's to this day and age where you got these working out
• 27:30
  every day You got nutritionists and all this stuff in regards to you watching
• 27:34
  every ounce and everything like that A lot of these guys were rather portly
• 27:37
  or you got banjo who's chewing on coca leaves the whole time, right?
• 27:40
  Yeah, just to keep them up there.
• 27:44
  What's also happening in this period, the race starts in 1927.
• 27:48
  We've been talking a little bit about 1933 and in the early 30s.
• 27:51
  So we got that six year jump there.
• 27:53
  And then we're creeping closer to the 40s, creeping closer to World War II.
• 27:57
  The technology advancements that are occurring from the mid 20s to the
• 28:02
  mid 30s to the early 40s are huge.
• 28:05
  It's like a space race compared to today where we're not
• 28:09
  searching for seconds anymore.
• 28:11
  We're searching for hundredths and thousandths of a second, which is a lot
• 28:15
  of technology for very little return.
• 28:17
  But in those days, all sorts of invention, ingenuity and things were going on.
• 28:21
  So John, talk to us about that and how that influences the birth.
• 28:25
  Of the first Ferraris, certainly the, the key technology of, I think for the
• 28:29
  twenties is supercharging Mercedes, that the one, the Mille Miglia was a,
• 28:34
  was supercharged and this created this sort of dichotomy in motor sport period
• 28:40
  where the unlimited cars would make plenty of power and be supercharged.
• 28:44
  And then there was a whole class of unsupercharged cars that were similar to
• 28:48
  the ones that everyday people could use.
• 28:51
  So there was always this contrast within the, the Mille Miglia.
• 28:55
  I suppose the other thing that we should say about it is that, you
• 28:59
  know, yes, a definite class of car.
• 29:01
  emerges that is good at this kind of event.
• 29:05
  We might even call it the Grand Touring car, the Grand Touring motorsports car.
• 29:10
  What we're saying is that, you know, a Bentley could win Le Mans, but it
• 29:13
  wasn't really the ideal shape for it.
• 29:16
  Mercedes SSK could win Le Mans, but it was not really the ideal shape for it.
• 29:21
  An Alfa 1750 with a Zagato body on it.
• 29:25
  Now that Was much more of what we might understand to be the first and indeed
• 29:30
  you can make that position that those alphas that won the melee in the 30s
• 29:35
  very much count as, you know, the first sports cars before we move on from
• 29:39
  this post war period, let's just cover off the weirdness of the end of the
• 29:43
  melee miller in the post war period.
• 29:45
  There was a really bad accident in 1938, a car hit, I went over
• 29:48
  a level crossing into the crowd and that was the end of the event.
• 29:52
  The event was stopped.
• 29:53
  There was no event in 1939, even though war hadn't broken
• 29:57
  out in that part of Europe.
• 29:59
  Yeah, there was even an event in 1940.
• 30:01
  The event in 1940 was, um, I, from my reading about it, it feels as if
• 30:08
  the Italians tried to do an event just for them, but then unexpectedly,
• 30:12
  the Germans like showed up.
• 30:14
  With these hot rod BMWs driven by Hushka von Hanstein, who became the,
• 30:19
  uh, you know, the face of Porsche Motorsport in the post war period.
• 30:22
  I guess the course was no longer the sort of crazy open roads.
• 30:27
  It was a triangle of closed roads and, and this is, this is very much in keeping.
• 30:33
  With racing on the public roads in continental Europe and Ireland, you know,
• 30:38
  in, in Ireland, there's still motorcycle racing, the same kind of thing as you see
• 30:43
  at the Isle of Man TT, but, you know, less money, club stuff, it's three towns joined
• 30:47
  together in a triangle, Reims, Reims, the circuit in northern France is this three
• 30:53
  And, you know, Towns joined together.
• 30:55
  This is a, this is a classic kind of layout.
• 30:57
  So the 1940 used that kind of format.
• 31:00
  It was won by, as I said, Hanstein in this, in this BMW, quite famously.
• 31:05
  The photo of him on the podium, he has his SS on his overalls.
• 31:10
  There, there were British people there.
• 31:12
  War had been declared.
• 31:13
  I think it must've been a very, very.
• 31:16
  Peculiar event, you know, I always feel like it warrants
• 31:19
  further research in my mind.
• 31:20
  It doesn't count as a melee melee or it stands aside.
• 31:24
  There's like post war period, the pre war period.
• 31:26
  And then there's this funny 1940 anomaly for our purposes.
• 31:31
  I think it's really worth talking about because this is the first time
• 31:35
  a car that Ferrari built himself.
• 31:37
  So this is the period where he's had the falling out with Alfromeo.
• 31:42
  We should go back to the fact that his relationship with Alfromeo is really odd,
• 31:45
  that they don't have a works racing team.
• 31:47
  They just have him doing it for them.
• 31:49
  And it seems from some of the reading that you do, a lot of this is predicated
• 31:53
  around Ferrari's personal relationship with Gabbato, the boss of Alfa Romeo, but
• 31:59
  then there comes this sort of falling out with this character, Wilfrid Reichardt.
• 32:05
  He has this estrangement, Ferrari has this estrangement from Alfa Romeo.
• 32:10
  Whilst he's estranged, he can't build his own cars, this is the understanding.
• 32:14
  So he doesn't build a car under his own name, a Ferrari, he builds
• 32:18
  this probably know better than me.
• 32:20
  William Auto Avioni.
• 32:23
  My Italian, I can't, it's not good, but Auto Avio Construzione 815.
• 32:27
  You know, but it feels like a Ferrari, right?
• 32:29
  Eight cylinders and 1500 cc's.
• 32:32
  The nomenclature is there right from the start.
• 32:35
  From memory, not such an impressive showing on the event, but he
• 32:38
  was there in that pre war Mille Miglia in a car that wasn't.
• 32:43
  And alpha with a Ferrari shield on the side of it, which is
• 32:46
  all he'd done up to then.
• 32:48
  So that's really where Ferrari begins at the Mille Miglia.
• 32:51
  And yeah, he had two cars entered.
• 32:52
  Yeah, they both retired.
• 32:54
  But you know, the main thing is, is if memory serves me, you know, when
• 32:57
  he created the name and put under, it was, he was trying very hard to hide
• 33:02
  the fact that it was him just because.
• 33:04
  You know, with what happened with Alfa Romeo and, you know, them saying,
• 33:07
  Hey, you can't go out and build your own cars and everything like that.
• 33:10
  But, you know, that desire and that need to do it was just so strong.
• 33:14
  Then the cars, you know, they kind of took on a look of a lot
• 33:17
  of other vehicles of that day.
• 33:19
  Kind of looked a lot like a.
• 33:20
  The BMW and stuff like that.
• 33:21
  You know, it's, I want to say, I say copying, but it had a very similar
• 33:25
  look to a lot of other cars back in that day, you know, I don't know.
• 33:28
  At that point, you know, you still had that very strong presence of these
• 33:32
  coach builders in that area and sending them out, obviously money had been
• 33:36
  extremely tight for him in regards to, you know, getting these things put
• 33:39
  together, you know, how much Testing input and everything that, you know,
• 33:42
  gone into these cars and it, nothing like what's, you know, it kind of is today.
• 33:45
  But the key thing is, is this is where, you know, he basically starts
• 33:49
  creating his aura in work, so to speak, in regards to getting into being,
• 33:54
  you know, builder that he became.
• 33:56
  So it got him going, obviously, unfortunately, we know what happens
• 34:01
  later, you know, in the coming months in that region and a certain gentleman
• 34:05
  up in Germany getting some crazy ideas.
• 34:08
  So it kind of distracts from that.
• 34:10
  You know, and he goes into his tool making business and, you know, keeps
• 34:14
  everything going and, you know, he did well, you know, at that point in time too.
• 34:18
  So, I mean, he was setting himself up for post war, kept himself very neutral,
• 34:21
  you know, people kind of say, oh, he joined the fascist prior to that.
• 34:24
  But, yeah, he did, he didn't participate in a lot of stuff.
• 34:27
  It was more just to kind of not say much gain favor, you know,
• 34:30
  to get the government contracts and kind of just, you know.
• 34:32
  Working the system, doing the politics and everything like that.
• 34:35
  But he really wasn't a face of it or anything like that.
• 34:38
  He did what he had to do in regards to what needed to be done to survive the war.
• 34:42
  That 8 1 5 A a c or a CC or whatever it was, Otto Evian constructs, the only
• 34:49
  that thing that was eight cylinders.
• 34:51
  Yet post-war.
• 34:51
  He's doing 12 cylinders, but still in this very.
• 34:55
  small capacity.
• 34:57
  Why, why was he doing 12?
• 34:58
  Why didn't he just do a four cylinder?
• 35:01
  That's what Fiat was doing.
• 35:02
  Now, I believe with the eight cylinder when he did that, it had a lot to
• 35:05
  do with what he had available to him in regards to build the car.
• 35:10
  So he couldn't go out and build his own, you know, cast his own
• 35:13
  block and do everything like that.
• 35:14
  He took a lot of pieces of parts from everywhere and built these cars.
• 35:18
  So hence that first one was an eight cylinder.
• 35:19
  You hit.
• 35:20
  The nail on the head.
• 35:21
  William Ferrari was resourceful, especially starting out, right?
• 35:24
  He had to beg, borrow and steal from wherever he could.
• 35:27
  Obviously he was on the rocks without for a male in some ways, right?
• 35:31
  Undercover trying to develop his own car, all this kind of stuff.
• 35:34
  Who's he going to go.
• 35:36
  Two for an engine at that point, right?
• 35:38
  It's not going to get it from Fiat.
• 35:39
  Fiat's not building the eight V until the 1950s.
• 35:43
  He's not going to get it from Alfa Romeo.
• 35:46
  He doesn't have his own engine.
• 35:47
  Like you said, he's not building his own.
• 35:48
  He's going to turn to Maserati and borrow from the 1939 Maserati
• 35:54
  race car, which had a V8 engine.
• 35:57
  So it makes sense to get ahold of one of those, jam it in your own
• 36:01
  chassis, make some modifications.
• 36:03
  Stamp the head, call it a Ferrari and go on with life.
• 36:06
  The Americans were ahead of the game.
• 36:09
  Cadillac had a V8 in the early 19 teens, along with a couple other brands.
• 36:15
  And then you've got Packard with what they called the twin six,
• 36:18
  which is the V12 as we know it.
• 36:20
  He's looking beyond.
• 36:22
  His boundaries to say, what can I do to build a better mousetrap?
• 36:26
  Because remember Ferrari in the early days, he's quoted as saying this.
• 36:29
  I could care less about the car.
• 36:30
  It's all about the engine, right?
• 36:32
  Build a bigger engine, build a bigger power plant.
• 36:34
  There was nothing in Italy bigger than the Maserati V8 at that time.
• 36:39
  Because the V8.
• 36:40
  that came came later pre war period the reason that there weren't very
• 36:44
  many v engines lancet did that before but really nobody did successful vng
• 36:49
  you know the va pre war wasn't really that well i guess the flathead va was
• 36:54
  successful wasn't it certainly mercedes benz their pre war racing cars were
• 36:58
  straight motors weren't they because you just it was just easier To do a strong,
• 37:03
  you only needed to do one casting.
• 37:04
  You didn't need to do the two castings in, in the V.
• 37:08
  And, you know, until Lancia do a V6 to race with, you know, in our period here,
• 37:13
  you know, nobody had done V6s at all.
• 37:15
  So it's an interesting point, isn't it?
• 37:17
  Because you do wonder, and I feel like I need to do more research now.
• 37:22
  You know, right there, if you imagine Ferrari trying to build that AAC,
• 37:26
  okay, I need to, like, cast an engine.
• 37:28
  How do I go about and do that?
• 37:29
  You can't just, like, call up a machine tool manufacturer, can you?
• 37:32
  So, there must have been, he must have had access.
• 37:37
  You know, so it's Modena, it is that relationship with Alpha, because I know
• 37:42
  there was the falling out, but he remains on good terms with Gabbato personally.
• 37:46
  I've got to believe that there were He never wanted to let them know what
• 37:50
  he was up to, right, with the racing program, so the logical conclusion
• 37:54
  is he went to Maserati for an engine.
• 37:56
  That's interesting.
• 37:57
  Yeah.
• 37:58
  Ready.
• 37:58
  Interesting.
• 37:59
  Where are we in the timeline now?
• 38:00
  We're like 1940s issue talked about the meal Amelia that wasn't the meal Amelia.
• 38:05
  And I will add a footnote here that our friend Paul Baxa from the
• 38:09
  society of automotive historians has a whole presentation that we
• 38:11
  are airing on break fix as part of our history of motorsports series.
• 38:15
  That's going to come out a little bit later.
• 38:17
  So you actually be able to dive into the 1940 meal Amelia
• 38:20
  very, very deeply on that.
• 38:21
  So I want to give him a shout out that we've got that coming.
• 38:24
  So 1941, 42, we're talking about the beginning of the war is the mille mille
• 38:29
  put on hold or does it continue through the war or does it restart post war?
• 38:34
  Where are we at?
