Great article.
They’d watched quietly, their motorcycles cooling in the parking lot, as he struggled to get behind the wheel of big, bronze-colored roadster. They were there when the roadster returned 20 minutes later, the 6.2-liter V-8 snap-crackling on the overrun and settling down to a basso rumble as it idled into the parking lot. They were silent as he walked back towards the small ristorante, almost certainly ascribing his measured pace to his 82 years, and not the collection of screws and pins holding his ankles together. Just as he reached the door, they politely applauded.
They hadn’t been born when he’d stormed past this very spot 57 years ago in a snarling silver sports car, drifting it from corner to corner like a rally driver, his head cocked back in the deceptively relaxed posture he always adopted behind the wheel. But they knew the story of that day – the story of the most epic drive in racing history. And now they could pay their respects to the legendary pilote himself. The soft patter catches him by surprise. He stops momentarily, smiles broadly, and gives a quick nod of acknowledgement. Then Sir Stirling Moss steps inside the Chalet Raticosa for an espresso. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Rear Three Quarters 2 The Chalet Raticosa is at the top of the 3175-foot Passo della Raticosa, about halfway along Strada Provinciale 65, which winds through the Tuscan hills to Bologna. On summer weekends, the parking lot of the small restaurant is jammed with motorcycles, everything from cafe-racer Ducatis to full-dress BMW tourers. Today, though, it’s quiet, with just a handful of bikes and the occasional local in a Fiat calling in for coffee or an early lunch. Today, you wouldn’t guess that Strada Provinciale 65, now basking quietly in the warm sunshine, is one of the most famous roads in Italy. A Mille Miglia road. Ah yes, the Mille Miglia. It started in the early 1920s, when a group of wealthy auto enthusiasts in Brescia discovered their city was about to lose the Italian Grand Prix to archrival Milan and its new track at Monza. They decided the best way to fight back was to have a race that was bigger and better than a mere Grand Prix; a race every automaker in the world would want to win to prove how good its cars were. They decided to have a 1000-mile – mille miglia – road race to Rome and back.
The Mille Miglia was run 24 times between 1927 and 1957, until a crash that killed playboy Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago, his American co-driver Ed Nelson, and nine spectators left the Italian authorities little option but to shut the race down. The Mille Miglia soldiered on for a couple of years as a time-trial event – a sort of road rally – before everyone lost interest. It was revived as a classic car rally in 1977. The Mille Miglia route lapped the top half of Italy, starting and finishing in Brescia, the ancient city in the industrial north of Italy whose more famous residents have included Pope Paul VI, 15-time champion motorcycle racer Giacomo Agostini, and Bartolomew Beretta, who founded his eponymous firearms company nearby in 1526. Following regular roads that were closed to civilian traffic on race day, the route ran east to Verona, then south to Ferrara and San Marino on the Adriatic Coast, before turning inland to Rome. From Rome, the racers headed back north, through some of Italy’s most scenic landscapes and iconic cities such as Siena, Florence, and Bologna, before a last mad dash across plains of the Po Valley to Brescia. The section between Rome and Bologna, where the road twists and turns endlessly through the hills, climbing up and over the Futa and Raticosa passes along the way, was widely regarded as the most challenging of the race. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Club Mille Miglia When Stirling Moss was signed by Mercedes-Benz to drive one of the 300SLR sports racers entered for the 1955 Mille Miglia, only two non-Italian drivers had ever won the event. Though 1000 miles of road was too much for anyone to truly learn, the locals clearly had an advantage. It was American John Fitch, a semi-regular driver for the Mercedes-Benz team at the time, who first suggested the idea of using the co-driver to help recall the route. The Mille Miglia was one of the few races that still allowed for a riding passenger. This was because the slowest cars – the comical 247cc BMW Isetta bubble cars and tiny Fiat Topolinos – often took more than 20 hours to complete a lap, and two could share the driving chores. (The cars started at 30- or 60-second intervals, with the slowest leaving Brescia more than 10 hours before the big banger Ferraris and Maseratis rolled off the starting ramp in the town square.) Stirling Moss And Denis Jenkinson Before 1955 Mille Miglia Race Fitch suggested to British racing journalist Denis Jenkinson, who was hoping to ride along with him in the 1955 race, that they pre-run the route and note all the tricky corners, blind crests, rough railway crossings, and other hazards. When Fitch learned he would be driving