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| The Mille Miglia |
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This site gives informations about: Regulation, Route and Informations of Mille Miglia historical cars race.
It wants to be also an instrument for involving fan of historical cars world, with the presentation of the best Drivers and Historic car marques and models which took part to the race.
Mille Miglia competition is the most famous historic car race in the world.
It was Enzo Ferrari who defined it "the world's greatest road race".
And he was right.
The historical car race was established by the young Contes Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti, apparently in response to their home town of Brescia 'losing' the Italian Grand Prix to Monza. Together with a group of wealthy associates, they chose a race from Brescia to Rome and back, a figure-eight shaped course of roughly 1500 km - or a thousand Roman miles. Later races followed twelve other routes with varying total lengths.
The first historical car race started on 26 March 1927 with around seventy-five starters - all Italian. The winner completed the course in just under 21 hours 5 minutes; local marque OM swept the top three places.
Tazio Nuvolari won the 1930 Mille Miglia in an Alfa Romeo. Having started after his team-mate and rival Achille Varzi, Nuvolari was comfortably leading the race but was still behind Varzi (holder of provisional second position) on the road. In the dim half light of early dawn Nuvolari tailed Varzi with his headlights off, thereby not being visible in the latters rear-view mirrors. He then overtook Varzi on the straight roads approaching the finish at Brescia, by pulling alongside and flicking his headlights on.
Borzacchini, Campari and Nuvolari. Each a winner of the historical car race Mille Miglia.
The event was usually dominated by local Italian drivers and marques, but 3 races were won by foreign cars, all of them German. In 1931, Rudolf Caracciola (famous in Grand Prix racing) and onboard mechanic Wilhelm Sebastian won with their big supercharged Mercedes-Benz SSK. It was also the first of 3 wins for a foreign driver as Caracciola was German, despite his name.
The win was a surprise as Caracciola had received very little support from the factory due to the economic crisis at that time. He did not have enough mechanics to man all necessary service points. After performing a pit stop, they had to hurry across Italy, cutting the triangle-shaped course short in order to arrive in time before the race car.
The Italians continued to dominate their race after the war, now again on a single big lap through Italy. Mercedes made another good effort in 1952 with the underpowered original Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, scoring second with the German crew Karl Kling/Hans Klenk that later in the year would win the Carrera Panamericana. Caracciola, in a comeback attempt, crashed.
Few other non-Italians managed podium finishes in the 1950s, among them Juan Manuel Fangio, Peter Collins and Wolfgang von Trips. From 1953 until 1957 the Mille Miglia was also a round of the World Sports Car championship. In 1955, Mercedes made another attempt at winning the MM, this time with careful preparation and a more powerful car, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR which was based on the Formula One car (Mercedes-Benz W196), not the other sports cars named Mercedes-Benz 300SL. Both young German Hans Herrmann (who had a remarkable previous efforts with Porsche) as well as British Stirling Moss relied on the support of navigators while Juan Manuel Fangio (car #658) preferred to drive alone as usual as he considered road races dangerous since his co-pilot was killed in South America. Karl Kling also drove alone, in the fourth Mercedes, #701.
Similar to his teammates, Moss and his navigator, motor race journalist Denis Jenkinson, ran a total of six reconnaissance laps beforehand, enabling "Jenks" to make course notes (pace notes) on a scroll of paper 15 feet (460 cm) long that he read from and gave directions to Moss during the race by a coded system of hand signals. Although this undoubtedly helped them, Moss's innate ability was clearly the predominant factor. Indeed, it should be noted that Moss was competing against drivers with a large amount of local knowledge of the route, so the reconnaissance laps were considered an equaliser, rather than an advantage.
The historical car race was banned after a fatal crash in 1957 that took the lives of driver Alfonso de Portago, his co-driver/navigator, and eleven spectators, at the village of Guidizzolo. The crash was probably caused by a blown tire. The manufacturer was blamed and sued for this, as was the Ferrari team, which, in order to save time, had not changed tires.
Since 1977, the name was revived as the Mille Miglia Storica, a parade for pre -1957 cars that takes fourth day on the Brescia – Roma – Brescia route.
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