• 38:35
  It restarts post war in 1947.
• 38:38
  Remember it had sort of stopped in 1938 and then it had restarted
• 38:42
  in this circuit format down in 47.
• 38:45
  It's like 1938 never happened.
• 38:47
  And we're going back to this crazy open road race around the country.
• 38:51
  You know, I lived in Italy for a year and, and, uh, I lived with
• 38:54
  a really weird German guy who was very into Italian cinema.
• 39:00
  And I went to a number of fifties Italian movies with him.
• 39:04
  And I remember after the third one saying to him, are all fifties
• 39:08
  Italian movies about some poor widow who like has to work in the fields.
• 39:14
  Or be a prostitute, but she chooses to nobly work in the fields.
• 39:17
  Is that what it's all about?
• 39:20
  And he was like, yes.
• 39:21
  And then we get into this big diatribe about how it's the land,
• 39:25
  and it's that she personifies Italy.
• 39:27
  And this is why Sophia Loren and all of When we think about the Mille
• 39:33
  Miglia coming back, we have to see it in this context of Italy rebuilding
• 39:37
  itself, of remembering a good time, of remembering As we said before, a festival.
• 39:43
  The early route maps, the route maps from the 40s and the 50s, they would list,
• 39:48
  you know, Serafini driving Ferrari, but they would also list, you know, Siena.
• 39:53
  And here's a photograph of the cathedral in Siena kind of thing, because
• 39:58
  this is the route that we're taking.
• 40:00
  So we have this feeling of Italian festival, which brings the events back.
• 40:05
  And as William alluded to earlier in those events in.
• 40:09
  47, 48, cars weren't really, they were what had survived the
• 40:14
  war pulled out and dusted off.
• 40:16
  And the drivers were very much the same kind of, you know, pulling
• 40:21
  themselves out of the cupboard and dusting themselves off a little bit.
• 40:25
  So, you know, that 1947 winner Alfa Romeo 2900B.
• 40:30
  I mean, that's a beautiful car and even a fast car by modern standards,
• 40:34
  but it's a completely pre war design.
• 40:36
  You know, you had a lot of the drivers participating, basically
• 40:39
  just, hey, just starting back up.
• 40:41
  They participated pre war, now they're doing a post war.
• 40:44
  I mean, you have a lot of guys that won pre war that win post war.
• 40:48
  You know, and you got to look at it, basically 10 years in regards to that gap,
• 40:52
  and these guys weren't young, so to speak, when they It says a lot there in regards
• 40:58
  to, I guess you'd say the desire, you know, and there's that passion to race,
• 41:02
  you know, and getting back to, I would say down to the roots, but, you know,
• 41:05
  just getting back to it and going for it.
• 41:11
  Car factory.
• 41:12
  As we note the birth of Ferrari 1947, what did the rest of the field look like?
• 41:18
  You know, we talked about Bentley pre war.
• 41:20
  We obviously talked about Alfa Romeo, a couple of BMWs in there, a Mercedes.
• 41:25
  What does the 1947, 48, 49 entry list for the Mille Miglia look like?
• 41:32
  Who's allowed to race?
• 41:33
  Anybody, as I read somewhere, Eddie, Tom, Dick, or Luigi is allowed to enter.
• 41:38
  You talked earlier about the classing system where it was sort of like 300
• 41:46
  horsepower and above with your forced induction or These regular pedestrian
• 41:50
  cars, you know, the Cinquecentos and all those things of the world
• 41:53
  that existed back then, did that dichotomy still exist or was there
• 41:57
  a proper classing system in 47?
• 41:59
  Had they figured it out in the 10 years that had gone by, or
• 42:02
  were they still running sort of fast and loose and developing the
• 42:06
  race as they were going along?
• 42:08
  The bulk of the entry is always small capacity Fiat, Fiat 11.
• 42:13
  Many of those were sedans.
• 42:16
  Then you had guys like Zagato and Abarth, who made a career for themselves, putting
• 42:22
  these beautiful aerodynamic bodies on Fiat 1100s, because if you think of it You
• 42:28
  know, those Adriatic Straits, I've read, I don't know if this was true, that Jaguar
• 42:33
  needed a higher back axle ratio for the Mille Miglia than they used at Le Mans.
• 42:39
  Le Mans has got a three mile straight, and it was for those Adriatic Straits.
• 42:43
  So if you could imagine how wrung out Fiat 1100 would have been
• 42:48
  on those kind of straights, any extra little bit of horsepower,
• 42:52
  any improved aero you can find.
• 42:54
  So, you know, we, we look at.
• 42:56
  The second generation Prius and we see that little indent on the roof.
• 43:00
  Well, that bubble was a Zagato, you know, styling trade, but it's
• 43:05
  literally about making the frontal area that little bit less so it can cut
• 43:10
  through the air a little bit faster.
• 43:11
  And the crucible that these guys were testing themselves
• 43:15
  in was the Mille Miglia.
• 43:16
  That was the Indianapolis 500 of, uh, you know, events.
• 43:21
  So most of the entry list is standard.
• 43:24
  Little Fiat's a lot of the entry list is these hot rodded little Fiat's
• 43:29
  then you also have larger Touring cars so four door Alfa Romeo this kind
• 43:35
  of thing you see a lot of that stuff being entered any French entrance
• 43:40
  some But no, not very many, because remember in, in the post war period,
• 43:45
  there's no motor racing in 45 or 46.
• 43:48
  And then in 47, there's, you know, the first British event was in Jersey in 1947.
• 43:54
  And there is this sense of some recovery in 1947.
• 43:57
  But really, the French weren't in a position to do much.
• 44:02
  Much motor racing at that time in my, uh, in my experience.
• 44:05
  So 1948, there's a plethora of Fiat's and then the Ferraris begin their dominance.
• 44:12
  And I know dominance in motorsport.
• 44:14
  We don't think about that back then.
• 44:17
  Like we do today when you talk about, you know, Schumacher and Hamilton,
• 44:22
  and now they're stopping and things like that in the formula one.
• 44:25
  And some of the other disciplines, but Ferrari was becoming dominant and they
• 44:28
  set dominance for almost a decade in that period, the year after they officially
• 44:34
  opened their doors as a company.
• 44:36
  So educate the audience on the significance of 48 up through 57
• 44:41
  and where that takes the rest of the conversation about the Mille Miglia.
• 44:44
  For 47, you know, with that entry.
• 44:47
  The car that they raced at actually had won their prior
• 44:51
  race in the Grand Prix Rome.
• 44:52
  So I mean he already was going in as a race winning car
• 44:57
  constructor, I guess you could say.
• 44:58
  Was that a 1 6 6 that first year, Willie?
• 45:01
  No, the uh, 1, 2, 5 in 47.
• 45:04
  It has that, you know, we are looking front end.
• 45:07
  You wanna see that Grill's almost like an olive Aston Martin DB two three.
• 45:11
  You know that weird look to it.
• 45:13
  But that, you know, that's the one thing right out of the gate.
• 45:15
  First race, retire.
• 45:17
  Second race, they win.
• 45:18
  And so then they go to the Mille Emilia and it retires in that race.
• 45:21
  But, you know, he came out of the gate pretty hot, I guess you
• 45:24
  could say, in regards to winning.
• 45:26
  The Grand Prix of Rome obviously wasn't the Mille Emilia, and obviously
• 45:29
  length, endurance of what that road is.
• 45:32
  So, you know, you have a lot of brutality.
• 45:34
  In regards to what a car has to take, potholes, everything like that.
• 45:37
  Just, you know, it's getting beat the hell by the road itself.
• 45:41
  It's pretty impressive what they come up with.
• 45:43
  And obviously we get into 48, that's when they really, you know, make that leap in
• 45:48
  regards to You know, having several cars in it say dominating, you know, there's
• 45:52
  that line that I've used in some of my other presentations that Ferrari uses
• 45:57
  in a documentary that, you know, when he was working in the first world war,
• 46:01
  he was worked in the Packard factory and he fell in love with the V 12 engine.
• 46:06
  These Packard aero engine.
• 46:08
  I fell in love with the V 12 and I have never got divorced.
• 46:11
  That was the quote.
• 46:13
  Yeah, yeah.
• 46:13
  Anyone listening, you know, if they read, obviously, you know, you have a couple of
• 46:17
  big novels in regards to Enzo's history.
• 46:20
  But the one thing you know and understand about Enzo Ferrari is he knew how
• 46:25
  to work, I guess you would say, the story, narrate to make it in his favor.
• 46:30
  I always look at it when you hear a lot of these stories, you know, kind
• 46:33
  of going back, we just talked before in regards to how about Lamborghini with
• 46:36
  the tractor or the clutch, what have you know, you know, you're going to
• 46:39
  hear all these little nuanced stories.
• 46:41
  There's always little tweaks to it.
• 46:42
  And My understanding was that he went with the 12 cylinder because of the Packard.
• 46:47
  But when he was able to build everything himself, it's one thing, okay, you
• 46:52
  build a frame, it's just tubing.
• 46:53
  Back then, those frames were pretty straightforward.
• 46:55
  Two tubes, some cross members, what have you, start building it up, you know, and
• 46:58
  beating the metal, you know, using the English wheel and using hammers, dollies
• 47:02
  and wooden bucks and everything like that.
• 47:04
  Casting your own blocks.
• 47:05
  I mean, you're talking molten metal in regards to building this stuff
• 47:09
  and sand casting, all this stuff.
• 47:11
  It's incredible.
• 47:13
  The infrastructure get put into place to build those cars.
• 47:16
  So you're basically building everything yourself from scratch.
• 47:19
  It wasn't like you were, Hey, I'm gonna order this from over here.
• 47:21
  I'm going to order this from this manufacturer or whatnot.
• 47:24
  I mean, a majority of the, they've made a manufacturer themselves,
• 47:28
  but the electronics, I think if memory serves, they were using Lucas
• 47:31
  electronics and stuff from the UK.
• 47:33
  There's certain things that are bringing in, but your major components, you know,
• 47:36
  they were manufacturing themselves, but getting on the 12 cylinder, my
• 47:39
  understanding is because just, he loved that Packard and just the sound of it and
• 47:44
  the power, the delivery and how smooth it was, and it was about how effortlessly
• 47:49
  it ran and with the Vanderbilt cup, that kind of played a little bit of
• 47:53
  role into how well Packard did and that kind of stuff back then as well, played
• 47:56
  a big role in it, which is kind of surprising because you wouldn't think.
• 48:00
  An American car is going to have influence on this Italian
• 48:04
  automaker, but it played a big role.
• 48:06
  To me, it all makes sense when you look back over what was available at the time.
• 48:10
  So who's he going to turn to with the biggest, baddest engine on the block?
• 48:13
  The Packard Twin 6.
• 48:15
  Yeah, you look at the displacement of the difference between the two.
• 48:19
  Those 12s, V12s in the beginning, you know, they weren't
• 48:21
  very big displacement wise.
• 48:23
  In your mind, you think V12, you're thinking this big monstrous engine,
• 48:27
  everything's like, Oh, it's 12 cylinders.
• 48:29
  That's like a two liter 12 cylinder, but that's when you're borrowing
• 48:33
  jugs from a Fiat and you're trying to put it all together.
• 48:36
  Right?
• 48:37
  You know, I thought there was a rational reason for the V12 around the
• 48:40
  fact that they can usually rev high.
• 48:42
  And even the Packard Boater, the reason they call it twin six is
• 48:45
  it's two straight sixes together.
• 48:47
  It's not a actual casted V.
• 48:50
  So even then it's sort of, we're working towards what the V12 becomes,
• 48:56
  you know, the classic V12s from Ferrari and Jaguar and so down the line.
• 48:59
  So, you know, it's a little nuanced thing.
• 49:01
  And, and I refer to the Packards as a twin six for that specific
• 49:05
  reason, because it is two straight sixes together on one crank.
• 49:08
  All right, so here we are, we're jumping back into the beginning
• 49:12
  of the Dolce Vita period.
• 49:14
  We're talking about the reconstruction of Italy, the renaissance of the Mila Milia.
• 49:19
  So we're fast forwarding 1947 into 48, 49, 50 and so on down the line.
• 49:23
  So do we want to talk about.
• 49:25
  Some of the notable cars from this period, specifically the Ferraris.
• 49:29
  William, where do we want to take the conversation now that we're in this
• 49:32
  sweet spot of the meal Amelia's rebirth?
• 49:34
  I guess you'd say being sports tours and what have you is a majority of
• 49:39
  these cars were all closed coops.
• 49:40
  You might've had the rare one here and there.
• 49:42
  It's not till you start getting more subsequent years till he's made.
• 49:45
  No, it needs to be an open top.
• 49:46
  Barketta.
• 49:47
  A lot of it kind of, and you go back, and I'm sure John can, you know, hit on these
• 49:51
  points, is some of the drivers preferred the coupe to the Barchetta just because
• 49:56
  sound, noise, comfort, what have you.
• 49:58
  And not to mention, a majority of these guys were driving
• 50:01
  wearing double breasted suits.
• 50:02
  So they don't want to get their clothes dirty.
