wolfgang von trips fatal crash

September 10: Formula One driver Wolfgang von Trips died in a horrific crash that killed 15 spectators at the Italian Grand Prix on this day in 1961. The German racer, who was on course to win that year’s championship, clipped Briton Jim Clark’s Lotus, which catapulted his Ferrari into the crowd. Von Trips, 33, the wealthy playboy son of a noble Rhineland family, was thrown from the airborne car and died after hitting the ground at the notorious Monza circuit.

[ On This Day: Racing driver Bill Vukovich dies in Indianapolis fireball crash ]

In the aftermath, Clark, who would also later die racing in 1968, revealed how the accident happened.

“Von Trips and I were racing along the straightaway and were nearing one of the banked curves, the one on the southern end,” he said. “We were about 100 metres from the beginning of the curve. “Von Trips was running close to the inside of the track. I was closely following him, keeping near the outside. “At one point Von Trips shifted sideways so that my front wheels collided with his back wheels. It was the fatal moment.

[ On This Day: Farnborough Air Show tragedy kills 29 ]

“Von Trips's car spun twice and went into the guardrail along the inside of the track. Then it bounced back, struck my own car and bounced down into the crowd.” Von Trips had been leading the 1961 Formula One World Drivers Championship and needed only third place in Italy – the penultimate Grand Prix – to win the competition. A British Pathé newsreel filmed Phil Hill, who became the only American to clinch the title after winning the race, receiving his trophy not knowing about his rival’s fate.

But, in an era when drivers were expected to dice with death while earning in their careers what Lewis Hamilton makes in a race, fatal crashes were fairly typical. In the 1960s race organizer were not that interested in safety and that decade alone saw 14 F1 drivers die. That began to change with the death of Clark, a highly charismatic star who was probably the best-loved racer of that era. The death toll slowly began to fall, with 12 drivers dying in the 1970s and four in the 1980s. No racer has died in a grand prix since Brazilian world champion Ayrton Senna lost his life after a crash at San Marino in 1994.

[ On This Day: Le Mans crash kills 83 fans ]

Altogether, 49 F1 drivers have lost their lives in racecars. Von Trips, who had twice been injured after crashing at previous Italian Grand Prix events, helped fellow German Michael Schumacher become an F1 legend. A go-kart track he opened at Kerpen, near Cologne, was later leased by Rolf Schumacher, who taught his oldest boy and other son Ralf how to race there. In 1992, Michael Schumacher, who also raced for Ferrari, became the first German to win a full-length grand prix since Von Trips’s 1961 victory in Britain. He went on to win a record seven championships and is widely regarded as the best ever F1 driver.

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Tragedy Within Triumph: Hill and Andretti at Monza

America's only Formula 1 champions each experienced tragic loss on the day of their biggest victories

BY: JOHN LAMM PHOTOS: ERIC DELLA FAILLE PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, REVS DIGITAL LIBRARY

I t was such a strange scenario. In the seven decades of the Formula 1 World Driver’s Championship, U.S. citizens have won it only twice — Phil Hill with Ferrari in 1961 and Mario Andretti with Lotus in 1978, the last 41 years ago.

And the circumstances under which they clinched their championships were tragically similar. This intertwining story involves the same day of the same month (September 10), the same racetrack (Monza in northern Italy) and the same run-up to the same sad finale.

In their championship campaigns, Hill and Andretti each had season-long battles with a teammate: Hill versus the German Count Wolfgang von Trips (or “Trips,” as Phil simply called him), Andretti with Sweden’s Ronnie Peterson. Chillingly, both of their teammates died as the result of accidents within the first two laps of different editions of the Italian Grand Prix.

Shortly after Mario won his title, Phil and I met him in Ontario, California, then home to Ontario Motor Speedway. We were in a car, Mario driving, Phil also in the front seat while I sat in back, holding the tape recorder as the two Formula 1 champions talked about their titles and the tragic similarities of the circumstances in which they were won.

Part I: September 10, 1961

The drama for Phil Hill began well before the race at Monza. He knew the 1.5-liter V-6s in von Trips’ and his Ferraris were susceptible to valve problems if held at high revs for a long period of time. Pre-race testing had put the engines in that fragile state, so Hill wanted his engine replaced. Enzo Ferrari didn’t want to do it, but Hill didn’t back down.

“I insisted my engine be changed,” Hill said. “We stayed at a small country hotel, and knowing the little things that can go wrong in an engine swap — throttles not right when carburetors have to be quickly changed from one engine to the next — I was up at 6 a.m. the next morning to drive the car, to run things in a bit and try some standing starts.” He wanted to be certain that the problems he had been experiencing were solved.

“Right from the start of the race, I knew the engine had been the problem, because the car was its old self,” he said. “I was leading before the end of the first lap, only to come around on the second and find waving yellow flags, debris and an upside-down Ferrari.”

Von Trips had led the championship standings going into Monza, but on lap two, his Ferrari touched Jimmy Clark’s Lotus. The German driver’s car shot up an embankment and into the crowd, killing 15 spectators, before flipping back onto the track, tossing him out.

“How did I react?” Hill asked. “I didn’t know whose car it was until I came around and Trips’ number was missing from the pit sign. And then I didn’t dwell on it. I’d seen so many accidents in which the car was wrapped up like a pretzel and the driver had walked away.”

As the race progressed, Hill had other worries, watching his teammates disappear one-by-one from the list, wondering if their engines had failed and if his would be next. [Editors’ note: The other Ferraris did drop out with engine-related issues.]

“I was walking on eggshells, trying to win at the slowest possible speed and being as gentle as I could with the engine,” Hill said.

“When the race was over, the first thing I asked Chiti [Carlo Chiti, the Ferrari’s designer and team manager] when I got to the pits was, ‘How is Trips?’ There was sort of a guilt hanging on his face when he caught my eye, and he quickly sort of glanced away. At that instant, I knew Trips was dead. And yet seconds later he said: ‘He’s all right. Go on, ride the car up to where they want it.’ He tried to fake it and just wanted me to get up to the winner’s stand to enjoy the victory.”

That would never really happen. There was no party that evening. And in the morning, for Hill anyway, the happy feelings, almost disbelief, that he’d won the championship were countered by von Trips’ death. There was the funeral to attend, including the long, slow walk from von Trips’ castle to the cemetery. In the end, there never was a celebration.