a 300SL production car rather than the faster 300SLR sports racer, he graciously allowed Jenkinson to take the idea to Stirling Moss instead. (The talented Fitch would go on to win the production class, regardless.) From February, Moss and Jenkinson practiced the route several times, sometimes hitting 150 mph on the open Italian roads, and writing off two cars in separate incidents. “The only thing we bothered about was where the road was not as fast as it looked,” Moss recalls, “because if you’re going over a brow at 170 mph, you want to know if the road goes straight. Those sort of things we’d write down. Anything that was different from what it looked.” After checking and cross-checking, Jenkinson transcribed the notes onto an 18-foot-long roll of paper that was placed inside an alloy container with a perspex window on the front side and rollers top and bottom. Jenkinson read the notes by winding the paper from the lower roller to the upper one. Pace notes are routinely used by rally crews the world over these days, but back in 1955, this was revolutionary stuff.
Small, intense, and mildly eccentric, Denis Jenkinson was a singular individual. Born in 1920,“Jenks,” as he became known to racing’s great and good, became enamored by racing cars in the late 1930s. He was studying engineering when World War II broke out in 1939, but didn’t serve, registering as a conscientious objector and working as a civilian at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. His decision not to fight had nothing to do with a lack of bravery. After the war he became a passenger for top motorcycle sidecar racers, winning the World Championship with Brit Eric Oliver in 1949. Stirling Moss And Denis Jenkinson Mercedes Benz 300 SLR In 1955 Mille Miglia Front Jenkinson, who lived for many years in a tiny cottage in rural England without running water or electricity, started writing as a means of staying involved with top-level racing, and became a celebrated editor for the respected British magazine Motor Sport, covering Formula 1 and sports car races all over Europe for more than four decades. He died in 1996, but his story on riding with Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia, published in Motor Sport a couple of weeks after the race, remains one of the greatest pieces of auto racing journalism ever written, not the least for its wry understatement. “Entering the main street of Padova at 150mph we braked for the right-angle at the end, and suddenly I realized that Moss was beginning to work furiously on the steering wheel, for we were arriving at the corner much too fast and it seemed doubtful whether we could stop in time. I sat fascinated, watching Moss working away to keep control, and was so intrigued to follow his every action and live every inch of the way with him, that I completely forgot to be scared.” Stirling Moss was only 25 at the time, but well on his way to becoming Britain’s superstar racing driver of the 1950s and early '60s. He won 212 of the 529 races he started, including 16 Formula 1 Grands Prix. Fast and versatile – he drove 84 different cars in his career, competing in as many as 62 races a year – Moss was unlucky not to win the Formula 1 World Championship, finishing second four times in a row from 1955 through 1958. Stirling Moss And Denis Jenkinson Mercedes Benz 300 SLR In 1955 Mille Miglia Rear He retired from top level racing in 1962 after a testing crash at Goodwood left him in a coma for a month. Ever the perfectionist behind the wheel, he felt the crash robbed him of the edge he needed to win. But in that May of 1955, under a blazing Italian sun, Stirling Moss was at the very top of his game. He and Jenkinson rolled off the start line at Brescia at 7:22 a.m., and only one car passed them during the entire 1000 miles – the Ferrari driven by Eugenio Castelotti, who had started at 7:23 a.m. and would later succumb to mechanical problems. “The 4.4-liter Ferrari was very powerful, but I thought there was no way he was going to last, which of course he didn’t,” recalls Moss, who says he and Jenkinson figured they’d probably finish third. “Castelotti was a fast guy, but he wasn’t exactly easygoing.” (Castelotti won the 1956 Sebring 12 Hour for Ferrari before being killed in a crash while testing in 1957.) Stirling Moss And Denis Jenkinson After 1955 Mille Miglia Race The Mercedes-Benz 300SLR wasn’t the most powerful car in the race – it had just over 300 hp – and its in-board mounted drum brakes weren’t as good as the newfangled discs being pioneered by Jaguar. But Moss rates it as the greatest sports car ever. “It was not an easy car to drive. The steering was heavy at low speed, and the brakes were heavy. It wasn’t a wimp’s car,” says Moss. “Its great strength was that it was a driver’s car, so well-balanced and responsive to the throttle and the brakes.” And it was tough, a vital attribute when trying to race flat-out for 1000 miles over haphazard Italian roads. “With a Mercedes, you didn’t worry whether a wheel was going to fall off or the gearbox was going to break,” Moss says.
Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Front Three Quarters Static Moss and Jenkinson roared into Rome with a lead of two minutes, having averaged 107 mph for the 500-odd miles from Brescia. The pace note system had proven its worth, particularly on the fast, open roads down to the Adriatic Coast, where Moss frequently wound the SLR up to 170-180 mph on the narrow two lanes. “If Jenks hadn’t been there I hate to think how much slower I would have been,” he says. ““If he said it was flat-out over the brow, I kept it in there at 180 mph.” As Moss admits the Mille Miglia was the one race that made him nervous – “I couldn’t learn the circuit” – the bond he developed with Jenkinson during those 1000 miles was remarkable. Great racers often talk about being in the zone when driving at their absolute limit; a solitary, otherworldly place of preternatural awareness and responsiveness. What’s remarkable about the 1955 Mille Miglia is that Moss and Jenkinson seemed to be in the zone together. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Rear End Speaking was impossible in an open racing car at speed, and when they’d tried an intercom during testing, Moss found his levels of concentration blanked out the words in his earphones. So Jenkinson relied on hand signals, 15 in all, to communicate. 'It’s amazing to me that he would give a wag of the hand, and my interpretation of the wags worked out,” says Moss. In his Motor Sport story, Jenkinson writes of taking blind brows and bridges at 170 mph, adding whimsically “…I chuckled to myself as I realized Moss was not lifting his foot as he had threatened.” Though one brow near Pescara caught them out badly. On one straight, lined with trees, we had marked down a hump in the road as being flat-out only if the road was dry. It was, so I gave the appropriate signal and with 7500rpm in fifth gear on the tachometer we took off, for we had made an error in our estimation of the severity of the hump. For a measurable amount of time the vibro-massage that you get sitting in a 300SLR at that speed suddenly ceased, and there was time for us to look at each other with raised eyebrows before we landed again. Even had we been in the air for only one second we should have traveled some 200 feet through the air, and I estimated the duration of flight at something more than one second.
Moss still remembers that moment: “We’d been over [the hump] in practice, and there’d been no problem at all,” he says. “But we’d probably only been doing 115-120 mph. We probably hit it at 170 mph or more, and it was quite a bit different.” He laughs, then goes quiet. “The car took off. Thank God I didn’t close my eyes.” There was an old saying among Mille Miglia racers: “He who leads at Rome is never first home.” So for the deeply superstitious Moss, his blazing entry into the Italian capital wasn’t necessarily a good omen. Ahead lay not only the winding roads through the hills of Lazio and Tuscany, but also swarms of slow-moving cars that had already been on the road 10 hours or more. “The trouble with the Mille is that if you go off and have an accident you are going to be traveling pretty quickly. You don’t make mistakes on slow corners.” Well, not if you’re Stirling Moss, anyway. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Front Three Quarter Turn In this modern era of cool suits and electrolyte drinks and masseuses standing by in air-conditioned team garages at long-distance races, it’s staggering to think that by the time Moss and Jenkinson reached the Raticosa Pass, they’d been running flat-out for about seven hours. Their longest stop had been precisely 64 seconds, in Rome, where the Mercedes mechanics had changed four wheels and topped up the 58-gallon fuel tank, and Moss had ducked under a nearby grandstand for a comfort break. En route, Moss had wolfed down a solitary banana, peeled by Jenkinson, and occasionally sucked on a tube connected to a bottle of lemon juice to keep his fluids up. That was cutting-edge sports science in 1955. Meanwhile, the heat, the oil fumes from the engine, the acrid black dust from the front brakes, and the constantly changing G-loadings had already taken their toll on Jenkinson. He’d been violently sick over the side of the 300SLR several hundred miles back, losing his glasses in the 150-mph slipstream. Fortunately, he had a spare pair. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Side In Motion …I marveled that anyone could drive so furiously for such a long time… On we went, up and over the Raticosa Pass, plunging down the other side in one long series of slides that to me felt completely uncontrolled but to Moss were obviously intentional. However, there was one particular one that was not intentional and by sheer good fortune the stone parapet on the outside of the corner stepped back just in time, and caused us to make rude faces at each other. The 60 miles across the mountains from Florence to Bologna had taken just 61 minutes, a time that Moss thinks would be hard work even in the 563-hp, carbon-ceramic-braked Mercedes SLS Roadster he’s now driving. “It would be interesting to know,” he muses as we cruise quietly down the back of the Raticosa Pass. “This has obviously better acceleration and brakes, but is it as well-balanced?” As the 300SLR roared out of Bologna and headed for the fast, open roads back across the Po Valley, Moss and Jenkinson weren’t sure whether they were still leading, but they realized they were well ahead of the record race average of 88 mph, and had a chance of making it back to Brescia just 10 hours after they’d started. “There were so many opportunities for things to go wrong,” Moss recalls. “The biggest problem was the drivers who weren’t all that competent. I think we had 500 entries, and on fast sections we’d be doing 180 or so and come up behind a car that had already been racing 15 or 20 hours, and you worried they were not going to look in the mirror.”
With an estimated 5 million Italians out watching the race, crowd control was another cause for concern. “There were people all the way around, even right out in the country,” says Moss. “If they were lining the inside of the corner, you couldn’t see where you wanted to make your apex. They were literally on the side of the damn road. You couldn’t see what the corner was like.” Nevertheless, as Jenkinson reported, Moss kept his right foot buried. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Scenary Up the long fast straights through Modena, Reggio Emilia and Parma we went, not wasting a second anywhere, cruising at a continuous 170mph, cutting off only when I indicated corners, or bumpy hill-brows. Looking up I suddenly realized that we were overtaking an aeroplane, and then I knew I was living in the realms of fantasy, and when we caught and passed a second one my brain began to boggle at the sustained speed… This really was pure speed, the car was going perfectly and reaching 7600rpm in fifth gear in places, which was as honest a 170mph plus as I’d care to argue about. To give the Mille Miglia a sting in the tail, the organizers awarded the Nuvolari Cup for the fastest time for the largely straight blast from Cremona back to Brescia. For the last 20-odd miles of the race, Moss says he averaged 165.1 mph. “We weren’t hanging around,” he says, with only a trace of irony. Mercedes Benz SLS Roadster Front Three Quarters 2 The grimy, dented 3000SLR came around the final corner of the Mille Miglia in downtown Brescia with Moss holding it in a 100 mph powerslide to cross the finish line precisely 10 hours, 7 minutes, and 48 seconds after he had rolled the car off the starting ramp and powered down the road to Verona. Moss and Jenkinson had averaged almost 98 mph for 1000 miles, shattering the existing record by almost 10 mph. Drive those old Mille Miglia roads, as I did, in the thundering, staggeringly fast Mercedes-Benz SLS Roadster, and you can begin to understand how monumental an achievement that victory was. With its eight-cylinder engine mounted behind the front axle centerline, the SLS is perhaps the one modern Mercedes with clear traces of SLR in its DNA. But even with the SLS’ far superior acceleration, braking, and lateral grip, it would take a truly heroic effort to come close to the 98 mph average Moss, Jenkinson, and the 300SLR achieved that day. The most epic drive of all time? Absolutely.