• 50:04
  So it's not so much in the, some of the early years, or I'd say, you
• 50:08
  know, of the Ferrari cars, but as you get into subsequent years, you
• 50:13
  could have three, four different models makes a Ferraris in the race.
• 50:18
  Now they obviously had different size classes and what have you, you know,
• 50:22
  so you compete, I think it was a 2000 CC was like something like that.
• 50:26
  So there's obviously those little subsequent subclasses, you know,
• 50:30
  you can race the one as well, but.
• 50:32
  You know, you always had a mixture of cars in there.
• 50:35
  The one, obviously, the one was the 166S.
• 50:38
  The chassis, 0 0 3 S, the one with, I always, I'm terrible at pronouncing
• 50:44
  this, Biondetti and the Volt.
• 50:45
  Is it, uh, John, how do you pronounce his last name?
• 50:47
  He asked the non Italian how to pronounce an Italian name.
• 50:50
  Can you believe this?
• 50:52
  We can't get this far through without mentioning Clemente Biondetti, can we?
• 50:56
  Because the bloke won four times, which is twice as much as anybody else won.
• 51:01
  He raced within a few months of dying of cancer as well.
• 51:04
  I mean, the bloke was from Sardinia and my understanding is, is that the
• 51:09
  others were kind of snobbish with him.
• 51:11
  He's a southerner.
• 51:12
  Come on now.
• 51:13
  I think it was a social class thing.
• 51:15
  Yeah.
• 51:15
  And, uh, there was even a thing between like the Piedmontese and
• 51:20
  the guys from, from the East.
• 51:21
  And I think, you know, the peasant from the Agricultural Island.
• 51:25
  I think that bloke really well, the other gentleman that William was
• 51:29
  referring to is Giuseppe Navone.
• 51:31
  Thank you.
• 51:32
  My Italian is not good.
• 51:35
  John mentioned all about, you know, going in the car, you can go in and
• 51:38
  start getting an adapt a lot of these, but you know, in 48, you know, there
• 51:42
  was obviously with the winning car, it's impressive for what they were able to do.
• 51:46
  Cause these cars took a beating in regards to what that race was.
• 51:50
  94 miles an hour.
• 51:54
  So you're not talking anything crazy fast.
• 51:56
  I mean, you're talking drum breaks.
• 51:58
  You're not talking to something that's going to be stopping a
• 51:59
  dime or everything like that.
• 52:00
  And you know, and you know, you had a lot of long straights and whatnot, but
• 52:04
  you had a lot of mountainous portion of this where you're on the, you know, using
• 52:07
  your brakes quite a bit, how John had mentioned about how new Volaris driving
• 52:11
  style regards to throwing the car around.
• 52:13
  I think, you know, a lot of these guys, you know, they started looking at,
• 52:17
  okay, how do I save this or whatnot?
• 52:20
  Because the car had to make it.
• 52:21
  You know, as that as is, you know, to finish first, first, you got to finish.
• 52:25
  These cars are fragile.
• 52:26
  Ferrari's biggest Achilles heel throughout all the subsequent
• 52:30
  years was the transmissions.
• 52:33
  And the rear end and the axon that just because banging on the ground and just,
• 52:37
  you know, it took out Pierrot to roofie, you know, five times, I think it was
• 52:41
  something like that, that he retired.
• 52:43
  Either.
• 52:43
  He's always the same thing.
• 52:45
  His rear end is very actual.
• 52:46
  I roofies like the Lloyd Ruby of the guy who was always well placed and then fell
• 52:53
  out in the most absurd unlucky kind of, yeah, up front or leading or whatnot.
• 52:58
  And that happens.
• 52:59
  And that's a common occurrence.
• 53:00
  You know, these cars were fragile.
• 53:02
  And the other aspect is, it's not so much again, as we talk going from
• 53:06
  like about here from 47 to 53, you're not talking major leaps and bounds in
• 53:12
  regards to torque, horsepower, speed, but again, just very fragile cars.
• 53:18
  You know, these things were all hand built and you're not talking
• 53:20
  precision getting out your micrometers and all this stuff and regarding
• 53:24
  your tolerances and gaps in that.
• 53:25
  You know, these guys are drinking at noon for lunch and having wine and everything
• 53:30
  like that, you know, and smoking.
• 53:31
  It was just, I was not saying attention to detail wasn't there.
• 53:34
  You're not talking about obviously what it is today.
• 53:36
  It's just nowhere near it.
• 53:37
  You have one car built and it's not like you're building five a day.
• 53:40
  It goes, Hey, you got one car.
• 53:42
  A week, potentially.
• 53:43
  It's a very slow process, but these cars are very, very fragile.
• 53:46
  So do we know how many of these 47, 48, 49 early, early Ferrari race cars that were
• 53:53
  in the Mille Miglia still exist today?
• 53:55
  Not a lot.
• 53:56
  I mean, as you get into the, you know, later years, when you start getting
• 54:00
  into 54, 5, 6 going on, there's more of those around that participated
• 54:06
  because there was numerous ones.
• 54:08
  Cause you start getting towards the end of it.
• 54:10
  No, you have 20 plus four hours in the race.
• 54:12
  So you're going to have quite a few that are roaming around.
• 54:16
  They can say they've got million million history.
• 54:18
  Now, obviously you're only going to have that one that has a winning
• 54:20
  history and your winning car.
• 54:22
  There's not that many in regards to production numbers, but no, you're
• 54:26
  going to have subsequent ones that line, but he was not building.
• 54:29
  Hundreds and hundreds of cars.
• 54:30
  You had 20 of this, 10 of that, five of this, you know?
• 54:33
  So when you sit and think, Oh, it's still running around now.
• 54:35
  I mean, all those cars were basically race cars.
• 54:37
  Yeah.
• 54:38
  I mean, couple of, Hey, you'll drive down the street now, but these were meant
• 54:41
  to last that wasn't their intent when they got built, it was, Hey, I'm going
• 54:46
  to race this car for a couple of years, you know, and then it's just basically.
• 54:50
  Say junk, but basically that's kind of what it was.
• 54:52
  And you look back at these old ads, you know, especially like people always
• 54:55
  pull up like for, I'm two 50 GTOs.
• 54:56
  Oh, he can buy this thing for, you know, it was 500 back in
• 55:00
  the early seventies, right?
• 55:01
  It's like, Oh my God, you know, now it's 50, million.
• 55:05
  I get, they were just old beat up race cars.
• 55:07
  He had a few that were scrapped, you know, very common back then, you'll
• 55:11
  motor blew up, get rid of it, pitch it, you know, put a different motor in it.
• 55:14
  A lot of these cars that came over to the U.
• 55:16
  S., you know, they dumped in, you know, a Chevy or a Ford motor.
• 55:19
  It's kind of tough to really trace some of these.
• 55:22
  I would say there's not an abundance, but yeah, there's, you know, there's
• 55:25
  a decent amount running around.
• 55:26
  And what's interesting about this and John, you might remember, there's a
• 55:30
  presentation from year before last from Trevor Lister and Don Capps from the
• 55:35
  society of automotive historians, where they actually talk about the provenance
• 55:38
  of a lot of these cars, especially the Maseratis you're hitting the nail right
• 55:42
  on the head, William, where they talk about, well, the engine blew up, so we
• 55:46
  took it out and we put in a different one.
• 55:48
  And then we called it the model one 67.
• 55:50
  Instead of the one 66 and it's the same chassis number, but
• 55:53
  the engine code doesn't match.
• 55:54
  And so there's all this sort of who cares because it was racing.
• 55:58
  And, you know, you listen to the presentation and how they dissect it all
• 56:01
  down and try to figure out the lineage of some of these cars and what is the
• 56:05
  provenance of these early race cars.
• 56:07
  And basically at the end of it, you realize it's an extremely difficult,
• 56:11
  challenging task to nail down where some of them ended up or suddenly
• 56:16
  there's a new model of Ferrari.
• 56:17
  Well, it's really the old car with a different motor.
• 56:20
  This has been changed and they scratched out the bin number
• 56:23
  and put a new one on, right?
• 56:23
  So if you're interested in diving deep off the diving board onto that side of
• 56:27
  the pool, we're going to reissue that episode later, but it's really interesting
• 56:31
  that you bring that up because it is.
• 56:33
  systemic, especially in Italy, all the manufacturers as a result of these races,
• 56:38
  trying to evolve and perfect their cars.
• 56:40
  At its root, what my understanding of what Trevor List is saying is that
• 56:45
  Italian cars are often like motorcycles.
• 56:47
  So a motorcycle has a frame identity and it also has an engine number
• 56:51
  and typically it's the engine number which we know the motorcycle.
• 56:55
  Trevor's contention is, is that in most countries around the world, we
• 56:59
  know a car by its chassis number.
• 57:01
  However, the Italians and Ferrari and Maserati and so on, they would
• 57:06
  identify a car by its engine.
• 57:08
  So let's say I buy car number one with engine number one.
• 57:11
  I go out, I race it, I blow up the motor.
• 57:13
  I send my car back to the factory and I say, Ferrari, give me
• 57:16
  your latest greatest engine.
• 57:17
  Ferrari says, okay, he takes the engine number one out.
• 57:20
  He puts engine number two in.
• 57:22
  I drive the car away.
• 57:24
  According to Ferrari, I'm driving engine number two.
• 57:27
  But according to the British government, I'm driving engine number one.
• 57:31
  I might be really happy with that confusion.
• 57:34
  If this was car number two, because it's got engine number two, I would have to
• 57:37
  pay a whole new load more purchase tax.
• 57:40
  Whereas if I just say that this is just a part, even if maybe I balled
• 57:45
  the car up completely, and you know, the only part left is my St.
• 57:48
  Christopher on the dashboard, it might suit me for tax reasons.
• 57:52
  To say that actually I, this is a different part of the same car.
• 57:56
  So there's not so what Trevor list has tried to do is partly unpick that,
• 58:01
  but mostly he thinks that a lot of the confusion can be unpicked if you follow
• 58:05
  engine numbers, rather than chassis numbers for the 48 winning car scrapped.
• 58:10
  They took the motor out of it, but the car, it got, you know, they
• 58:12
  raced a couple of times, but that car got scrapped and they put the
• 58:14
  motor into something else, whatnot.
• 58:16
  And it's actually kind of jumping back to the 125S from 47.
• 58:21
  It went to all the different races and whatnot, but in 06, or well, early 2000s,
• 58:26
  I forget the gentleman's name, you know, but they tried to, I guess you would
• 58:30
  say they recreated it, so to speak.
• 58:32
  But then there was also this argument that they were trying to say, no,
• 58:35
  it's that one, but showed it at Pebble Beach, but he didn't enter it.
• 58:38
  And it was a, I guess, a big sigh of relief from all the judges and
• 58:42
  everybody else in the concourse because there was going to be a huge
• 58:45
  uproar in regards to legitimacy and history and everything in this car and
• 58:49
  trying to actually prove what it was.
• 58:51
  Ferrari was good, you know, documentation and there's so many historians out
• 58:55
  there, you know, so many people that follow Ferrari and kind of
• 58:57
  go back and everything like that.
• 58:58
  As you get more into, you know, the fifties, especially, and on mid fifties
• 59:03
  and on, it's pretty, I want to say easy.
• 59:05
  You can go through and find history and whatnot series of cars are, but
• 59:09
  your late forties and early fifties, it sometimes can be a little difficult
• 59:12
  just because of what these cars went through and what they did with it.
• 59:14
  The reason why it's so complicated and difficult.
• 59:17
  is there are many, many generations of auctioneers and classic car brokers
• 59:22
  who've spent a career out of saying, my Maserati 250 F is worth 5 million because
• 59:28
  it was driven by Sterling Moss, whereas yours is only worth three because he
• 59:32
  wasn't well, if suddenly mine might've been driven by Sterling Moss or yours
• 59:36
  might've been, or actually who the bloody hell knows who was driven by what.
• 59:40
  Which is kind of what Trevor Lister says, introducing that level of
• 59:44
  confusion doesn't help anybody.
• 59:46
  And I'm reminded of a student who's worked for Stanford University.
• 59:50
  And for a while, REVS had a program running at Stanford
• 59:54
  that I was, was part of.
• 59:55
  And I remember a student coming and looking for funding for a startup that he
• 59:59
  was going to do, that was going to test.
• 1:00:01
  paint depth and integrity, but he was a chemical major to a much higher
• 1:00:05
  standard that is currently done.
• 1:00:07
  And it took a couple of the old car guys to come to him and say, look,
• 1:00:10
  there's no upside to any of this.
• 1:00:12
  I don't need to know that my car has been repainted if I think it's original.
• 1:00:16
  And if you're buying the car off me.
• 1:00:18
  Just believe that it's original.
• 1:00:19
  I think that it's original.
• 1:00:20
  You think it's original.
• 1:00:21
  Let's all believe that it's original.
• 1:00:23
  Believe the emperor has new clothes.
• 1:00:25
  Let's not just cast into doubt whether or not he may or may not
• 1:00:29
  be wearing any clothes because then everybody's going to lose.
• 1:00:32
  There's no upside to finding out that the cars had a new fender painted on it.