“It may sound foolish now, but somehow I felt too involved in the death of Trips,” said Hill, always a deeply introspective man. “I wasn’t, of course, just another driver of another car. What I probably felt was that with all the lauding, there should also be some kind of guilt over it. I probably felt that it was appropriate to feel this guilt and not be bold and say, ‘Well, he screwed up.’ ”

Ferrari didn’t race in the U.S. Grand Prix at Watkins Glen in 1961, and it also bowed out in 1962, so American fans never saw the famous shark-nose Ferraris race in the U.S., a great disappointment to Hill. Worse yet, Ferrari destroyed all those distinctive, twin-snout Grand Prix cars. Hill, a Californian, had spent many years racing in Europe during a deadly time in the sport’s history. When he finally had his hard-won title, he wanted to share it with his countrymen with the winning car. And that was denied him, something he regretted the rest of his life.

Part II: September 10, 1978

Locked in a battle with teammate Ronnie Peterson for the World’s Driving Championship, Mario Andretti in his Lotus and Canadian Gilles Villeneuve in a Ferrari were on the front row for the Italian Grand Prix. Peterson had qualified for the fifth spot in the second team Lotus. The start was a bit confused, and the cars funneled into a jam as they approached the chicane at the end of the front straight.

Peterson’s car was pushed into the guardrail on the right, where its front end was crushed. A total of 10 cars were involved, with Peterson’s catching fire. James Hunt, the Englishman with the well-earned reputation as a playboy, is credited with pulling him from the wreckage.

The race was immediately stopped. Andretti, during that Ontario interview with Hill, described getting back to Peterson at the scene of the wreck, “I saw him. He was conscious and didn’t look badly burned. He looked badly broken up, but I figured one thing that can mend on a young man is bones.

“So I felt no matter how bad, his long legs, they’ll put them right. I felt really, truly, sincerely sorry, even though he was the only one that could have contested my situation. I figured now he’s gonna watch the rest of the races on crutches, and I’m gonna have to heckle the s**t out of him and that sort of thing. I was just trying to think of the light side.

“Even though I felt okay — It’s only an injury, he’ll be on crutches for a couple, three months, and then he’ll be all right, I, honest to God… there was something in the back of my mind. I had a big lump of worry. There was something bigger. You know what I mean?”

After a long delay, the race was restarted, and Andretti finished fifth, good enough to take the title. Then it was time to tend to Peterson.

“We rushed from the track, over the crowd to the hospital with Colin [Lotus founder Colin Chapman],” Andretti said. “The decision was already made by his business manager to go ahead and operate.

“We had Professor [Sid] Watkins, who follows all the Formula 1 events, and Dr. Rafael [Rafael Grajales-Robles of Panama], who was for a long time Emerson Fittipaldi’s personal friend and physician. They were assisting, and coming in and out to keep us informed as to the progress. The biggest problem and concern was to restore circulation to his right foot, which was badly, badly mangled.

“About midnight, they came over and assured us that everything possible, in their opinion, was being done. Watkins said: ‘What the hell? There’s nothing we can do now, so you might as well get some rest. They’re going on the easier part, his left foot, which just straightforward fractures. But they’re nothing really shattered.’”

Andretti returned to his hotel that evening thinking that his teammate was on the road to recovery. He tried to raise the spirits of Chapman, who was taking Peterson’s injury hard, and the two discussed possible replacements for the injured driver to finish the season.

The following morning Andretti got a call from Fittipaldi informing him that Peterson’s condition had worsened and that the injured driver was in critical condition. Still, he was optimistic about his teammate’s chances, but he quickly headed to the hospital to pay him a visit. By the time he arrived, Ronnie Peterson was dead.

“I tell you, that one, I couldn’t accept for a long time,” Mario said later. “I just couldn’t accept it. I thought, what a damn waste.”

The loss was particularly heartfelt because Andretti had grown very close to Peterson and his family.

“Ronnie was one of the best friends I ever had in my life in or out of the car,” he said. “Our families spent time together. I stayed at his house, and he stayed at my house. We played tennis together. We’d water ski. We just enjoyed each other’s company.”

When we think of the celebrations that follow winning a Formula 1 championship these days, it’s easy to get caught up in the delight of the moment. For example, who can forget the warmth of the 1982 champ Keke Rosberg with this son, Nico, after the younger man won the 2016 title?

This era of blessedly safer race cars seems so divorced from what Hill and Andretti went through. Perhaps the sport of Formula 1, which took so many lives over so many years, has finally reached its own age of innocence. That perspective, that sense of sacrifices made, is important to consider as we celebrate America’s two world champions, Phil Hill and Mario Andretti, and what they achieved at Monza — our All-American heroes.

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1961 italian grand prix: ecstasy and tragedy at monza.

• September 3, 2014
• Daniel Lloyd

The 1961 Italian Grand Prix was supposed to be a celebration. The Tifosi were out in force to welcome home their darling fleet of 156 Ferraris that had affectionately developed the ‘Sharknose’ moniker and dominated much of the season. It was Ferrari’s day. They were almost guaranteed to have a World Driver’s Champion, with the title set to be decided in the penultimate round at Monza.

An Epic Conclusion

Wolfgang von Trips and Phil Hill entered the race just four points apart, with the latter doing the chasing. Both were vying for their maiden world championship trophy, and both had delivered some awe-inspiring drives throughout the season. Hill had finished every race thus far, winning the Belgian Grand Prix, while ‘The Count’ had accumulated four podium finishes in six races, including victories at Zandvoort and Aintree. Ron Walker Racing’s Stirling Moss had an outside chance at winning the title in his privateer Lotus, but two non-finishes in France and Britain had virtually discarded him from the title-race. The formality was that the Scuderia pair would be racing each other for the overall spoils.

Several notable drivers struggled in qualifying, including Hill who ordered his team to perform an overnight replacement of his Ferrari’s 120 degree engine. Jack Brabham and Moss also endured engine trouble, which allowed von Trips to claim his first pole position of the year. Mexican youngster Ricardo Rodriguez started on the outside of the front row; a remarkable feat considering his engine was less powerful than the other the Ferrari cars.

The parkland around the Autodromo Nazionale Monza was engulfed by the fervent atmosphere that only the Italian fans could create. Even in the early ‘60s Monza was considered to be the highlight of the Formula 1 calendar, such was its challenge to the driver. Several segments where competitors would hold the throttle to the floor for around 30 seconds at a time helped to envelop the race in endeavour. It was all about raw speed, and whoever dared to push the barriers of their machinery the farthest.

The Ferraris were specifically geared to generate the highest possible straight-line speed. As such, they were expected to struggle when accelerating away at the start, although once they had reached the oval section of the famous 6 mile course they would be in a league of their own. At least, that was the plan.

