1000 Miglia 2012

The legend of the Mille Miglia dates to late 1926. Four young men with a passion for cars, and for car racing, came up with the idea of a race across a thousand miles of Italy (“mille miglia” means “1,000 miles” in Italian). These “four musketeers” – Count Aymo Maggi di Gradella and his friend and first financier, Count Franco Mazzotti (both at the head of the brand new Automobile Club of Brescia), Renzo Castagneto, whose excellent organizational abilities matched his passion as a racing car driver, and Giovanni Canestrini, journalist at the national sports paper, the “Gazzetta dello Sport” – were disappointed that their hometown, Brescia, had not been assigned the Italian Grand Prix. So they came up with an alternative, a race on a figure-eight route that went on ordinary roads all the way from Brescia to Rome and back. The total distance was approximately 1,600 kilometers, which corresponded to the thousand miles of the race’s name. But it was only after the end of the first Mille Miglia, seeing its tremendous success, that it was decided to repeat it the next year, and in those that followed. Hence, the first historic Mille Miglia saw 77 cars lined up at the starting line on March 26, 1927, with only one foreign crew (at the wheel of a tiny Peugeot 5 HP Spyder).

Entering the race were Italy’s best racing car drivers, along with some celebrities and famous public faces. Fifty-five cars managed to complete the race, while the twenty-two others were forced to withdraw due to technical difficulties. The winners of the first Mille Miglia were Ferdinando Minoia and Giuseppe Morandi in a OM. They raced the route in 21 hours, 4 minutes, 48 seconds, and one fifth at an average of 77.238 km/hour. As the Mille Miglia grew in popularity, it became the greatest spectacle on the roads of Italy, and this in spite of the economic difficulties and international controversies that Italy was experiencing in those years. After the race was suspended in 1939 following upon a serious accident the year before, it was interrupted once again in 1940 by the Second World War. But even so, that year featured a particular version of the event on a reduced route that connected Brescia, Cremona, and Mantua.

The Mille Miglia went back on the road at 2:00PM on June 21, 1947. Italy was now a republic, and victory was taken by Biondetti paired with Romano on a mighty and powerful "Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Touring Sedan", with a time of 16 hours 16 minutes and 39 seconds. But the absolute record time was achieved by the English racing car driver, Stirling Moss who in 1955 covered the 1,600 kilometers in 10 hours and 8 minutes, at the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR number 722. It is said that his navigator, bearded journalist, Denis Jenkinson, carefully studied the route in order to compile a scroll of route details. He directed Moss during the race, unrolling his five meter long scroll (in a purposely-made box with two rollers) giving him advanced notice of the characteristics of the route just ahead.

But then, in 1957, the race ended in tragedy, closing this phase of the Mille Miglia story. The winner was Taruffi in a Ferrari, but in Guidizzolo, in the Province of Mantua, a mere forty kilometers from the finish line, the Spanish racing car driver, Alfonso de Portago, blew his front left tire and skidded off the road at almost 300 km/h. He was killed in the accident along with his co-driver, the American journalist, Edmund Gurner Nelson, and nine spectators. Three days later the Italian Government decreed the end of the Mille Miglia and the race on the open road. The Automobile Club of Brescia made an attemptto try to give some continuity to the race. But the organizers had to give up on the idea of a speed race, transforming it into a regularity race with tracts where speed was allowed, on the model of what in the past had been used at the Stella Alpina in Italy, and at the Tour de France Automobile in France.

Three Mille Miglia races were run in 1958, 1959, and 1961. But while they kept the name and approximately the distance, they were carried out in a totally different manner from the Mille Miglia races of the past.

FROM 1977 TO TODAY

In 1977, on the Mille Miglia’s fiftieth anniversary, the Automobile Club of Brescia decided to follow the trendy phenomenon of classic car collecting, and organize a revival of the race from Brescia to Rome and back. Only classic cars could enter, and the final ranking would be based on the results of precision trials sited along the route.

But a repeat performance of the event on its thousand mile route required a fulltime organization that could handle all the details, including economic ones, to run it. The new organization made its debut in 1982, on the occasion of the second historic revival, which was the first to leave from the traditional ramp on Viale Venezia. It was followed by other revivals in 1984 and 1986. Requests for entry multiplied, passing from 220 in 1982 to 350 in 1984, obliging the organizers in 1987 to go from holding the race every two years, to an annual one.

The historical revival of the Mille Miglia has inherited not just the symbols and the routes of the race, but also its spirit. Today’s Mille Miglia aims to exalt competition under various aspects, in addition to performance, it now matches it in a knowledgeable fashion with passion and rigor.

In keeping with the spirit of an event that is reserved for classic cars, beginning in 1993 it became obligatory to use manual chronometers, rather than sophisticated modern electronic measurement devices. Then, starting from 1996, the participation of the oldest cars – which up to now had been handicapped by the difficulty in driving them – was encouraged by giving them an incentive with the use of a classification coefficient. A limit of 375 participating cars was set. This now allowed the organizers to choose among cars, picking out those who played a significant role in the history of the race, and also put together a thirty year panorama of the evolution of sports cars from 1927 to 1957, giving the public a spectacle that was unique in the world.

In 2012 to celebrate the Thirtieth Historical Revival of the Milla Miglia, the ATI organization (Temporary Association of Businesses composed of: MAC Group, Meet Comunicazione and SanremoRally) is preparing to create a huge logo of the race’s symbolic red arrow, the Freccia Rossa to set a Guinness World Record.