• 1:00:37
  That was the point that was, was made.
• 1:00:42
  is out there.
• 1:00:46
  William, to your point about cars falling apart, I mentioned
• 1:00:50
  my involvement with Stanford.
• 1:00:52
  I did some work with a chap whose official title is the Omar and Anthea
• 1:00:58
  Hoskins Professor of Classical History.
• 1:01:01
  This is a dude who made a career out of looking at shards of Greek
• 1:01:04
  pottery and comparing them with other.
• 1:01:07
  Shards of Greek pottery coming up with a whole fresh way of understanding
• 1:01:12
  the way life developed on the Greek Peloponnesian peninsula.
• 1:01:17
  So it sounds boring, but it has this kind of really, like, profound point
• 1:01:21
  that we understand a lot more about ancient Greece than we did before.
• 1:01:24
  Now, he loves The story of the, the Milli Milia in 1948 with
• 1:01:28
  Naval, with the Ferrari's given.
• 1:01:31
  Ferrari has four entries.
• 1:01:33
  He sold one car to an Italian prince, but Naval comes to him and says,
• 1:01:38
  look, Ferrari, I can't dine my bed.
• 1:01:40
  Give me a car to race.
• 1:01:41
  So Ferrari's like, alright, I'll give you this car that I sold to this Russian.
• 1:01:46
  Noble, but I'll give you that car and you can race in it.
• 1:01:49
  And the story is that the car falls apart under Nuvolari.
• 1:01:53
  The bonnet comes off and Nuvolari says, No problem.
• 1:01:56
  It's lighter now.
• 1:01:57
  We'll race better.
• 1:01:58
  The seat comes adrift.
• 1:01:59
  And this is the part that Michael Shanks, my academic colleague, likes.
• 1:02:03
  So, so Nuvolari now.
• 1:02:04
  races on on a bag of oranges and lemon and we now have to think about this Sophia
• 1:02:09
  Loren and you know the personification of Italy here so eventually the car
• 1:02:14
  expires at the side of the road and Nuvolari is like at the side of the
• 1:02:18
  road and a priest finds him and says can I help you great Tazio and Nuvolari
• 1:02:24
  says yes and sleeps in his bed.
• 1:02:26
  The priest gives him his bed to sleep in and Nuvolari, exhausted, sleeps in the bed
• 1:02:31
  and Ferrari weeps because he's not able to build a car which is strong enough for
• 1:02:37
  the passion that Nuvolari can bring to it.
• 1:02:39
  Obviously, me and Daddy winning the race, you know, you would think I say
• 1:02:43
  accolades and whatnot but everyone was so focused on Nuvolari and he was
• 1:02:47
  kind of getting all the attention.
• 1:02:49
  And I know Nouvelire is kind of like trying to push it back, but
• 1:02:52
  everyone was so focused on Nouvelire because he didn't win and everything
• 1:02:55
  that happened and stuff like that.
• 1:02:56
  So Biandetti's win kind of was, I want to say understated, but you
• 1:03:00
  know, everyone was kind of more focused on Nouvelire than they were
• 1:03:02
  on the actual winner of the race day.
• 1:03:04
  Yeah.
• 1:03:04
  And Biandetti has this quote, doesn't he, that in the melee melee, you have
• 1:03:08
  to have the courage to drive slowly.
• 1:03:10
  You get the impression that contemporaries were.
• 1:03:14
  Cynical about him because, you know, he was always the guy who you couldn't drive
• 1:03:18
  steadily and still win the Mille Miglia, but he certainly didn't like, put it
• 1:03:22
  out there in the way the Novolari did.
• 1:03:25
  The previous year, he'd raced the Stusitalia, been leading and it had
• 1:03:28
  got wet right towards the end and he'd like, had to change a spark plug.
• 1:03:32
  And the story I read in the Lurani biography is.
• 1:03:35
  Back at home in, in Manchuria, he says to his old mechanic who'd
• 1:03:38
  refused to come with him, if you'd come with me, we'd have won.
• 1:03:43
  We'd have changed the spot because it took me five minutes to change the spot.
• 1:03:46
  Like if you'd have come, we'd have done it in less time and we'd have won the race.
• 1:03:50
  So that's 48.
• 1:03:51
  Biondetti wins at an average speed of 75 miles an hour.
• 1:03:55
  Biondetti again, 48.
• 1:03:58
  75.
• 1:03:58
  And 49, 82 on dirty winning three years in a row.
• 1:04:02
  Look at the times to is that's kind of a big leap because 48 at roughly a
• 1:04:07
  little over 75 miles an hour airspeed, 15 hours, five minutes, 44 seconds.
• 1:04:12
  But then in 49, not that different of a car, but it was, it was a
• 1:04:16
  barketta, everything like that.
• 1:04:18
  You know, it changed up quite a bit, but it drops by three hours.
• 1:04:21
  It's huge.
• 1:04:22
  That's a lot.
• 1:04:23
  Yeah.
• 1:04:23
  I wonder if the weather was better.
• 1:04:24
  I wonder if it was a weather thing that plays into it.
• 1:04:27
  And you know, rain, it was very prominent.
• 1:04:29
  In that race, you're in, you're out.
• 1:04:32
  Obviously, as you get into the subsequent years when the cars start
• 1:04:34
  getting bigger and faster, 48, you know, there was a weather issue.
• 1:04:38
  And you gotta remember the tires that they were using back then.
• 1:04:41
  You're not talking specialized rain tires or anything like that.
• 1:04:43
  I mean, they were terrible tires.
• 1:04:46
  But that's a big leap, and obviously it would have been completely dry or whatnot.
• 1:04:49
  You know, you go from 48 to 49, but again, the two gentlemen,
• 1:04:52
  they, they win it again.
• 1:04:53
  And that just goes to tell you, he knew how to win that race.
• 1:04:57
  I would say he was a specialized guy for it, but two years in a
• 1:05:00
  row, winning for a Ferrari, it says a lot for Biendetti and Devoni.
• 1:05:04
  The whole business of whether you raced with a Barchetta, Or
• 1:05:08
  whether you race with a closed car.
• 1:05:10
  The open car, of course, has got less air resistance.
• 1:05:13
  So fundamentally, it's going to be a faster car for the same
• 1:05:16
  amount of horsepower, less weight.
• 1:05:17
  The closed car, because it keeps the weather off, and you're just that much
• 1:05:22
  more civilized, the argument is the closed car can be So in 47, the Alfa
• 1:05:28
  that Biondetti wins with is closed.
• 1:05:31
  In 48, it was That was a coupe.
• 1:05:35
  It was another 166 in 49.
• 1:05:37
  Because when you go from that, from 166 S to a 16 MM with MM, obviously
• 1:05:42
  stand for Mille Miglia, because now, you know, he's on this run.
• 1:05:45
  They basically took the 166 S, shortened it just a bit.
• 1:05:48
  Obviously, they made it a Barchetta, you know, and a few other little tweaks here
• 1:05:52
  and there, you know, and created that car.
• 1:05:54
  Enzo's thought always was that you win this race in an open car.
• 1:05:58
  He thinks a race car is open.
• 1:06:00
  It's not a coupe.
• 1:06:01
  I don't know how much difference, but obviously I think going from
• 1:06:04
  that coupe to that barketta and for what they changed on it, really, I
• 1:06:07
  want to say drastic, a max speed only goes up by maybe 15 miles an hour.
• 1:06:11
  You know, so you're not talking some massive jump where you're talking
• 1:06:15
  like 50 miles an hour faster.
• 1:06:16
  I think that's significant though, isn't it?
• 1:06:18
  Over the 10, 11 hours the race would take.
• 1:06:20
  Something that could do 135 versus something that can do 120.
• 1:06:24
  Yeah.
• 1:06:25
  When you step away from 1949 1950 and you jump from the 166MM to the
• 1:06:31
  195S, you're kind of going back to that squarish, garish, boxy look.
• 1:06:37
  That was the early Ferraris, like the 125 and things like that.
• 1:06:41
  So I'm seeing this design language flip flop happening
• 1:06:44
  here as he's finding his way.
• 1:06:46
  Probably whoever was going to do the cheapest bodywork.
• 1:06:49
  There was a sale on square grills that week.
• 1:06:52
  No, but if you think about that, if I'm one of those little
• 1:06:55
  Carrozzeria, and they were little, they were half a dozen guys at most.
• 1:07:00
  If a car with my body wins just its class in the millimetre, let alone
• 1:07:04
  winning the whole event, that's terrific advertising for somebody to come to
• 1:07:08
  my girl's rear for their nice Alfa Romeo or touring Fiat or whatever.
• 1:07:13
  So I feel like Ferrari wasn't exaggerating when he said that the body
• 1:07:17
  is like a dress on a beautiful woman.
• 1:07:19
  This is what it was, right?
• 1:07:21
  It was, and you know, we know that he just concentrated on the engine.
• 1:07:24
  And was never that interested in, you know, making the brakes better or making
• 1:07:27
  the chassis better or anything like that.
• 1:07:29
  He just focused on making the engine better.
• 1:07:31
  And then you've got these coach builders who are competing with each other.
• 1:07:35
  These yes, aerodynamic bodies on, but also good looking bodies because
• 1:07:39
  they want their car to be on the.
• 1:07:40
  photograph of tomorrow's Sunday sports newspaper as the Mille Miglia winner.
• 1:07:45
  Well, you mentioned 1950.
• 1:07:47
  So here we are, right.
• 1:07:48
  And I was already alluding to that with the change in design from the
• 1:07:51
  one six, six to the one nine five S.
• 1:07:53
  So what's significant about the 1950 Mille Miglia?
• 1:07:57
  Well, it's the first time the Marzotto brothers make a real impact on the event.
• 1:08:01
  So this is a family of textile magnets, and there's four brothers, all of whom
• 1:08:06
  are super enthusiastic buyers and racers.
• 1:08:09
  And Giannino wins twice.
• 1:08:12
  And as William alluded to earlier, because the family were
• 1:08:15
  textile magnets, he would race.
• 1:08:17
  wearing a double breasted shirt and tie, even in an open car.
• 1:08:20
  You know, you're advertising your, your wares.
• 1:08:23
  There's an expression that Noblesse obliged this notion that the wealthy
• 1:08:28
  and the, the nobleman should share what he has with the peasantry somewhat.
• 1:08:34
  So in other words, I can afford these fine clothes and this Ferrari.
• 1:08:38
  I'm not going to hide them under a bushel.
• 1:08:40
  In my, I'm not going to live in a compound.
• 1:08:43
  I'm not going to buy a Hawaiian Island.
• 1:08:45
  No, I'm going to race the Mille Miglia wearing these fine clothes
• 1:08:49
  and driving this fine Ferrari.
• 1:08:51
  Yeah.
• 1:08:52
  All right.
• 1:08:52
  So for me, there's, there's that element going on, right?
• 1:08:55
  The Marzotto brothers feel to me less like.
• 1:08:58
  Uh, motor races and more like, I won't say playboys because that implies that
• 1:09:03
  they were womanizing, and I don't know that they were, and it implies that they
• 1:09:06
  weren't doing it seriously, and they were doing it seriously, but, you know, the
• 1:09:11
  Marzotto brothers were never gonna come to Dundrod and race in the rain of Northern
• 1:09:17
  Ireland, you know, Nuvolari wanted to do that, they weren't in that kind of realm.
• 1:09:22
  And I think the big story that year is this absurdness where Marzotto struggles,
• 1:09:29
  where Giannino struggles to get a car and then gets a car and wins the race.
• 1:09:34
  And then after the race, Ferrari says to him, Oh, by the way, I changed the motor.
• 1:09:38
  So you owe me half the prize money because he fitted this bigger
• 1:09:42
  motor without Marzotto knowing.
• 1:09:45
  And this is another one of these Ferrari stories where one
• 1:09:47
  wonders how true it really is.
• 1:09:49
  That's what I need to about that car.
• 1:09:51
  You go for 1.
• 1:09:52
  6 mm and you go up just 195s.
• 1:09:54
  Obviously that 195s that he won with.
• 1:09:57
  Cherokee 0026M.
• 1:09:59
  When you look it up history wise, it actually referred to as 166
• 1:10:03
  because that's what he bought.
• 1:10:05
  And as John mentioned, unbeknownst to him at the factory, they
• 1:10:10
  dumped in that bigger motor.
• 1:10:12
  He didn't know it.
• 1:10:13
  And obviously more power, everything like that.
• 1:10:14
  So it's called the 1 9 5 s 'cause of the motor and kind of going back
• 1:10:17
  to think, hey, it's designated, hey, it's by what the engine is.
• 1:10:20
  Not so much the chassis, but that chassis was a 1, 6 6 that he had
• 1:10:24
  bought for that and then they just dumped in this bigger motor.
• 1:10:27
  So it's back and forth in regards to what was saying, but bumping it up.
• 1:10:30
  Now you had 160 horsepower, got a top speed of just a
• 1:10:33
  hair under 137 miles an hour.
• 1:10:35
  So I mean, you're creeping up there in regards to power.