A Fated Race Day

Il Tricolore fell and the roar of over 30 finely tuned 1.5 litre Formula 1 cars permeated the cool afternoon air. As predicted, the five works Ferraris were slow off the line, allowing Graham Hill’s BRM, Jim Clark’s Lotus and Jo Bonnier’s ageing Porsche to get within range on the approach to Curva Grande. Von Trips characteristically had a poor start; he often took several laps to acclimatise to the pace.

However, the Sharknoses soon came into their own and Hill took the lead on the first lap, pursued closely by Richie Ginther and Rodriguez. Clark and Graham Hill followed, with von Trips trying to return to head of the field.

On lap two, von Trips had worked his way past Brabham coming out of the first Lesmo and managed to overtake Clark coming out of the next corner. Brabham bit back and scythed past the pair on the approach to Vialone, the site of Alberto Ascari’s fatal crash six years prior. The cars streamed onto the Rettifilo Centro, the straight that leads to the fabled Parabolica. Von Trips was chasing Brabham and Rodriguez, who was in third. Clark was drafting behind von Trips’ Ferrari.

The account of the second lap melee differs from source to source, but the end result was the same.

Von Trips was tagged by Clark on the run up to the Parabolica, sending both cars careering left into the bank that hundreds of spectators were packed behind. The Ferrari was launched into the air, hacking down the helpless by-standers. The championship contender who grew up idolising his pre-war hero Bernd Rosemeyer and spent his childhood watching the Silver Arrows storm to victory at the Nordschleife was flung from his car across the track; his body coming to a rest, lifeless.

At the front of the field, Hill ploughed on with Ginther in hot pursuit. They were oblivious to the commotion, although they could see the debris as they approached the Parabolica on each lap. If Hill had been told, he would have stopped his car. Hill and von Trips had become friends over the course of the season, although both accepted that a close relationship in such a dangerous environment was dangerous in itself (they were fully aware of the tragic end to the ‘mon amie mates’, Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins). Hill was a reserved character who drove hard but was more than conscious of the risk he was undertaking. Von Trips led a more lavish life, but was also afraid of death. All drivers were, but it was part and parcel of the sport in that era.

Hill’s Forgotten Win

Hill went on to produce one of the drives of his life, winning the race and the championship, the first time an American had done so. But his victory was short lived. After receiving his trophy and champagne the new champion was addressed by Ferrari’s Carlo Chiti. The defining moment of his life had been shrouded by tragedy and a sense of guilt. He remained stoic upon the realisation of von Trips’ death, but would never be the same.

The 1961 Italian Grand Prix marked one of Formula 1’s most heart-wrenching weekends. While sources contest that the fatality rate was either fourteen or fifteen, it remains as one of the worst crashes the sport has ever seen. While we are thankful of the safety measures that currently protect our current crop of drivers, there is always a stark reminder that the glamorous world of Formula 1 has a dark and tragic past.

The 1961 race at Monza claimed the life of one of the sport’s finest stars, and still stands as one of the darkest days in Formula 1 history.

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‘The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit,’ by Michael Cannell

With death and glamour sitting side by side in Grand Prix racing during the 1950s and ’60s, it’s not surprising that the sport attracted young men from noble European families. They saw risking their lives behind the wheel as a way to become modern-day knights. Count Wolfgang von Trips, the last of a 700-year-old noble line and so reckless that he was dubbed Count Crash, was one of these knights of the racetrack. He drove to win glory and help restore Germany’s battered pride.

Noting that the essence of any great sports story is the "pairing of opposites," Michael Cannell , a former editor at the New York Times, has chosen to pair the fearless count with a cautious Californian named Phil Hill. Uncharacteristically for an elite driver, Hill fretted publicly about safety, leading the English driver Mike Hawthorn to nickname him "Auntie." Despite their different personalities, von Trips and Hill were friends before the 1961 Grand Prix drove them apart.

Although that competition supplies a plot line, " The Limit " is really about men who loved speed and were willing to die for it. The book depicts Grand Prix racing in an era before sponsorship deals, when drivers attained great speed without seat belts or fireproof clothing and knew "odds grimmer than those their older brothers had faced in the war."

Nobody personified this mystique better than Alfonso de Portago , the 17th Marquis de Portago, whom Hill regarded as "a Spanish James Dean without some of the brooding." When Portago died driving Italy's Mille Miglia in 1957 — at age 28 — in a horrific crash that sliced his body in two and claimed the lives of nine spectators, pictures of the actress Linda Christian giving Portago a final kiss at his last checkpoint made front pages around the world.Portago had spent most of his last day on Earth philosophizing with von Trips about racing. The two noblemen agreed that it was "beautiful and necessary."

Racing was necessary, too, for Hill, who grew up the son of two abusive alcoholics in Santa Monica. Hill found refuge in tinkering with engines, starting with his aunt’s Pierce-Arrow. Unlike von Trips, who knew nothing about engines, Hill had the heart of a mechanic, having spent a year working in English auto plants.

Von Trips’s aristocratic family lost almost everything in the war, and as a young man he frequently had to borrow money from his friends. Hill tended to be solitary, while von Trips was a ladies’ man who had a lengthy affair with Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy, the daughter of Italy’s last king.Hill visited the moated von Trips castle and bonded with the count’s mother over a shared interest in classical music. Both von Trips and Hill were on Enzo Ferrari’s team, and Ferrari notoriously goaded his drivers into bitter — and sometimes fatal — rivalries.

Throughout the summer of 1961, von Trips and Hill had “traded checkered flags” on the Grand Prix circuit. Both desperately wanted to be first at Monza, the Italian race that closed out the European phase of the Grand Prix. Hill won, but his victory was eclipsed by von Trips’s death after he lost control of his car that day. Feeling guilty to be alive while his friend and rival had perished in the competition, Hill was a pallbearer at von Trips’s “Gothic death pageant” of a funeral.

Hill’s concern for safety paid off: He retired to California, where he found the contentment that had long eluded him in a late-in-life marriage. He died in 2008. Although there were times when I wished for a bit more panache in the writing, this book is so thoroughly absorbing that I’d recommend it even to readers who don’t have a driver’s license.

Hays is the author of " The Fortune Hunters : Dazzling Women and the Men They Married."

Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit

By Michael Cannell

Twelve. 318 pp. $25.99

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von Trips—Monza 1961

Posted on 9 June 2013 29 March 2015 Author Glenn Leave a comment

The 1961 death of German driver Wolfgang von Trips , known as “Taffy,” really illustrates the dramatic change in values in Formula One racing over the decades.

