Public Proving Ground

As a test of cool driving skill and hot sports cars, Italy's Mille Miglia ranks with the world's toughest races. The 950-mile course--from Brescia to Rome and back --runs over the hairpin turns of four rugged mountain passes (one so grim that it inspired some of Dante's Inferno), through scores of towns and villages, and along straight ribbons of road where the racers hit it up as high as 150 m.p.h.

This week's Mille Miglia drew a record 573 entries, and a big reason was the increasingly keen commercial competition among the sports-car makers of Germany, France, Italy and England. With production booming, the makers feel that the postwar sellers' market is over, that from now on they will have to sell their cars strictly on performance. They saw the Mille Miglia as a public proving ground.

The Germans approached the problem with Teutonic thoroughness. They were on the scene three months in advance, going over the course again & again, measuring gradients and corners. German drivers even got out of their cars to hand-test road surfaces. Leaving little to chance, the Germans saturated the entry lists with 23 Porsches, precision-built little speedsters made up largely of Volkswagen components. Britons, noting the Germans at work, did not even bother to make trial runs. Said one Jaguar driver: "It's a sporting event, not a scientific test. Where's the sport if you remove the unexpected?"

Putters & Roars. The smaller classes started first. Italian Fiats ("Little Mice"), French Panhards and Renaults whizzed off the elevated starting platform at 30-sec. intervals and sped away. The din shifted from putters to roars as the bigger cars streaked off in their turn. One entrant who made a rather slow start was Moviemaker

Roberto Rossellini, driving a 2,000 cc Ferrari ; he coasted slowly down the incline so that his personal cameraman could take pictures of his take-off (he dropped out of the race in Rome, the halfway point).

The news of the race, as it filtered back by radio to the Brescia crowd, was of records being smashed again & again at every checkpoint. Ferrari Driver Gianni Marzotto, the 1950 winner, reached Verona at an average clip of 106 m.p.h. Minutes later, Verona clocked Argentina's Juan Fangio, in an Alfa Romeo, at 106.6. Former World Champion Nino Farina, of Turin, also in a Ferrari, raised it to 109.7. The crowd gasped when it heard about Italy's Consalvo Sanesi and his Alfa Romeo. His speed: 112.8 m.p.h.

Death & Records. News of another kind was solemnly expected, and it was not long in coming. Two hours after the race began, Frenchman Lucien Descollanges careened off the highway in his Jaguar and his co-driver, Pierre Gilbert Ugnon, was killed. A Fiat hit an Italian youngster, who wandered on to the road, and killed him instantly. Twelve others were injured. Bloody as it was, Mille Miglia hardly compared with when a car plowed into a crowd and killed 23.

Sanesi's Alfa Romeo conked out be tween Aquila and Rome. From then on, the race settled down to a finish fight between German Driver Karl Kling, winner of last November's Pan American road race, and Argentina's Fangio--both in Alfa Romeos--and Gianni Marzotto in his Ferrari. At the end of 950 miles, it was Marzotto's Ferrari, smaller and easier to handle than the huge Alfas, which crossed the finish line first in new record time: 10 hr. 37 min. 19 sec., for an average speed of better than 88 m.p.h. As expected, the little 1,500 c.c. German. Porsche jobs proved to be the secondary sensation of the race. Every one of them finished, the leader at a 75 m.p.h. average.

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