• 1:10:40
  You're still thinking that doesn't sound like a lot, but again, you're still
• 1:10:42
  talking about a car that's pretty basic in regards to stopping and everything
• 1:10:46
  like that, it gets going, but I always found that interesting in regards to
• 1:10:48
  how that car is looked at and viewed up until 1950, you mentioned it earlier.
• 1:10:53
  William, there were a couple of Ferraris here, a couple of Ferraris there.
• 1:10:56
  They were only building a handful of cars.
• 1:10:57
  And in 1950, the number of Ferraris entered in the Miele, Miele jumps.
• 1:11:03
  About 5X compared to the previous year where you have 16
• 1:11:08
  Ferraris entered in the race.
• 1:11:10
  And that is pretty significant for a company in its third official
• 1:11:15
  year that is hand building cars.
• 1:11:17
  Earlier in our conversation, John was speaking about Rome and the Romans
• 1:11:22
  and the chariot races, but then also getting into like the Vanderbilt
• 1:11:25
  Cup and everything like that.
• 1:11:26
  You know, and you mentioned NASCAR, you know, always had adages.
• 1:11:28
  I would say that big adage is, you know, We'll win on Sunday, sell on Monday.
• 1:11:32
  That basically started way back when, when cars are doing it.
• 1:11:34
  Cause that was it.
• 1:11:35
  The car that was winning was the car that people wanted.
• 1:11:38
  Ferrari was winning.
• 1:11:39
  So these people that had the money, I want a Ferrari because that's what's winning.
• 1:11:43
  It started way back when, so it wasn't kind of started, you know, this
• 1:11:46
  NASCAR kind of marketing campaign.
• 1:11:48
  Went on Sunday, sell Monday.
• 1:11:49
  It was basically, it started from the dawn of the car in essence, when they started
• 1:11:53
  racing because people wanted the car that wanted that's kind of how these races
• 1:11:57
  also kind of came about in the beginning.
• 1:11:59
  It was an endurance race to test these cars, these manufacturers
• 1:12:03
  and these manufacturers to prove I have the best, strongest, fastest
• 1:12:07
  car, and that's what people wanted.
• 1:12:10
  1950 into 51, we introduced the Ferrari 340 America.
• 1:12:16
  For me, this is when the horsepower figures and the top speed starts
• 1:12:20
  becoming interesting, and I think it's my own perception of what a fast
• 1:12:24
  car is, because I'm sure for my son, his generation, a car that can't do
• 1:12:28
  150 miles an hour is not that fast.
• 1:12:30
  But for me, If a car can do 150 miles an hour and has more than 250
• 1:12:35
  horsepower, it qualifies as a, as a fast car, especially when the tires
• 1:12:39
  are as narrow and the brakes are as bad and the drivers and the event is
• 1:12:44
  generally as lunatic as the Mille Miglia.
• 1:12:47
  I feel this is the stage now where it starts.
• 1:12:50
  It's to move into something where it's quite hard to believe
• 1:12:54
  that it was allowed to go ahead.
• 1:12:55
  50 to 51, you know, if you go from 160 horsepower to 220 top speed, it
• 1:13:01
  said, you know, just a hair under 137 in 1950 to just a bit under 150.
• 1:13:07
  in 51.
• 1:13:08
  That's a significant jump, especially on the horsepower scale in regards
• 1:13:12
  to what these engines are doing.
• 1:13:14
  I think that has to do with design and the engine and was it Lampretti that was
• 1:13:19
  coming into play, creating these motors?
• 1:13:21
  Yeah, when we, when I, when you or I might think about 120 or 150 miles
• 1:13:25
  an hour, we imagine, well, that's like, you know, on a track day or on
• 1:13:29
  a Notionally imaginative, you know, allegedly a quiet piece of freeway or
• 1:13:34
  autostrada, you might see those speeds.
• 1:13:36
  The important thing to understand about the Mille Miglia is this is taking
• 1:13:38
  place through town, across bridges.
• 1:13:41
  The V12, that's an important thing to talk about, isn't it?
• 1:13:44
  We talked about Ferrari and this agitator of men.
• 1:13:47
  Throughout the period, two V12 engines produced in Multiple different capacities
• 1:13:52
  when he's friends with Columbo, the Columbo engine gets developed.
• 1:13:56
  When he falls out with Columbo, he hires Lampready.
• 1:13:59
  Lampready designs his own engine and this engine grows in capacity.
• 1:14:02
  And then when he falls out with Lampready, he rehires Columbo and
• 1:14:06
  develops the Columbo engine again.
• 1:14:08
  I'm told.
• 1:14:09
  By Alain Decadene.
• 1:14:11
  Let's name drop there.
• 1:14:12
  I did an event years ago called the Mille Miglia North America with him.
• 1:14:16
  We had Buono 250 that was chassis number 0625.
• 1:14:20
  I know that car's still out there.
• 1:14:22
  It was not in great condition when Decadene and I drove it and he was
• 1:14:26
  looking under the hood of that car that he said to me it's a Columbo.
• 1:14:29
  You can tell by the spark plug position.
• 1:14:31
  One has the plugs high, the other has the plugs low.
• 1:14:35
  Um, I yeah, but but yes, absolutely.
• 1:14:38
  We've got that.
• 1:14:39
  And it seems to me the increased horsepower came simply from being
• 1:14:42
  able to do bigger displacement.
• 1:14:44
  And I feel like there must have been things like we were
• 1:14:48
  getting better grade fuel.
• 1:14:50
  So you could do higher.
• 1:14:52
  Compression ratios, because my understanding was, even if you could
• 1:14:55
  make the machine tools to do like high compression, the fuel was so
• 1:14:59
  bad that you couldn't really do it.
• 1:15:00
  You know, there was no point in trying to do high compression.
• 1:15:02
  Everything, everything was like an American car in the 1970s, rather than
• 1:15:07
  American cars in the late 60s, you know, it was always pretty low compression
• 1:15:11
  sub due to the poor grade of fuel.
• 1:15:13
  Didn't they bring in special race fuel?
• 1:15:15
  Did the organizers arrange that?
• 1:15:16
  I know like the post war, like the first couple, because of rationing and whatnot,
• 1:15:20
  you know, getting allotments had to really go to the government, but didn't
• 1:15:23
  they, because of the, you know, obviously compression and that stuff, didn't they
• 1:15:26
  have to get special, bring in good fuel?
• 1:15:30
  I read a story about somebody who missed the refueling rig.
• 1:15:34
  Like a Ferrari team member who'd missed the refueling stop, stopped
• 1:15:38
  for normal gas, like gassed up at a normal gas station.
• 1:15:42
  That normal fuel, the Ferrari couldn't run on that normal fuel.
• 1:15:46
  Yeah.
• 1:15:47
  What I am aware of is that you were allowed what the British
• 1:15:52
  teams would call jungle juice.
• 1:15:54
  In Formula 1 up until either 57 or 58.
• 1:15:59
  You know, the issue was, was that if I've mixed up special fuel, you have to
• 1:16:03
  go to the lengths of mixing up special fuel in order to be competitive with me.
• 1:16:08
  And then each of us are rushing around spending loads of time trying to get hold
• 1:16:12
  of all these special fuels because this is the easiest way for us to make horsepower.
• 1:16:16
  And none of this really has anything to do with motor racing.
• 1:16:19
  So that's why those special fuels were banned in Formula 1.
• 1:16:22
  I imagine.
• 1:16:23
  There were standard fueling in the immediate post war period.
• 1:16:28
  There were fewer shortages.
• 1:16:29
  So the fuel had to be especially allocated tires and fuel.
• 1:16:33
  The stories of people, Italians entering early milly milliers, getting
• 1:16:37
  their fuel and tires, and then just driving home because you only did
• 1:16:41
  it to get the free tires and fuel.
• 1:16:43
  As a side note, in case anyone listening is curious, actually the
• 1:16:47
  50 and 51 car are currently owned by the same person, and I probably, can
• 1:16:52
  I pronounce the last name is right?
• 1:16:54
  It's, it's Crowell, C R O U L.
• 1:16:56
  Jack and Kingsley, they own both those cars.
• 1:16:59
  Oh.
• 1:17:00
  Well, who knew?
• 1:17:00
  William did.
• 1:17:01
  Yeah, because now you're getting the car, you know, that raced and one participated
• 1:17:07
  and its current day still have its correct, you know, matching numbers,
• 1:17:12
  everything, engine, gearbox, everything.
• 1:17:15
  This is when you start getting to values of a car that kind of, I
• 1:17:19
  guess you get obscene because it plays a huge role in regards to.
• 1:17:23
  Race history and value of a car.
• 1:17:26
  And especially if you have a winning car, especially of a stature of
• 1:17:31
  the Mille Emilia Targa Florio Le Mans, that really takes the value
• 1:17:36
  of the car exponentially higher.
• 1:17:38
  Just because of the exposure and the profile of it.
• 1:17:42
  So how much does it add?
• 1:17:43
  I mean, you know, again, something's only worth what someone's willing to pay,
• 1:17:47
  but it really adds value to that car.
• 1:17:50
  If it has it on its CV in regards to winning a very
• 1:17:54
  high profile race like that.
• 1:17:55
  Value wise, you'd have to go back and kind of look, but you know, it's not like
• 1:17:59
  these things pop up every year or every auction, like say F forties and stuff
• 1:18:04
  like that, where you kind of can gauge the market based on that these pop up,
• 1:18:08
  you know, every maybe 5, 6, 7 years and markets change so much at a consistent
• 1:18:13
  basis, it's kind of hard to pinpoint what something's worth getting your experts
• 1:18:16
  out there and they can start putting a number on it or throw a number at it.
• 1:18:19
  You don't know until a, it goes through an auction and either
• 1:18:23
  it sells or it doesn't sell.
• 1:18:25
  It doesn't hit reserve.
• 1:18:26
  So you kind of see what the market's saying, or you kind of know
• 1:18:30
  through the grapevine that a, it was sold privately at this price.
• 1:18:35
  So that's when you start getting these values in regards to, you know, not
• 1:18:39
  hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• 1:18:40
  You're talking seven, eight, nine, 10, 20 million, you know, going up.
• 1:18:45
  I wouldn't say, you know, getting into these.
• 1:18:47
  With these one nine fives and that stuff, you know, you're
• 1:18:50
  not getting into 15 million.
• 1:18:52
  So, I mean, you're going to be in that five to 10 million range.
• 1:18:55
  I think it starts getting into, I would say use, especially this day
• 1:18:59
  and age and what you can do with these cars and going to events.
• 1:19:03
  You're starting to see a lot more.
• 1:19:04
  It's not just, Hey, they're just sitting on the lawn.
• 1:19:06
  Hey, they're driving them and participate in the middle of me or participate in the
• 1:19:09
  Colorado grand or the California mill.
• 1:19:11
  Getting out there and you like these cars and they're still
• 1:19:14
  very, I don't want to say archaic.
• 1:19:16
  But you know, the technology it's getting there, you'll want to drive these things
• 1:19:21
  and use them on a regular basis gets very, very touchy because something breaks.
• 1:19:27
  You can't just go and find a new NOS part on these things.
• 1:19:30
  You know, it depends on the owner as well.
• 1:19:32
  You know, you can have some guys, I don't care.
• 1:19:34
  They got so much money.
• 1:19:35
  They just, I'm going to go enjoy it, which is great because
• 1:19:37
  then more people get to see it.
• 1:19:39
  Where then you got other people, they own these cars, they stick them in
• 1:19:41
  their collection and no one ever gets to see them but them and their family.
• 1:19:44
  And people always ask, well, how is that worth this?
• 1:19:47
  John, me and you have had this conversation.
• 1:19:49
  You know, Eric, we've had this conversation on previous episodes and
• 1:19:53
  stuff like that about values and stuff.
• 1:19:55
  It's the story though, isn't it?
• 1:19:56
  If you're buying a Honda Accord, You know, in the used car trade in Britain, people
• 1:20:00
  will say, Oh, it's got no stories, mate.
• 1:20:02
  That means, you know, it definitely, you know, it hasn't been robbed and,
• 1:20:06
  you know, joined Britain and then it's tarted up and is now being sold to you.
• 1:20:11
  You know, it's been owned by the cliched one lady owner, hasn't it?
• 1:20:15
  So the no story where you're buying your Honda Accord, you definitely
• 1:20:18
  want a car with no stories when you're buying your Ferrari F40.
• 1:20:22
  Do you want the one that was owned new by the cocaine dealer who
• 1:20:25
  drove it into a swimming pool?
• 1:20:27
  Yes.
• 1:20:27
  Do you want the one that was owned by, you know, the Chinese millionaire who put
• 1:20:32
  it in a hermetically sealed container?
• 1:20:34
  Now the market would tell you the hermetically sealed car that has
• 1:20:39
  absolutely no stories about it at all.
• 1:20:42
  That's the one you want.
• 1:20:43
  Now the irony with these kind of Ferrari is the car that has no story
• 1:20:49
  has less value than the one that has.
• 1:20:52
  All the stories associated with it and, you know, we're also in a
• 1:20:56
  place where the worse the condition, it's got a new leather seat in it.
• 1:21:01
  Well, so what?