Leading the World Championship (a third place would have been sufficient for the title) for Ferrari, von Trips tangled with then Lotus rookie Jim Clark in the Italian GP at Monza , vaulted over a dirt bern into the air and the crowd (before catch fences and retaining walls) and landed upside down in the middle of the track. In those days, with spectators mangled and the driver’s lifeless body being carried across the circuit, the race went on despite the gruesome accident, as it had always done. No safety, no red flag, no medical crew.

Clark put it behind him to win two Grand Prix championships, narrowly lose two more, conquer the American Indy 500 for the first time in a rear-engine car, and the perish himself at an inconsequential F2 race at a newly opened, rainy Hockenheim circuit, ironically in Germany.

And yet, reporting the Monza race, the correspondent of Motor Sport magazine would not mention the tragedy until two thirds of the way through his long article, after the usual meticulous description of the latest modifications to the competing cars. “For those in the grandstands and pits and around the rest of the circuit the race went on,” he remarked, “details of the accident being unknown and unannounced by the organisers.” A victory for Von Trips would have given him the world championship. Instead the race and the title were taken by his team-mate, Phil Hill, a sensitive man who, unlike Mike Hawthorn at Le Mans six years earlier, found it hard to celebrate his good fortune.

When motor racing was a matter of life and death | Richard Williams | The Guardian

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HORROR IN ITALY

• Author: William Rospigliosi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ORIGINAL LAYOUT

A swarm of festive Italians bracketed the checkered finish line at Brescia, waiting. The scent of lime blossoms filled the air. Clusters of the white flowers whirled down from green foliage, to be flattened against scorching asphalt as car after car completed the tortuous thousand miles of open road of Italy's Mille Miglia.

The Italians were jubilant that their compatriot, 50-year-old Piero Taruffi had won the race, coming out of semiretirement at the 11th hour to fill out Enzo Ferrari's short-handed team. It was a triumph of unusual sweetness for the silver-haired Taruffi, the "old fox," who knew the Italian mountain roads better than any man but had raced in the Mille Miglia without success so many times before.

The crowd cheered Taruffi, who averaged 94.78 mph in his experimental 4.2-liter Ferrari, and the German, Count Wolfgang von Trips, who arrived in second place in a 3.8-liter Ferrari, and the Belgian, Olivier Gendebien, who was a brilliant third in a 3-liter Ferrari touring coupé. And they waited for the popular young driver, 28-year-old Alfonso de Portago, to complete a winning Ferrari foursome.

They liked his good looks, his shiny mop of curly black hair, his devil-may-care attitude about many sports. They called him uno simpaticone. They were with him. The loudspeakers said he had passed Mantua, passed Goito and was on the straight stretch between Goito and Guidizzolo. The people waited, and he did not appear.

De Portago had driven a hard race. He would not have driven at all, for it is a race much hated by most of the drivers, but young Cesare Perdisa gave up racing after the recent death of the Italian champion, Eugenio Castellotti, and De Portago, as a member of the Ferrari team, was asked to take Perdisa's 3.8 Ferrari. Reluctantly, with a premonition of disaster that he communicated to a few friends, he did. Even after Perdisa's withdrawal (to become a horseman), De Portago might have bypassed the race. The talented Luigi Musso might have taken the car, but he became sick.

Handicapped by lack of experience in the thousands of turns of Italy's narrow, sinuous roads, De Portago drove harder than most, attempting to win by sheer virtuosity. He had only 30 miles to go—a few minutes left to drive—when it happened. The narrow bridge of Goito was behind him, the tormenting twists of the Apennines forgotten, and the inviting tape of the road through the Po Valley lay before him.

The spectators who lined the road saw him coming—first a dot in the distance, looming larger every second. He must have been going 150 mph. Children tried to force themselves past the legs of their elders, up to the front of the crowd. There was a sudden report, followed by a hiss—a tire blowing out—and the dot that was De Portago, a red Ferrari by now, swerved violently. Its tail hit the bank at the left of the road. Then the car catapulted above the first line of onlookers, cut the telegraph wires above, and landed among the more timorous spectators who had stayed back for greater safety. Amid the shrieks of the injured and dying, De Portago died immediately, and with him his old friend, the 40-year-old American Edmund Nelson, who had come along for the ride.

A FRIEND NAMED NELSON

Nelson, a picaresque character like De Portago, had ridden with the Spaniard before—a victorious ride in last year's Tour de France for automobiles. De Portago first met him in 1945, when a bearded Nelson had come out of the Merchant Marine to take a job at Manhattan's Hotel Plaza. The young De Portago dressed in the latest Savile Row styles, sported a gold cigaret holder, smoked Oriental cigarets and spoke with a pronounced English accent. While living at the Plaza he became fast friends with the older Nelson. He copied Nelson's more casual dress, lost his Briticisms and even learned how to box from Nelson, who had been a light-heavyweight fighter. It was Nelson who taught the marquis how to bobsled.

Nine spectators were killed with Nelson and De Portago, 20 others injured. The deaths of a Dutch amateur driver, Josef Gottgens, who crashed a Triumph TR 3 into a wall at Florence, and a motorcycle policeman brought the toll to 13.

It was the worst composite disaster in the turbulent history of the Mille Miglia, the worst in racing since the Le Mans tragedy in 1955. It may well mean the end of the Mille Miglia as a road race. Only with great difficulty had the Mille Miglia organizers overcome a governmental objection to its being run this year after six persons died in last year's race. It is becoming increasingly evident that speeds are too high and roads too narrow for today's cars. Other accidents, besides De Portago's and that of Gottgens were only narrowly avoided. Said the world champion driver, Juan Manuel Fangio, after the race (in which he did not compete):

"I shall never run in the Mille Miglia in the future because it is a race that is really too dangerous. I have tried it five times, and I have always seen that the risk is too great."

Racing tends to survive its disasters, however, and the Mille Miglia must be recorded as a triumphant event for Enzo Ferrari's machines, in spite of the overshadowing tragedy. Eight of the first 10 places over-all were won by Ferraris, a new affirmation, if perhaps the last, of the Modena factory's postwar domination of the Mille Miglia. With three races for the 1957 world championship for manufacturers now run, Ferrari has gone ahead of its keenest rival, Maserati, two victories to one.

