The 1953-running of the Mille Miglia was completely packed to the gills with Italian drivers and automakers, racing for the 1,000 mile title from Brescia to Roma and again. Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, OSCA, Lancia, Fiat, Moretti, and Bandini all had factory-backed racing efforts at this spherical, whereas international interlopers from Aston Martin, Jaguar, Gordini, Porsche, Deutsch-Bonnet, and even Chrysler tried their stage finest to get to the top. Over 400 automobiles competed on this occasion, and dozens did not make it again to Brescia. This was among the many most fun racing prizes in Italy, and everybody needed to take that trophy residence.
How tough was the Mille Miglia? Well, to place it in perspective, Juan Manuel Fangio, one of many biggest racing drivers of all time, by no means managed to win the race. He completed third in 1950, second in ’53 and ’55, and regardless of 5 makes an attempt by no means reached the highest step of the rostrum.
Stop studying for those who don’t wish to see any spoilers for a race from over seventy years in the past. Giannino Marzotto with navigator Marco Crosara took their Ferrari 340 MM with Vignale coachwork by the 1,000 miles in simply ten hours and 37 minutes. That’s a mean of 94.14 miles per hour in 1953!
And he truly went even sooner than that. Perhaps the perfect little anecdote from this specific race is that Marzotto’s hood obtained caught shut, so his mechanics couldn’t accomplish the mid-race oil change that was specified. Marzotto left a later checkpoint, then remembered he nonetheless wanted an oil change, so he made a u-turn to get again to his crew. The crew lower a gap within the automotive’s hood over the oil fill port, and obtained the job accomplished. There’s no telling how a lot time he misplaced in that little mishap, however he carried on and completed simply 14-ish minutes forward of Fangio.
And they did all of this with drum brakes and carburetors and whatnot. I’m undecided I can fathom that form of velocity in these automobiles, even supposing I’m fairly positive an analogous time could possibly be set by a superb driver in a minivan as of late.
Anyway, watch this video, as a result of it’s fairly an fascinating option to see how the racing was reported in its time.
Source: jalopnik.com