• 1:21:02
  It's got a new leather seat in it like every other vintage Ferrari.
• 1:21:05
  It's got the old leather seat.
• 1:21:07
  You mean Tazio Nuvolari?
• 1:21:09
  farted on that seat.
• 1:21:13
  Well, you know, I'm gonna, at this point, how many other leather seats can
• 1:21:17
  you buy that Tassio Nuvolari actually farted on that are attached to a racing
• 1:21:22
  car that you can show to your friends?
• 1:21:24
  So at this point, suddenly it doesn't matter to me whether it
• 1:21:27
  costs 12 million or 15 million.
• 1:21:30
  I told my friend I was going to have the seat that Nuvolari farted in.
• 1:21:34
  And by Jimny, I'm gonna have it.
• 1:21:36
  And that does drive values of them.
• 1:21:38
  And it's, it's funny, you know, we're, we're talking about 51,
• 1:21:41
  we're talking about the car that Villaresi won in 1951 with.
• 1:21:45
  For many years at Pebble Beach, I've done a slightly, I won't say sneaky
• 1:21:49
  thing, because it's not really sneaky, because anybody can do it, but I'm
• 1:21:52
  not wealthy enough to be in the quail ticket lottery, but that is the best.
• 1:21:56
  Show to go to a pebble, you know, the pebble beach itself is great But really
• 1:22:00
  the quail if you especially if you prefer post war cars as I tend to the quail is is
• 1:22:06
  probably even better So what I'll usually do is wait to the Friday afternoon until
• 1:22:10
  it's closing up and when they're loading all the cars up I'll just walk across the
• 1:22:14
  field most of the cars have gone, but you still see a few lying around one day I've
• 1:22:19
  spent a good 15 minutes With Villaresi's 1951 Mille Miglia winner because, uh, you
• 1:22:27
  know, they were moving the cars around, but it was just there sitting on the lawn.
• 1:22:31
  on its owner had a really nice, um, few moments with it.
• 1:22:34
  So the bottom line there is, is that it's great that owners.
• 1:22:37
  Feel the need to bring them out and it's great that they've survived because I
• 1:22:41
  had a total like you're not meant to touch these things are you but I did
• 1:22:44
  rest my hand on the door handle and think to myself Villa Razi stood here
• 1:22:49
  the morning, you know when he got in the car before he won the race, you know,
• 1:22:52
  so I did I did allow myself that and I should just say A lot of my knowledge
• 1:22:58
  of the Mille Miglia comes from a series of books, publishers Brooklyn's books,
• 1:23:02
  and they've done a series on great motor races on the Mille Miglia, on Carrera
• 1:23:06
  Panamericana, on the Targa Florio, but the cover of the edition that covers the
• 1:23:11
  1951 Mille Miglia is Villaresi's Ferrari.
• 1:23:16
  With a bunch of front end damage on it.
• 1:23:18
  And it's obvious he's gone off the road, not seriously, but just a little bit.
• 1:23:21
  And that to me really speaks of what the Mille Miglia is all about.
• 1:23:24
  Because, you know, the winning car went off the road and suffered damage.
• 1:23:28
  It's not like Formula One, where if you put a wheel wrong, it's over.
• 1:23:31
  This is an event where there's bumps and bruises on the, on the winning car.
• 1:23:36
  Like a NASCAR.
• 1:23:37
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:23:38
  Mentioning like the hermetically sealed F40.
• 1:23:40
  Yeah, that's the one that people want to go after.
• 1:23:42
  But what's unfortunate is like, you can't drive it then.
• 1:23:45
  That's the problem is you're going to buy it.
• 1:23:47
  It's just, it's something to look at because it loses its value.
• 1:23:51
  You start putting the miles on.
• 1:23:52
  And this is a mechanical being entity.
• 1:23:55
  It's meant to be started, driven and going.
• 1:23:58
  I mean, it needs to be lubricated, everything.
• 1:24:00
  So it's in that car.
• 1:24:01
  God knows what would tell you.
• 1:24:02
  Oh yeah.
• 1:24:02
  I commissioned it to get it back onto the road itself.
• 1:24:05
  You don't have to replace everything because you couldn't drive it.
• 1:24:08
  There's only got say 500 miles since 1988.
• 1:24:11
  You really can't drive.
• 1:24:12
  You know, it's going to take a lot of money to get that thing up to
• 1:24:15
  be able to do it, but you wouldn't want to because it loses value.
• 1:24:17
  So what I've learned from this is confirmation of two
• 1:24:21
  previous break fix episodes.
• 1:24:23
  One is, the first question I need to ask when buying a Ferrari of this
• 1:24:27
  period is, A, what does it smell like?
• 1:24:29
  And B, Going back to our Italian car episode.
• 1:24:32
  I definitely want the one with the crack pipe in the glove box.
• 1:24:36
  Right?
• 1:24:36
  William.
• 1:24:36
  Exactly.
• 1:24:37
  That's got the story.
• 1:24:40
  I guess that can be seen as like, you know, to quote John says, I did new
• 1:24:44
  Valerie fart who farted in this car.
• 1:24:46
  See, what does it smell like?
• 1:24:47
  That's what it smells like.
• 1:24:49
  Who farted in this car?
• 1:24:51
  All old Volkswagen smell like melting crayons.
• 1:24:54
  That's all I know.
• 1:24:55
  So that brings us to 19.
• 1:24:58
  52.
• 1:24:59
  And I think we're going to close out the thought with 52 and 53, their
• 1:25:02
  significance before we pick up for the second half of the millimelia coverage
• 1:25:06
  on the Ferrari marketplace, you know, more power, higher top end speed, but the
• 1:25:11
  interesting fact is now what you start getting into is, you know, obviously pre
• 1:25:14
  war, but then post war too, is You always had usually a mechanic riding with you.
• 1:25:20
  There was always someone next to you in the passenger seat.
• 1:25:23
  But as you start getting into these years, you start seeing not so much
• 1:25:27
  52, but I know when 53 guys started, as you start seeing guys start racing
• 1:25:31
  by themselves, the winning car.
• 1:25:33
  Again, 250 at 230 horsepower, so we've got a 10 horsepower jump.
• 1:25:38
  It starts going up more, it's almost at 156.
• 1:25:41
  So, it's jumping up there.
• 1:25:42
  0 1 5 6 18 is the winning chassis number of 1952.
• 1:25:49
  I think it's fascinating that he gave Tarufi, like, uh,
• 1:25:53
  open four and a half liter.
• 1:25:55
  And he gives Braco, who wins, a closed three liter.
• 1:25:59
  Yeah.
• 1:25:59
  There's no even sense that, you know, I'm going to build the same
• 1:26:02
  engine, but, you know, do some open cars and some closed cars.
• 1:26:06
  There's no sense of that whatsoever.
• 1:26:09
  We're just going to do whatever.
• 1:26:10
  I feel like Braco doesn't feature in much other motor racing history.
• 1:26:17
  He wasn't part of the team that Alpha.
• 1:26:19
  Formula One team or anything like that.
• 1:26:21
  And one source I read refers to him as a, as a hill climb specialist.
• 1:26:26
  The other story that I'd read that was particularly, uh, amusing,
• 1:26:30
  uh, about him was, he's known as a hill climb specialist.
• 1:26:33
  And of course on the Mille Miglia, you've those two passes, the Futa and the
• 1:26:37
  Raticosa, where it was often felt that, you know, here was a, a section where you,
• 1:26:42
  the driver could make a real difference.
• 1:26:45
  If you attacked over those passes, that was a way that you could maybe
• 1:26:50
  make a difference in a way that the flat out flat straits around Cremona
• 1:26:55
  and Manchu and all those bits between the middle of the country and back up
• 1:27:00
  north, all those bits wouldn't allow you to make the same kind of difference.
• 1:27:03
  So the, the story is that, that in, in 52, Barco was behind cling
• 1:27:09
  as they do this northern phase and as they leave Florence was they
• 1:27:13
  approach, Barco says to his co-driver.
• 1:27:15
  I will lead by, by Florence or, you know, I'll lead by then, or as long
• 1:27:21
  as you keep plying me with this brandy that you're, you're buying me with.
• 1:27:26
  Yeah.
• 1:27:27
  Braco had that reputation of being the kind of hitting the sauce quite a bit.
• 1:27:31
  And, and the story that I'd read was that when he beat Kling, Kling was never the
• 1:27:34
  same again because he was like beaten.
• 1:27:37
  The pictures of Braco.
• 1:27:38
  You know, he's often in an ill fitting sports jacket.
• 1:27:41
  And he's like Vazzi in that he always seems to have a cigarette on.
• 1:27:45
  Unlike Bonetto.
• 1:27:47
  Bonetto's the one that's always got the pipe on.
• 1:27:49
  It's quite peculiar to think about people in middle age, in the way
• 1:27:54
  that Braco was, who are able to do this completely kind of, you know,
• 1:28:00
  sports bikers talk about brain out.
• 1:28:02
  Let's see, you say, you know, how was your ride?
• 1:28:04
  And they say, Oh, it was brain out, mate.
• 1:28:06
  And what that means is that I took my brain out.
• 1:28:10
  I wasn't thinking.
• 1:28:11
  I just instinctively.
• 1:28:13
  So, you know, did you split between cars at 120 miles an hour?
• 1:28:16
  Yeah.
• 1:28:17
  And I feel like fascist.
• 1:28:20
  philosophy that was with Italy right the way from the early 20s
• 1:28:24
  right the way through the mid 40s.
• 1:28:26
  That fascist philosophy believed that a state of war was natural, believed
• 1:28:31
  that a level of attrition was natural.
• 1:28:35
  So guys like Nuvolari and Bracco grew up with this motto, either it goes
• 1:28:43
  Or I'll crash it, you know, it was win or crash, absolutely a win or
• 1:28:47
  crash philosophy and, and that must have been very hard to compete with.
• 1:28:51
  And certainly the Brits, I mean, Donald Healy went and competed
• 1:28:55
  in an early mille millia and he describes it as a lunatic race.
• 1:28:59
  And I feel that Braco probably personifies that lunacy even more
• 1:29:04
  than Biondetti or even more than the names like Ascari or Castellotti
• 1:29:09
  that we've heard as Formula 1 stars.
• 1:29:11
  This guy who was a hill climb guy who didn't really do much, you know, kind
• 1:29:16
  of retired, but was persuaded back.
• 1:29:19
  I don't think he was even going to race.
• 1:29:20
  I think Villaresi was meant to race and I think he took Villaresi's.
• 1:29:23
  seat in this Hillclimb special car.
• 1:29:26
  So yeah, amazing personality.
• 1:29:27
  That's the year that Mercedes came and basically started, I want
• 1:29:32
  to say a big push or onslaught.
• 1:29:34
  They showed up like a month early for the race.
• 1:29:37
  Cat, all their guys camped out and just.
• 1:29:39
  Repeatedly, repeatedly doing the whole course, learning it, learning
• 1:29:43
  it, learning it, could that have played into Cling's little thing?
• 1:29:45
  And, you know, Neubauer had his, his strategy in regards to his three guys.
• 1:29:50
  Hey, you're the tortoise, you're the hare.
• 1:29:53
  You're, you know, this guy's chasing you and going, they tried to really
• 1:29:56
  hammer it and Rocco still wins.
• 1:29:58
  And Cling was leading for a long time, but then they got to the hills.
• 1:30:02
  And he went past them, I think that really just chafed Kling's ass.
• 1:30:08
  And he was like, how the hell is this guy doing it?
• 1:30:11
  Because those SLs, they were, you could probably say they were superior to that
• 1:30:15
  Ferrari, technologically, everything.
• 1:30:17
  But it comes down to just knowing the course and technique and what have
• 1:30:21
  you, but Braco triumphed in the end.
• 1:30:23
  Sterling Wallace was racing a Jag and I think he only made it a
• 1:30:26
  few miles or something like that.
• 1:30:27
  I know he didn't finish, but yeah, he didn't have much success.
• 1:30:30
  Well, that's really a point worth making, isn't it?
• 1:30:32
  That we're talking about how dominant Ferrari was.
• 1:30:35
  We talked about Mercedes winning a couple of times.
• 1:30:37
  We're not talking about Maserati winning at all.
• 1:30:39
  No, we're not talking about Porsche winning at all.
• 1:30:42
  Now, albeit they were really just starting, but Jaguar were pretty dominant
• 1:30:46
  at Le Mans in this period, five wins at Le Mans, nothing at the melee.
• 1:30:52
  Was it because they didn't try?
• 1:30:54
  Hmm.
• 1:30:55
  One year, Biondetti had a Jaguar.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah.
• 1:30:57
  Was it because the cars weren't tough enough where they could win Le Mans?
• 1:31:00
  Was it because they weren't able to cope with the rough roads, the
• 1:31:04
  changing surface, all of that?
• 1:31:06
  Was it because the people driving them?
• 1:31:08
  didn't have the local knowledge.
• 1:31:09
  It tended to be, you know, we tended to put Brits in them and it took us a while
• 1:31:13
  to figure out that it was probably a better idea to give them to people like
• 1:31:16
  Fangio and Biondetti to do the job in.