Ironically, Maserati was favored in the Mille Miglia. Two of its magnificent new 4.5-liter models, the fastest sports cars in the world today, were to be driven by Britain's great champion, Stirling Moss, and France's best driver, Jean Behra. On the day before the race Behra, who lost an ear in the 1955 Irish Tourist Trophy race and suffered a score of other injuries in his yet unsuccessful push to become a world champion, damaged one 4.5 irreparably in an accident while completing a painstaking training grind.

And high though the death toll was, it might have been much higher except for the bravery, skill and incredible reflexes of Moss. Having started last, an excellent position in which to judge the speeds he must average, Moss got no farther than the first bend outside Brescia. Coming into the curve he felt the brake pedal of his 400-hp mount give way beneath his foot. In the split second before the Maserati could hurtle, brakeless, out of control, Moss coolly jammed the shift lever into low gear, bringing the compression of his eight cylinders against the speed of the car. He stopped before the car reached the spectators who lined the Rezzato cemetery—its walls white and cypress trees dark against the brightening dawn.

When Moss went out, the race changed its nature. It was henceforth Ferrari's domain. Three different cars took the lead at various points but they were all three Ferraris. At Ravenna, the first check point, the five cars first to arrive were all Ferraris—first Wolfgang von Trips, second Peter Collins, third Taruffi, fourth De Portago—only one minute and 35 seconds behind Taruffi—and Olivier Gendebien.

But Collins was determined to beat Moss's 1955 record of 98 mph and, pushing hard along the flat straight Adriatic stretch, he was first to reach Pescara, with Taruffi—who always made a specialty of pushing on the straight Pescara run—less than a minute behind him. Von Trips had dropped back into third place and De Portago still held his fourth place in front of Gendebien among the five Ferraris in the lead.

Climbing up the Apennines across to Aquila and Rome, Collins masterfully, relentlessly pushed his advantage, while all others dropped back.

At the Rome check point, the blond Briton led the field by almost six minutes. Taruffi was still followed by Von Trips, and De Portago held grimly on to his fourth place. At that point, Collins was only nine seconds behind Moss's 1955 record.

Then, after 550 miles of running, came the hairpin bend northward—the bend which joins the Flaminian and the Cassian ways. Collins took it perfectly—right in the center of the road—in a smooth arc with no wheel screech. Taruffi, in his customary black overalls and silver helmet, swung wide before the bend and, calmly with upraised head, took the road that led him north to victory. But De Portago's lack of knowledge of the route was very apparent when he took the bend too fast, seemed suddenly surprised to find it was a hairpin and, with the car straining outward, only just managed to complete the turn northward toward the place where he was about to die. De Portago had actually never been round the entire Mille Miglia course, though he had twice attempted to do so with Nelson. The first time, De Portago's car had caught fire at Ferrara, and the second time out he had run into a milestone almost at the start of the course.

It is a tribute to his skill and daring that he kept to fourth place the whole way, despite this very grave handicap.

He was still in fourth place at the Florence check point. At Florence, Collins had beaten Moss's 1955 record by four minutes and had left Taruffi nine minutes behind him. The five Ferraris were still leading in the same order.

Up the steep twisty Futa and Raticosa passes, between Florence and Bologna, the pace began to tell, not on Collins but on his car's transmission. Taruffi was also having trouble with his transmission and with his springing. At Bologna he intended to give up, as he had done in the 12 Mille Miglias he had attempted before. But this time, in his 13th try, when he heard that his rival, Peter Collins, was in the same bad trouble, he decided to go on. He said:

"I had intended to give up because the car didn't seem very safe to me, in its crippled condition. But I had promised my wife that I would give up racing if I won a Mille Miglia. So I took a chance." Taruffi's faith in himself became justified when at Parma, Collins—as unlucky in his way as his countryman Moss—had to retire with a broken half-axle.

Taruffi continued on his way—not pressing too hard—careful to avoid gearshifts that would add to strain on his damaged transmission. Von Trips behind him was almost wheel to wheel, but the old fox was never one to be ruffled. Von Trips had started from Brescia three minutes ahead of him, so, as long as Von Trips kept wheel to wheel, Taruffi had a three-minutes lead.

But the two cars, racing in to the jammed finish line, side by side, made a grand ending to what, in all probability, will be the last of all Mille Miglias. (Gendebien—in third place—had arrived earlier.) Reports were circulating even then that the dashing De Portago had interrupted his rush toward Brescia, near Rome, upon seeing his frequent companion of late, the movie actress Linda Christian. He had stopped his car, it was said, waited for the actress to sprint to him, then had lifted her up and kissed her before roaring onward. It was with exhilaration that the last crowd on the finish line of the last Mille Miglia and of Taruffi's last race, waited eagerly for De Portago. But "Il Simpaticone," the fourth man, had been stopped by death at Guidizzolo.

can stay alive and in one piece for the first couple of years this is half the battle.

•The mere fact that we race requires no courage on our part.... We get terrified.... I think what frightens me most is that when I have actually lost control of the car there is absolutely nothing I can do except sit still, frozen with fear, and wait for events to take their natural course.

•Racing is a vice, and as such extremely hard to give up. All drivers swear that they will stop at such and such an age, but very few of them are able to do so.

•It is the uncertainty of the future that attracts the adventurer most. Few professions...have less security and more uncertainty about the future than motor racing. One can be on top one second, but all it requires is a very small error and one is very embarrassingly dead the next.

This prophetic and dramatic testimony came from the pen of 28-year-old Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, the 17th Marquis de Portago (shown above), and first appeared in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED last week just four days before his tragic death at Guidizzolo.

"Fon" de Portago seemed to have been carefully bred for glamour. From his father, who had been a movie actor, a great athlete and sportsman, a fabulous gambler and a fearless warrior for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, he inherited a cloak of romance dating back to the 16th century. One of his earliest ancestors had walked all the way from Florida to Mexico City as part of a Spanish treasure-hunting expedition in 1528.

From Fon's mother came the kind of American dollars needed to finance his restless life. She is the former Olga Leighton, a British girl who first married a Chicago financier named Mackey and through him accumulated a fortune from Household Finance Corporation.

Young Fon grew up in the elegant idleness of international society. His schooling—mostly by tutors except for a month at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1944—was casual. He was a foppishly dressed youth of 16 living at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel with his mother when he first burst into café society. By 1947 he had attracted headlines flying an airplane under a bridge in London to win a $500 bet. Soon he was a familiar figure on the steeplechase courses and polo fields of Europe. He was an accomplished bobsledder, swimmer and jai alai player—a superb athlete.

Logically enough, auto racing became Fon's greatest passion. He started with midget cars in France, quickly graduated to a 2-liter Maserati, which he first raced at Le Mans in 1954. He drove with far more verve than finesse, had far more than his share of accidents, and his wrinkled cars were his racing trademark. Yet he won his share of races, including the 1956 Tour de France for automobiles.

Surviving Fon de Portago are his pretty blonde wife, the former fashion model Carol McDaniel, and their two children—Andrea, 6, and Antonio, 3. Fon first met Carol in a nightclub and within two hours he told her he intended to marry her. When Fon made up his mind to do something he did it with a flourish. That is the way everyone remembers him.

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History: Ferrari and the Great Walkout of 1961

• Published on 16 Dec 2015 19:31

• By: Rob Veenstra

By: Bas Naafs

Ferrari 's history is a mix of spectacular highs, dark lows and controversies that fit in between the two. Ferrari's controversies are everything but boring though. Whoever reads a book about the life of Enzo Ferrari can't deny that it would do just right as a Hollywood script. Therefor it is about time that we pop open the Pinot Grigio, turn on Nino Rota's soundtrack of The Godfather, and seat ourselves in a comfy chair to read a story in which all the elements of an excellent Italian opera are present. It is about love, women, betrayal, comradery, and Ferrari's. Lots of Ferrari's. This week we'll be looking at Ferrari's Great Walkout of 1961 that saw Enzo's most profound engineers, like technical director Carlo Chiti and head of design Giotto Bizzarrini, leave Ferrari after a dispute regarding the unwelcome presence of Enzo's wife, Laura. The ever growing aggravation among his top engineers resulted in a dispute between them and Enzo which started to come to the fore in the late 1950's. However, in a short burst of optimism, the Ferrari employees forgot that one does not simply present an ultimatum to Il Commendatore. Still applied today: if you don't agree with how things are being run at Ferrari, you may take your services and get out. The same message that Ferruccio Lamborghini and the staff of the Ford Motor Company were faced with.

Misses Ferrari

Laura Dominica Garello (1923-1978) was Enzo's wife and mother of Dino Ferrari. Dino tragically died in 1956. His death was huge blow to Enzo, and slowly but surely he started to isolate himself from the factory and the Scuderia. While he locked himself up in his office at Modena, Laura started to patrol the premises of the factory and involved herself more and more in the general management of the Scuderia. It might well be that the death of Dino and Enzo's alleged love affair with another women made her a bit more like Enzo himself: a tyrannical figure. Sales manager Girolamo Gardini was Lauro’s most picked on target, and he had to endure many verbal violence. Gardini got fed up with these never ending discussions and, in 1961, turned to Enzo with an ultimatum: either Laura backs off from terrorizing the production team, or Gardini would leave the company. Unsurprisingly, Gardini had to pack his bags and leave the factory through the backdoor to go find himself a new employer. However, Il Commendatore did not expect Gardini's firing to create a huge backlash. After hearing the news, Chiti, Bizzarrini, Scuderia Ferrari team manager Tavoni, and five others called in the help of a lawyer with whom they formulated a letter in which they opposed Enzo's decision to fire Gardini. This was a remarkable situation because no one dared to oppose Enzo like that before, hence the name 'The Great Walkout'. Eight of the most influential engineers who made Ferrari the team to beat on the racetracks in both Formula One and GT-racing, took to the streets against Enzo’s tyrannical behavior. This came at a critical point in Ferrari’s history as they were about to get a heavy beating by Ford, Lotus , Jaguar and Shelby. Some predicted the end of the Scuderia.

Saturn devours his sons

Between the late 1950's and up until the end of the 1960's, Enzo Ferrari lost as many as seven drivers, driving his cars. In the Vatican newspaper, Enzo Ferrari was more than once compared to the Italian god Saturn, who devoured his own sons to keep his position as mighty god unchallenged. This Roman myth was depicted in a quite gruesome painting by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya between 1819 and 1823. I suggest you to look it up after dinner time. Alberto Ascari died during a test session on the circuit of Monza. Allfonso de Portage died in the tragic crash of the 1957 Mile Miglia in which his co-driver and ten bystanders also lost their lives. In 1958 Luigi Musso died on the circuit of Reims while, in the same year, Peter Collins lost his life in a crash on the Nürburgring. Wolfgang von Trips ’ fatal crash at Monza, 1961 was the most deadly of Formula One crashes, as he took fifteen bystanders with him. Six year later, Lorenzo Bandini had his fatal crash in the streets of Monte Carlo. Fatal accidents were by no means a rare occurrence; it was simply part of being a race driver in that era. However, the large amount of fatalities under Enzo's watch were simply too high for people to let go unnoticed, and Enzo ended up with this image of him walking over the bodies of his own people in search of success. Working against him was the Italian law. Every fatal accident in a race event on Italian grounds is to be legally treated as a murder case. The constructor of the car involved in the crash is, when proven, to be accused of murder. The loss of his 'sons' weakened the position of Il Commendatore and his company.

Automobili Turismo e Sport

Tavoni's Formula One team was going to drive under the name ATS (Automobili Turismo e Sport), which was going to be sponsored by a very wealthy Venetian aristocrat. Count Giovanni Volpi still believed that he could bring Venice back to its former position as one of the most powerful trade cities of the 16th and 17th century. In the early 1960's, Volpi started his own racing team, Scuderia Serenissima. His father, count Guiseppe Volpi di Misurata (someone who did many, many things. One of them was creating the Venice Film Festival), left his son a fortune to inherit. Giovanni loved motor racing and became a regular costumer for Enzo Ferrari's products. Among many other, Giovanni owned the iconic 250 GTO SWB ‘breadvan’. Because of the Great Walkout, Volpi took his chance to bring a group of talented engineers to his own Scuderia Serennisima by sponsoring Chiti, Tavoni and Bizzarini in creating ATS. ATS started work on three projects: an F1-car, a GT-prototype and a regular road going GT. Chiti and Tavoni made their debut with their V8 powered ATS-100 at the Dutch Grand Prix of 1963. The car was hideous. The nose was extremely low and small while the higher mounted engine was covered with pieces of the tubular chassis and some bodywork. The tubular frame was fabricated without much thought behind it. After installing the engine, more tubes were to be added which made it impossible to change the engine or gearbox without having to cut through the chassis! Phill Hill and Giancarlo Baghetti drove their ATS’s without any success. In Italy they realized an 11th and a 15th place, but failed to bring the car home in Belgium, Holland, Mexico and the U.S. They pulled out the plug after this hugely disappointing season, never to be seen again.