• 1:31:18
  It's a blend of the cars that Ferrari was building and the
• 1:31:22
  drivers who he was putting in them.
• 1:31:24
  Yeah, it's impressive that you can call on somebody of the caliber of Braco.
• 1:31:28
  I mean, something that I'm really struck by is clearly to win, you have to drive in
• 1:31:33
  a way personal safety was of a secondary.
• 1:31:37
  consideration.
• 1:31:38
  And there's this sense, I love Giuseppe Farina, but Farina,
• 1:31:42
  it was in the Virgin's hand.
• 1:31:43
  You know, whether or not I crash or wreck has nothing to do with me.
• 1:31:46
  I'm in the hand of fate.
• 1:31:48
  I'm in the hands of the Virgin.
• 1:31:49
  If you ally that with this sort of fascist philosophy, my word,
• 1:31:54
  it's, it is, it's frightening.
• 1:31:56
  It's, it's like that sort of teenage boy intensity.
• 1:32:00
  But it's been refined through a world war.
• 1:32:04
  And now what Ferrari's given us the equipment to go out and do this.
• 1:32:08
  We'll talk later about Ferrari's brush with the papacy around the Mille Miglia,
• 1:32:13
  but morally there's something a little, he's drinking his brandy and driving
• 1:32:18
  flat out over the Raticosa pass and then speeding through crowds of people.
• 1:32:22
  I mean, it's hard to believe that it's just so Italian.
• 1:32:26
  I mean, if you think about it in an alliterative sort of way, it's.
• 1:32:30
  Passion and power equals perfection, and that's sort of Ferrari in a nutshell.
• 1:32:35
  When you think about it, right?
• 1:32:36
  It takes that exuberant teenage passion.
• 1:32:39
  Like you're talking about the extra power of these big engines that they're again,
• 1:32:43
  they're throwing caution to the wind, saying the body's the body, whatever.
• 1:32:46
  We're going to build a bigger, better mousetrap, bigger engine.
• 1:32:49
  And then it's putting those two, the crazy.
• 1:32:51
  With this big engine and that gives you the win.
• 1:32:54
  And when you think about, yes, the Mercedes is a better car or the
• 1:32:57
  Porsche was better engineered or the Jag had this advantage or whatever,
• 1:33:00
  but it never panned out because the variables didn't align correctly.
• 1:33:05
  You know, the superiority of the Benz with a sterile, very utilitarian driver.
• 1:33:10
  It's not going to happen.
• 1:33:11
  You can do all the practicing and calculations you want and perfectly apex
• 1:33:15
  every turn on a thousand mile route.
• 1:33:18
  But it doesn't work if you're not adaptable and you don't
• 1:33:20
  drive, like you said, with your brain out and you stop thinking.
• 1:33:25
  And this translates to all sorts of disciplines of motorsport.
• 1:33:28
  When you think about Formula One and you talk about just we'll pick three names
• 1:33:32
  from the same era, Senna, Prost and Mansell, all champions in their own right.
• 1:33:38
  It's completely different drivers, excellent machinery, but
• 1:33:41
  who's the better driver, right?
• 1:33:43
  And if you take the unruly boyish nature of Senna and his car, it's
• 1:33:48
  sort of like Brandini and Marzotto and all the rest of these guys that are
• 1:33:52
  just driving with everything in the wind and they're having fun doing it.
• 1:33:57
  So maybe that's part of the equation, right?
• 1:33:59
  Is that reckless abandon lets you push to 11 tenths.
• 1:34:03
  Where everybody else is not.
• 1:34:05
  I certainly think that's part of the Ferrari magic.
• 1:34:07
  100 percent!
• 1:34:08
  100 percent.
• 1:34:09
  Oh yeah!
• 1:34:09
  Everyone wants Ferrari apparel, right?
• 1:34:12
  The reason you want a Ferrari logo on your shoe is that you
• 1:34:15
  want to have some of that.
• 1:34:16
  It's like when you put the Brute 33 on, you feel like Barry Sheen, you know?
• 1:34:20
  It's that kind of thing.
• 1:34:21
  Yeah.
• 1:34:23
  That was one thing too.
• 1:34:24
  And again, go back to like how we said about, you know, cars, I say, get
• 1:34:27
  into participation, you know, and, you know, having a Ferrari that's in there.
• 1:34:31
  But in that race, there was 27 Ferraris entered out of the 501
• 1:34:36
  that started 501 cars start.
• 1:34:38
  I mean, and just think about that number, 501 cars.
• 1:34:42
  Started that event because you always see a lot of these things where they
• 1:34:45
  start on that ramp, 52 was actually the first year that they started on
• 1:34:48
  that ramp, they didn't have it before.
• 1:34:50
  And the reason being is because they wanted people to be able to see.
• 1:34:54
  The spectators.
• 1:34:55
  So when the guys, they pulled up onto the ramp, they could see who was
• 1:34:58
  driving or that instead of, you know, being on the ground, you know, we had
• 1:35:01
  all these crowds, it was tough to see.
• 1:35:03
  So, Hey, let's build a starting ramp.
• 1:35:05
  They roll up and go, but 52 is the first year they had that.
• 1:35:08
  Which is interesting because the only other discipline of motorsport that
• 1:35:11
  still does that to this day is rally.
• 1:35:13
  Yep.
• 1:35:14
  I found that interesting too, because I was like, Oh, wow.
• 1:35:16
  It's like you're thinking of mine.
• 1:35:17
  You see, you think that just, Oh, they always did that.
• 1:35:19
  52 is the first day they started doing that.
• 1:35:20
  And it was just those spectators.
• 1:35:22
  Could see their heroes, these people that we're driving on.
• 1:35:25
  That's what it boils down to because, you know, these people
• 1:35:27
  are so adored, especially in Italy.
• 1:35:29
  You know what I'm struck by?
• 1:35:30
  We've talked about how crazy the driving was.
• 1:35:33
  When you look to the film of them, they're always driving slowly.
• 1:35:36
  Yeah.
• 1:35:36
  I was watching some film with my son.
• 1:35:38
  like nine and I was thinking that thinking like he's not seeing that they're gonna
• 1:35:42
  like skidding around the corner they're like driving and I'm like oh yeah he's
• 1:35:46
  just like come into the town that we're in he's been doing like 180 out of the
• 1:35:50
  town he's now like tested the brakes and slowed down yeah it's like the TT
• 1:35:55
  all of the film when you see the Isle of Man TT the films them you know jumping
• 1:35:59
  over that little humpback bridge that's the only part of the course where
• 1:36:02
  they're doing less than 30 miles an hour But that's the part of the course
• 1:36:06
  where the camera is, because you can actually see them and catch all of that.
• 1:36:10
  So that shell film and a lot of films, although they're awesome representations
• 1:36:15
  of the event, I like the shell film, but it's only when you're out on the
• 1:36:18
  road and you can see the other cars coming past the camera car, that
• 1:36:22
  you really get a sense of the speed.
• 1:36:25
  The Kalmanski was, I don't think it was him and Collins were running together yet.
• 1:36:28
  Cause you know, in subsequent years, Kalmanski did phenomenal
• 1:36:31
  photos and take a video and.
• 1:36:34
  There's a few other instances of some participants basically just starting
• 1:36:37
  a race and then just bailing because they were doing a film or something
• 1:36:40
  like that, but I saw the number of cars starting and what you see,
• 1:36:45
  there was actually 607 cars entered.
• 1:36:49
  But only 501 started.
• 1:36:50
  So, I mean, you had over a hundred cars that didn't even start to
• 1:36:52
  vent itself for whatever reason.
• 1:36:54
  Think about that.
• 1:36:55
  And then how your number is, what time you start, there always was, the premise
• 1:36:59
  was the slower cars started first.
• 1:37:01
  Now you would think, no, let's start the fast cars first.
• 1:37:03
  But it's like, no, the slowest cars started first.
• 1:37:06
  The fast ones started last.
• 1:37:08
  So you always had that drama of them come flying by these
• 1:37:11
  slower cars and had to pass.
• 1:37:12
  So not only dealing with these roads, dealing with the crowds,
• 1:37:15
  because obviously when you watch this stuff, there's no barriers.
• 1:37:18
  There's no anything like that.
• 1:37:19
  I can't, I don't know if it was in 52.
• 1:37:21
  I know there's, there's one in there that cars were crashing at a
• 1:37:24
  certain point on the, on the course.
• 1:37:26
  They eventually from them crashing.
• 1:37:29
  They took out the guardrail.
• 1:37:30
  I don't know if it was 53, it might have been 53.
• 1:37:32
  But, so the guardrail's gone, the cars are there, so the person that's coming
• 1:37:36
  through, and I want to say it was the winner, he crashes into that car, because
• 1:37:41
  as the guardrail's gone, he only kind of goes off when he hits one of the person's
• 1:37:44
  cars, and so the damage isn't significant, so he keeps going, and goes on.
• 1:37:48
  The person that he hit, then they went after him to pay for it to
• 1:37:51
  fix his car, because he hit it.
• 1:37:52
  It kind of just shows you what they were dealing with.
• 1:37:56
  Here's where we're going to go.
• 1:37:56
  We're going to go into 1953.
• 1:37:59
  And what we're going to do is after they get done, we're going to pause.
• 1:38:03
  And what we're going to do is we're going to have a second part to this discussion
• 1:38:07
  that we will put that out next week, just make everyone know that we still got a
• 1:38:11
  subsequent other half to go, because what we're going to get into in that other
• 1:38:15
  half too, we start talking is obviously the increase in horsepower, the cars,
• 1:38:19
  but we're also going to get into, because of 1957 being the last race, but also.
• 1:38:24
  With the new Ferrari movie that came out, kind of have a little discussion
• 1:38:26
  with that and how it all ties in.
• 1:38:28
  But we're going to jump into 1953.
• 1:38:31
  There's a lot of interesting things with 1953.
• 1:38:33
  You go from 1952 with 230 horsepower from the winning car to 300
• 1:38:39
  horsepower for the winning car.
• 1:38:41
  You go into a 340 mm, a hair under 168 miles an hour.
• 1:38:45
  So it's actually not too much faster top speed, but your
• 1:38:49
  horsepower is increased immensely.
• 1:38:50
  You know, the winner, Giano Marzotto, winning the race, but what's interesting
• 1:38:55
  about the fact is he didn't have a car when that race was supposed to start.
• 1:38:59
  He was actually supposed to race, I believe it was, he was supposed
• 1:39:03
  to race one of the Alfa Romeo.
• 1:39:05
  One of those Disco Volantes.
• 1:39:06
  He was promised a car.
• 1:39:08
  He went on, I guess it was a family, whatever, getaway to, uh, Lebanon for
• 1:39:13
  where his one part of his family was from.
• 1:39:15
  But when he returned, he did not have a car.
• 1:39:18
  They said, nope, sorry.
• 1:39:19
  They assigned it to someone else.
• 1:39:21
  He went then and tried to make some calls.
• 1:39:23
  He called Lance.
• 1:39:23
  Yeah, they didn't have a car.
• 1:39:24
  Now you would think, no brainer.
• 1:39:26
  Well, why doesn't he just get a Ferrari?
• 1:39:27
  Well, he had a bit of a dust up.
• 1:39:30
  with Enzo, because he had built and designed a car
• 1:39:34
  affectionately called the egg.
• 1:39:36
  And if you look it up, you'll see why they called it the egg.
• 1:39:40
  He started, I guess, say dabbling and looking at and understanding aerodynamics
• 1:39:45
  of a car, you know, how it affects it, top speed, everything and where it's worked.
• 1:39:48
  Now, obviously, it's very crude in regards to doing it, you know,
• 1:39:51
  not kind of anywhere near what's today, but it started entering the
• 1:39:54
  picture, which is rather impressive.
• 1:39:56
  For 1953.
• 1:39:57
  And you take a look at the car, you can see where they're coming from.
• 1:39:59
  Now the interesting fact was Enzo wasn't too happy, but Marzotto family and
• 1:40:04
  the brothers were such good customers, you know, he kind of, uh, gritted
• 1:40:08
  his teeth and kind of dealt with it.
• 1:40:10
  Now, the one problem they had, though, with the egg was the radiator that
• 1:40:14
  was supplied to them by Ferrari was the wrong one, because the weight
• 1:40:17
  was supposed to rest in there, and so what their problem was, they had
• 1:40:19
  front end lift, which was creating, you know, obviously, very light in your
• 1:40:22
  steering in certain aspects, especially when you're going down straight.
• 1:40:25
  So, when he got back, his mindset was, well, I don't have a car.
• 1:40:28
  He was all prepared and he started to dust that off and he
• 1:40:32
  was going to bring that car back.
• 1:40:33
  And that was a couple year old car itself.
• 1:40:35
  Well, his co driver, how would you say Corsera?
• 1:40:39
  I'd say Corsara.
• 1:40:40
  He played mediator between Enzo and Marzotto and it was interesting
• 1:40:45
  how he played it off because you tell Enzo, Oh yeah, he's sorry.
• 1:40:49
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:40:49
  And then he was going to Marzotto and saying, Oh Enzo.