Ferrari survived the revolution. Enzo hired, together with a couple of others, Mauro Forghieri and Sergio Scaglietti. Scaglietti finished the 250 GTO and designed beautiful Ferrari body's for years to come. Forghieri became Ferrari's technical director and led the development of the 312 series that became highly successful in the GT- and prototype- endurance racing, while its F1 cousin –the 158-  won the world championship in 1964 with John Surtees behind the wheel. During his active years at Ferrari, Forghieri took eight constructers titles. Enzo Ferrari did not succumb to the challenges with which he was faced in the early 1960’s. He went through a lot, but never cracked.

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Special Report: Italian Grand Prix

Auto Racing Is Still Cruel After All These Years

By Brad Spurgeon

• Sept. 3, 2015

Probably no one has found a better three-word definition of auto racing than Robert Daley, whose 1963 book about Formula One was called “ The Cruel Sport .” Daley, who wrote about Formula One for The New York Times in the 1950s and early ’60s, took the title from a driver’s comment after a deadly accident.

This year, auto racing has again been reminded of its cruel nature by the deaths of two drivers: Justin Wilson , a former Formula One driver who died in August of injuries suffered in an IndyCar accident in the United States, and Jules Bianchi , who died of head injuries in July, nine months after an accident in the Japan Grand Prix. He was the first driver to die in a racing related accident in Formula One since Ayrton Senna in 1994.

But during the period in which Daley covered Formula One for the Times from his base in France, drivers were dying regularly. In his book, Daley recounts a conversation with the German driver Wolfgang von Trips the night before the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1961 . Talking about crashes, von Trips said: “It could happen tomorrow. That’s the thing about this business. You never know.”

The 1961 Italian Grand Prix is remembered not only as the race in which the leader of the championship — von Trips — died in a crash, but also the race in which that death handed the race victory and drivers’ title to the victim’s only real challenger, his teammate, Phil Hill .

That made Hill the first, and only, American-born Formula One drivers’ champion. In 1978, Mario Andretti, who was born in Italy, became the second (and only other) American to win the drivers’ title.

Sept. 10, 1961, is also remembered as the day of the worst-ever death toll for spectators at a Formula One race. Fourteen spectators were killed when von Trips’s Ferrari slid off the track and catapulted up the earth embankment, swirling through the air and striking down spectators.

Monza had long been not only the fastest Formula One track, as it still is today, but also one of the most dangerous. In 1960, the British teams protested the danger of the banked corners by refusing to take part. For the 1961 race, some small changes were made to the track and the cars were less powerful, with a new 1.5-liter engine formula, so the British teams returned. But the lethal, 45-degree angle banking in two 180-degree turns remained.

The track layout was a combination of banked curves and the road track. Although the accident was not caused by the banking, 1961 would be the last year that the banking was used for Formula One. It continued to be used occasionally in some other series until 1969.

The British teams might have returned, but the star cars of the weekend were the five Ferraris, with their distinctive shark noses. The Italian race was the seventh of eight races in the 1961 season, and the drivers’ title had come down to an almost certain showdown between von Trips and Hill. Von Trips led the championship with 33 points, ahead of Hill with 29. Stirling Moss, in a Lotus-Climax, was a distant third with 21 points.

Von Trips scored the pole position, while Hill only managed fourth. On the first lap of the race, von Trips dropped down the pack, while Hill moved into the lead, ahead of Richie Ginther and Ricardo Rodriguez in Ferraris, Jim Clark in a Lotus-Climax and Jack Brabham in a Cooper, with von Trips behind them.

On the second lap, von Trips passed Brabham and Clark. But the move slowed him, and Brabham came back to pass both von Trips and Clark. Heading toward what is called the Parabolica corner, von Trips slowed and moved left for the turn as Clark tried to pass him. The Ferrari’s left rear wheel made contact with Clark’s front right wheel.

Von Trips’s Ferrari went slipping off sideways and hit the embankment, at the top of which the public watched from behind a low fence. Von Trips was thrown from the car and killed instantly, but the car spun over the crowd, chopping people down.

“I honestly don’t think Taffy realized I was there,” Clark said afterward, using von Trips’s nickname. “I am sure that, when he passed me earlier, he had decided his was the faster car and I would be left behind.”

One by one the other Ferraris dropped out of the race with engine problems. That led the way to a victory by Hill, the only Ferrari remaining. Hill did not know that his teammate and friend had died, although when he saw the subdued way in which his team greeted him after the race, he understood . The podium procedure was done without exuberance.

In an interview at Monza in 2002, Hill objected to a report on his title victory that had been published in 1961 in the New York Herald Tribune’s Paris edition. He was quoted as saying that von Trips “deserved” the title and was “morally the winner” of the title.

“That journalist made up that quote,” Hill said. “I would never have said anything like that. I was very upset about von Trips. But I won the title; I deserved it and wanted it. And that’s motor racing. What a load of nonsense! I would never have said he was the moral winner!”

A cruel sport indeed.

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Mistress of the maestro of Maranello

W hat Fiamma Breschi liked best about Enzo Ferrari , apart from the hundreds of letters he wrote, in his famous violet ink, professing his love for her, was his absolute dedication to the job of building the racing cars that bore his name. "He was a constant presence at the factory," she remembers. "He would be there on Saturdays and Sundays, over Easter and Christmas. He never betrayed his cars. Other things, perhaps . . ."

Plenty of people knew Enzo Ferrari from one perspective or another, some of them less than entirely flattering, but few saw him from as many angles as Signora Breschi. At first she was the young mistress of one of his top drivers, Luigi Musso. After Musso's death, in the 1958 French grand prix, she became one of Ferrari's own women. And finally, until Ferrari himself died in 1988, she acted as his spy, one of a network of people whose intelligence-gathering allowed him to control the little empire that became the most powerful legend in motor racing.

Next Monday morning, several hundred people will be drawn by that legend to the Ferrari factory at Maranello, where they will witness the unveiling of the F2004, the car intended to carry Michael Schumacher to his seventh world championship. Enzo Ferrari was the first constructor to make the launch of his new car an annual event; still the faithful flock to pay homage to the legacy of an enigmatic figure who so hated leaving his home town that he persuaded the world to come to him.

Musso, a handsome young Roman, was one of the drivers whose deaths long ago helped create the Ferrari myth. Others included Peter Collins, Count Wolfgang von Trips, Lorenzo Bandini, Gilles Villeneuve and the Marquis de Portago, whose crash in the 1957 Mille Miglia sports car race took a group of spectators with him and created a scandal that almost put an end to the whole of motor racing.

From being the most hazardous sport on earth, formula one has become one of the safest: only one driver, Ayrton Senna, has been killed in a grand prix in the past 20 years. But the memory of those young men falling like autumn leaves remains to give the sport its enduring image of dark glamour, with Ferrari at the centre.

Fiamma Breschi, a native of Florence, was still a star-struck teenager when she met Musso in 1952. Within a short time he had left his wife and two children, and she was with him when he died at the Rheims circuit, dicing with his team-mate Mike Hawthorn. Now, at 69, living in her apartment near the centre of Florence, with Musso's yellow helmet among her souvenirs, she is among those heard in a television documentary titled The Secret Life of Enzo Ferrari, to be shown tonight.

She remembers the feud between Musso and his two English team-mates, Collins and Hawthorn. "The Englishmen had an agreement," she says. "Whichever of them won, they would share the winnings equally. It was the two of them against Luigi, who was not part of the agreement. Strength comes in numbers, and they were united against him. This antagonism was actually favourable rather than damaging to Ferrari. The faster the drivers went, the more likely it was that a Ferrari would win."

If Ferrari knew about the pact between the Englishmen, he would have relished the intrigue. "Cunning and intelligence were his greatest strengths," Breschi says. "He was incredibly good at choosing the people he worked with - the drivers, the engineers, the rest of the team. And then he would set them off against each other. He would indicate where a problem was, and the engineer who had designed the car would defend himself while the oth ers attacked him. From their discussion, Ferrari would work out the solution. And 99% of the time he was right."

There would often be rumours that one driver was being given better equipment. "They used to say that all the cars were prepared in the same way, and perhaps that was true, but as with cakes, there are those that rise more and those that rise less, and the cake that rises more tends to be given to the most greedy, to the driver who is already ahead. And Fangio, for example, was extremely greedy."

Musso was in debt when he died, and the money for winning the French grand prix, traditionally the biggest prize of the season, was important to him. Running wide on a flat-out curve, his car somersaulted into a field. When Breschi saw him in hospital, and felt him respond as she stroked his hand, she was told that there was hope. Later, back in their hotel room, the team manager arrived to tell her he was dead.

"I ran for the window, which was open because it was July and very hot. I tried to throw myself out. I was already halfway out when Beba, Fangio's girlfriend, and Lulu Trintignant, Maurice's wife, grabbed me and pulled me back. They didn't leave me alone that night or the next day."

By the end of that year Collins and Hawthorn were also dead, and Breschi could not suppress a feeling of release. "I had hated them both," she said, "first because I was aware of certain facts that were not right, and also because when I came out of the hospital and went back to the hotel, I found them in the square outside the hotel, laughing and playing a game of football with an empty beer-can. So when they died, too, it was liberating for me. Otherwise I would have had unpleasant feelings towards them for ever. This way I could find a sense of peace."

But not for long. A few months later she was in Rome, trying to forget her tragedy, when she received the first letter from Ferrari. "He said I would always have friends at Maranello and that I could go back whenever I wanted. So when I recovered, I went to see him."

Ferrari turned out to have two or three other things on his mind. First, he asked her for a woman's opinion on his road cars. "He had found that a number of women were jealous of their husbands' Ferraris. He thought it would be better if they started to like their husbands' cars. I reported all the faults that might annoy a passenger. All sorts of things. I managed to improve Ferrari cars despite not being an engineer."

He also started to send her to the races, using her as an extra pair of eyes and ears. "I always had to know what was going on. Then I'd go back to Modena and report it to him in person. Sometimes he got contradictory reports and he'd say, 'Should I believe you or them?'"

Gradually he revealed his deeper intentions. "He started to desire me. At first he hinted at it, and later he made it very clear. It started with letters and then moved to telephone conversations which lasted up to two hours. He would call me when the engineers went to lunch, after they went home, any time he had a minute to spare. He told me that he couldn't imagine his life without me. I refused him, but he kept writing to me about a passion that he said was literally consuming him. This lasted for years."

Ferrari already had a wife, Laura, and a long-term mistress, Lina Lardi. The volatile Laura had given him a son, Dino, a promising engineer whose death from muscular dystrophy in 1956, at the age of 24, sent Ferrari into a period of somewhat operatic mourning. By the gentle, undemanding Lina he had a second son, Piero, who was not permitted to carry the family name until Laura's death in 1978, when he was already 33. Having spent decades in social obscurity, Lina now lives, along with Piero and his family, in the big dark house in Modena where Enzo and Laura made their home.

"According to his letters," Breschi says, "I was the first woman of his life. His relationship with his wife was very odd. She was very funny when she was young, but after their son's death they became estranged. He saw her as a burden. With the other one, he always said it was an accident. Signora Lina never made his life difficult. When she was unhappy, she would go shopping in Modena. Her other hobby was knitting, and with that she managed to be content. We are all different. My hobby was driving a Ferrari."

Ferrari takes its toll:

Alberto Ascari

Ferrari's world champion of 1952 and 1953 was killed trying a friend's car during an informal test session at Monza in 1955, aged 36. Tens of thousands attended his funeral.

Eugenio Castellotti

The most promising Italian of the generation after Ascari died while testing at Modena in 1957, aged 26. Ferrari had telephoned the night before, summoning him to the session.

Alfonso de Portago

Spanish nobleman, Olympic bobsleigher and fencer, all-round playboy, killed - along with his co-driver and nine spectators - in the 1957 Mille Miglia, aged 28.

Luigi Musso

Another driver endowed with plenty of Latin charisma, Musso was after a big cash prize to meet his sizeable personal debts when he died at Rheims in 1958, aged 33.

Peter Collins

Killed while fighting for the lead at the Nürburgring in 1958, the dashing Collins might well have become the first British world champion. A Ferrari favourite, he was 26.

Wolfgang von Trips

A fatal crash at Monza deprived the 33-year-old German count of the championship and intensified criticisms of Ferrari from the Vatican and the Italian government.

Lorenzo Bandini

The 31-year-old Italian might well have escaped from his wrecked car at Monaco in 1967 had a TV helicopter, hovering to get better pictures, not fanned the blaze.

Gilles Villeneuve

Ferrari's displays of affection were not enough to save the Canadian, who crashed in Belgium while convinced that the team management had betrayed him. He was 32.

Richard Williams was a consultant on The Secret Life of Enzo Ferrari, to be shown tonight on BBC2 at 9pm.

• Formula One

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