• 1:40:52
  Oh yeah.
• 1:40:52
  He wants it back.
• 1:40:53
  So it was kind of played on Twitter.
• 1:40:54
  So they kissed and made up the car.
• 1:40:57
  They gave him actually was from a previous race.
• 1:41:00
  It was sitting in the corner.
• 1:41:01
  It was beat up.
• 1:41:02
  Didn't have a clutch.
• 1:41:03
  You know, it needed some stuff done to, it needed some work.
• 1:41:06
  So he says, I can give you this.
• 1:41:08
  You know, and Enzo's not thinking, oh, he's going to win this race.
• 1:41:10
  I think it's because it was beat up from this previous race.
• 1:41:13
  Well, they get it up running and there you have it.
• 1:41:17
  He wins the race in this car, you know, basically getting
• 1:41:19
  it last minute from Enzo.
• 1:41:22
  I mean, literally, like, I think a week or two before the race.
• 1:41:25
  So, I mean, it was very, very rushed in getting it.
• 1:41:27
  But, you know, hey, he took it and won.
• 1:41:30
  So what else in 1953, the wonderful shell film was made, and that gives
• 1:41:36
  a more effective document of the race visual document of the race than any
• 1:41:40
  melee Melia, there may be more stuff out there in Italian archives but certainly
• 1:41:46
  on if you surf around on YouTube this 53 film, which as it says this AI enhanced
• 1:41:52
  version of it that's available on YouTube so sure you're coming from the
• 1:41:56
  perspective of shell right that they want.
• 1:41:58
  You know, they're advertising their product somewhat, but for
• 1:42:01
  the first time, you know, this helicopter coverage of the race and
• 1:42:05
  the race itself is, is a good one.
• 1:42:08
  The, the alpha males are fast Fangio's back from an injury
• 1:42:11
  feels like he has a lot to prove.
• 1:42:13
  He's.
• 1:42:14
  Leading at Rome over the Futa or Raticosa, he develops steering issues
• 1:42:21
  and Marzotto passes him and wins.
• 1:42:24
  Or at least, you know, Marzotto overtakes him and wins in that final stage.
• 1:42:28
  And again, you know, Marzotto's win is worth talking about for me.
• 1:42:32
  The thing really worth talking about is Fangio finishing second.
• 1:42:36
  In a car that only steered on one wheel, you know, as a friend of mine said,
• 1:42:39
  well, at least he didn't have to drive it over any dangerous mountain passes.
• 1:42:43
  And at least he wasn't driving it more than, you know, 130 miles an hour.
• 1:42:47
  The drum brakes were as big as wheels anyway, so it was okay, you know.
• 1:42:53
  26 Ferraris entered and 12 had retired, I think before Rome.
• 1:42:59
  Yeah.
• 1:42:59
  That gives you the attrition rate.
• 1:43:01
  And the other thing, and the Brooklyn's books will give you the
• 1:43:03
  impression of like a, you know, will give you the, the, the race by race.
• 1:43:07
  But what I'm struck by is how often the leader is leading and crashes
• 1:43:12
  out . He doesn't like suffer a problem, he just straight ahead crashes out.
• 1:43:15
  Sna, he's leading, he's in a wall.
• 1:43:18
  out ski.
• 1:43:19
  There's no like, you know, you don't just change the tire and carry this
• 1:43:22
  isn't Gran Turismo where you just respawn further down the track.
• 1:43:26
  No, you're just, you're out and if you're eating hospital food, you're lucky.
• 1:43:30
  My own particular guy from the period, Giuseppe Farina, I
• 1:43:34
  mean, Farina seems never to have even made it as far as Pescara.
• 1:43:37
  You know, which is where they come from Brescia down the right hands down the
• 1:43:40
  Adriatic coast and then turn right across to Rome and then right again up to, he
• 1:43:44
  never even made it that far because, and Ferrari says about him in, in, uh,
• 1:43:48
  in his book about racing drivers, that he was like a high strung race horse.
• 1:43:53
  And you get this sense that he just couldn't like contain.
• 1:43:56
  himself to do an event that required a bit of endurance, like, you know,
• 1:44:00
  a bit of caring for the car, like the Mille Miglia or, or Le Mans.
• 1:44:04
  It takes that certain, I guess you would say, um, holding yourself back.
• 1:44:07
  You want to go 10 tenths.
• 1:44:09
  These guys, I think that you're winning to your point, like the
• 1:44:12
  number you said, you know, you had 26 start, but only 12 finished.
• 1:44:16
  I think the year before it was 27 started, I think only nine finished.
• 1:44:19
  So I'm about to go back and look at the exact numbers, but you know, the
• 1:44:21
  attrition rate was so high crash him or the car breaking down, it happened
• 1:44:26
  quite a bit, so they just kind of use it as a reference, you know, that's how
• 1:44:29
  Lamar was to for the longest period of time for it comes just flat out sprints.
• 1:44:33
  It is now.
• 1:44:33
  You had to feel that car and understand it and take care of the car and get
• 1:44:38
  yourself there to the finish line, but you also had to go at a rapid
• 1:44:41
  enough rate that you're going to win.
• 1:44:42
  My understanding is one year, Mike Hawthorne was so unhappy at the
• 1:44:47
  prospect of race 57, the year he'll won.
• 1:44:50
  Like he'll prove himself.
• 1:44:51
  It was going to be rainy and miserable.
• 1:44:52
  So Hawthorne deliberately wrecked the clutch early in the race.
• 1:44:55
  So they didn't have to race in, in the rain.
• 1:44:58
  I mean, I've not seen that written down, just reading between the lines and
• 1:45:02
  knowing what I know about Mike Hawthorne.
• 1:45:04
  It feels to me that that would have been the case.
• 1:45:07
  So a 25 year span.
• 1:45:10
  In our 1st part here covering the meal Amelia, what are the 3 big takeaways?
• 1:45:14
  What did we learn from looking at the early days of the meal Amelia?
• 1:45:18
  What do we leave our audience with in part 1 looking at it pre war and
• 1:45:24
  what everyone was trying to achieve?
• 1:45:25
  But even post war up to.
• 1:45:28
  Including 53 now, 53, obviously, as we discussed, you know, there was that big
• 1:45:33
  jump from 52, 53 and cardiac horsepower.
• 1:45:36
  And I agree with John is, you know, you're starting to see, you
• 1:45:39
  know, I want to say it's almost, these are becoming true race cars.
• 1:45:43
  The stuff he was building.
• 1:45:44
  Yeah, you know, it coops whatnot.
• 1:45:46
  Yeah.
• 1:45:46
  I mean, they were he had them in his mind Hey, they're race cars, but you could
• 1:45:49
  drive them on the street and drive them, you know, very delicately obviously racing
• 1:45:53
  clutches whatnot But this is what you know, it's starting to transition to the
• 1:45:56
  full blown race cars for this race So all your stuff up until this point You can
• 1:46:02
  see that relationship and see, you know, hey, between a street car and a race car.
• 1:46:06
  It's like, wow, you know, I mean, identical.
• 1:46:08
  I mean, you're not talking anything radically different.
• 1:46:10
  You know, you're not talking massive horsepower.
• 1:46:12
  You're not talking, you know, massive top speed.
• 1:46:15
  Now, you're talking these gentlemen drivers, you know, these
• 1:46:17
  guys racing in double breasted suits, you know, no helmets.
• 1:46:20
  I would guarantee, you know, majority of these cars didn't have seatbelts.
• 1:46:23
  You know, that adds back into the, you know, F1 race stuff like that in the
• 1:46:26
  open wheel single seater, you know, they want to be thrown from the car,
• 1:46:28
  but you're talking, you know, these closed coupes, you know, you'd think
• 1:46:31
  you'd want to be kind of locked down, but a lot of them probably didn't have
• 1:46:34
  seatbelts in, let alone, you know, safety harness, you know, you're not
• 1:46:37
  talking roll cages or anything like that.
• 1:46:38
  These were elegant cars, you know, leather interiors just laid out.
• 1:46:43
  I mean, beautiful cars.
• 1:46:44
  The technology and what was, how these cars were built, there wasn't a massive
• 1:46:48
  job, you know, pre war is building up, it's getting there, but then also in
• 1:46:51
  the war derails everything in regards to progress and technology advancement.
• 1:46:56
  Then all of a sudden, you know, the war ends and you're basically dealing with.
• 1:47:01
  technology from pre war, mid late 30s.
• 1:47:04
  There wasn't any vast because everything went to the war.
• 1:47:06
  So I mean, all of a sudden you're back into going race that, but you're
• 1:47:08
  actually working with and racing with technology and that from the 30s.
• 1:47:12
  It's playing catch up and then obviously it takes those few years to get those.
• 1:47:16
  Advancements going and start trying new things and kind of really, you
• 1:47:19
  know, getting those engineering down, you gradually see it, but then all of
• 1:47:23
  a sudden you can see in those five, six years when they started going
• 1:47:27
  back again from 47 to 53, okay, now that five, six years, so everything's.
• 1:47:33
  Caught up.
• 1:47:34
  Now we've tried these things.
• 1:47:35
  Hey, we could do this whatnot.
• 1:47:36
  Hey, we're taking this technology from, you know, airplanes or
• 1:47:39
  this and that we're gonna dump it into here and do these things.
• 1:47:41
  So you start getting to that point where you're going to see that big jump
• 1:47:44
  from 53 to 54, you know, and not only seeing the fact that it's an Italian
• 1:47:49
  basically only race in the beginning here, but now you're starting to see
• 1:47:53
  these other manufacturers from different countries starting to participate.
• 1:47:57
  You know, so you got your, you know, Jaguar company, you got Porsche, you got
• 1:48:00
  Mercedes, you know, you got these guys starting to show up with these cars.
• 1:48:03
  That, you know, Hey, they're new to the scene, but now you're
• 1:48:06
  starting to see the expansion.
• 1:48:07
  You know, you still have these hundreds and hundreds of cars starting,
• 1:48:09
  but you know, you're not seeing 95 percent of them in Italian built cars.
• 1:48:12
  You're starting to see them from outside it.
• 1:48:14
  It's kind of interesting how these things are progressing
• 1:48:16
  in regards to just advancement.
• 1:48:18
  and technology and what they were working with.
• 1:48:21
  Pretty impressive.
• 1:48:21
  And just the shape of the cars, you know, you look at the pre war stuff.
• 1:48:25
  The look of those cars, you know, when you think pre war, you're
• 1:48:26
  thinking Bentleys and stuff like that.
• 1:48:28
  And that's what a lot of these look like.
• 1:48:29
  Look at the SSK, how those things were, you know, almost they say
• 1:48:31
  cycle fendered cars and that stuff.
• 1:48:33
  And how it was, it wasn't these closed full bodied cars.
• 1:48:36
  They had these certain looks to them, but then all of a sudden,
• 1:48:38
  bam, you come back post war, they're completely different animals.
• 1:48:41
  My sort of takeaways is that this is an event which sits right in the middle.
• 1:48:47
  of automobility.
• 1:48:49
  It's like the very beginning of automobility in that it's a city
• 1:48:54
  to city, flat out, run over the dogs, F everybody road race.
• 1:49:00
  But there's no doubt that Ferrari is the single maker who's most
• 1:49:04
  associated with this race.
• 1:49:06
  Sure, Fiat, well far more Fiat's entered, but what a Ferrari is.
• 1:49:12
  What a grand touring luxury automobile is, that was a vehicle
• 1:49:19
  that could win the Mille Miglia.
• 1:49:21
  You know, what Ferrari is, was forged in the crucible of the Mille Miglia.
• 1:49:26
  So when we look at a late 20th century Ferrari like an F40, that car owes
• 1:49:33
  absolutely its DNA is the Mille Miglia.
• 1:49:37
  And the Mille Miglia's DNA is this beginning of motoring.
• 1:49:42
  So that would be my take.
• 1:49:43
  All right, guys, like I said before, we're going to have a second part
• 1:49:46
  to this series on the Mille Miglia.
• 1:49:47
  We'll get that out to you.
• 1:49:49
  Hopefully we should have it out next Friday for Ferrari Friday.
• 1:49:52
  I appreciate everyone listening and remember the motoring
• 1:49:56
  podcast network, motoringpodcast.
• 1:49:58
  net.
• 1:49:59
  And don't forget to check out John's the motor historian.
• 1:50:02
  We got a lot more stuff coming, so I appreciate everybody listening,
• 1:50:04
  but great stuff coming guys.
• 1:50:06
  Appreciate it.
• 1:50:07
  Back to you soon.
• 1:50:12
  This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports, as
• 1:50:16
  part of our motoring podcast network.
• 1:50:18
  For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational
• 1:50:21
  content from organizations like the Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring
• 1:50:25
  Historian, BrakeFix, and many others.
• 1:50:28
  If you'd like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the motoring
• 1:50:30
  podcast network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.
• 1:50:35
  patreon.
• 1:50:36
  com forward slash GT Motorsports.
• 1:50:39
  Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and
• 1:50:42
  expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has
• 1:50:45
  been published with their consent.
• 1:50:47
  If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators
• 1:50:50
  of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.