The Mille Miglia (, Thousand Miles) was an open-road, motorsport endurance race established in 1927 by the young Counts Francesco Mazzotti and Aymo Maggi. It took place in Italy 24 times from 1927 to 1957 (13 times before World War II, and 11 times from 1947).
Like the older Targa Florio and later the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico, the MM made grand tourers like Alfa Romeo, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche famous. The race brought out an estimated 5 million spectators.
From 1953 until 1957, the Mille Miglia was also a round of the World Sports Car Championship.
In 1977, the "Mille Miglia" was reborn as a regularity race for classic and vintage cars. Participation is limited to cars, produced no later than 1957, which had attended (or were registered to) the original race. The route (Brescia–Rome round trip) is similar to that of the original race, maintaining the point of departure/arrival in Viale Venezia in Brescia.
Car numbering Unlike modern day rallying, where cars are released with larger professional-class cars going before slower cars, in the Mille Miglia the smaller, slower, lower displacement cars started first. This made organisation simpler, as marshals did not have to be on duty for as long of a period, and it minimised the period that roads had to be closed. From 1949, cars were assigned numbers according to their start time. For example, the 1955 Moss/Jenkinson car, #722, left Brescia at 07:22 (see below), while the first cars had started at 21:00 the previous day. In the early days of the race, even winners needed 16 hours or more, so most competitors had to start before midnight and arrive after dusk, if at all.
History Before World War II
The Mille Miglia race was established by the young Counts Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti, sports manager Renzo Castagneto, and motoring journalist Giovanni Canestrini, apparently in response to the Italian Grand Prix being moved from their home town of Brescia to Monza. Together with a group of wealthy associates, they chose a race from Brescia to Rome and back, a figure-eight shaped course of roughly 1,500 km—or a thousand Roman miles. Later races followed twelve other routes of varying total lengths.
The first race started on 26 March 1927, with seventy-seven (77) starters—all Italian—of which fifty-one (51) reached the finishing post at Brescia by the end of the race. The first Mille Miglia covered 1,618 km, corresponding to just over 1,005 American or British miles. Entry was strictly restricted to unmodified production cars, and the entrance fee was set at a nominal 1 lira. The winner, Giuseppe Morandi, completed the course in just under 21 hours 5 minutes, averaging nearly 78 km/h (48 mph) in his 2-litre OM-produced car; Brescia-based Officine Meccaniche (OM) swept the top three places.
Tazio Nuvolari won the 1930 Mille Miglia in an Alfa Romeo 6C. Having started after his teammate and rival Achille Varzi, Nuvolari was leading the race, but was still behind Varzi, the holder of provisional second position, on the road. In the dim half-light of early dawn, Nuvolari tailed Varzi with his headlights off, thereby not being visible in the latter's rear-view mirrors. He then overtook Varzi on the straight roads approaching the finish at Brescia, pulling alongside and flicking his headlights on.
The event was usually dominated by local Italian drivers and marques, but three races were won by foreign cars. The first one was in 1931, when German driver Rudolf Caracciola, famous in Grand Prix racing, and riding mechanic Wilhelm Sebastian won with their big supercharged Mercedes-Benz SSKL, averaging for the first time more than 100 km/h (63 mph) in a Mille Miglia. Caracciola had received little support from the factory due to the economic crisis at that time. He did not have enough mechanics to man all necessary service points. After performing a pit stop, they had to hurry across Italy, cutting the triangle-shaped course short in order to arrive in time before the race car.
The race was briefly stopped by Italian leader Benito Mussolini after an accident in 1938 killed a number of spectators. This race saw eleven spectator fatalities; a Lancia Aprilla being driven by Angelo Mignanego and Dr. Luigi Bruzzo, just before they entered Bologna, went off the road and crashed into a whole group of spectators lining the road to watch the race. Ten people were killed, seven of whom were children, and 26 were injured; both competitors survived. Later in the race, another accident in Ferrara injured six people, and another took the life of a twelve-year-old girl just outside Rovigo. These accidents caused such an uproar in Italian society that the decision making of the race’s future went to the top of the Italian fascist government: Mussolini himself. The race was not run in 1939, instead "Litoranea Libica 1939" from Tobruk to Tripoli took place in Libya (then an Italian colony), which was won by Mussolini's personal chauffeur Ercole Boratto. When Mille Miglia resumed in April 1940, shortly before Italy entered World War II, it was dubbed the "Grand Prix of Brescia", and held on a short triangular course in the plains of northern Italy between Brescia, Cremona and Mantova that was lapped nine times.
This event saw the debut of the first Enzo Ferrari-owned marque AAC (Auto Avio Costruzioni) with the Tipo 815. Despite being populated mainly by Italian car makers, it was the aerodynamically-improved BMW 328, driven by Germans Huschke von Hanstein/Walter Bäumer, that won the high-speed race with an all-time high average of , even though the 1940 event was run on a much shorter and localised 100 km (62.5 mi) circuit.
After World War II
After the war, with the tragic accidents of 1938 having largely been forgotten due to the horrors of war, three of the organizers (minus Franco Mazzotti, who had been killed in the war) tried to revive the race, ultimately succeeding in receiving permission to run it in 1947. Despite post-war rationing, Italian government gave them enough gasoline to run the race, and Pirelli also offered four free tires for every registered car, resulting in an explosion of registrations. However, many entrants only registered to take advantage of the opportunity to receive a full tank of gas and new tires.
The participants of the first post-war run were once again all Italians, as British and French teams and drivers were unable to make the trip to Italy due to post-war currency shortages and in the United States, sports car racing had yet to become popular. German teams were also excluded for political reasons. Even in the 1948 race, Donald Healey and his son Geoffrey, who finished ninth in a Healey Westland roadster, were still the only non-Italian participants.
The Italians continued to dominate their race after the war, now again on a single big lap through Italy. Mercedes made another good effort in 1952 with the underpowered Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, scoring second, with the German crew Karl Kling/Hans Klenk that later in the year would win the Carrera Panamericana. Caracciola, in a comeback attempt, was fourth.
Few other non-Italians managed podium finishes in the 1950s, among them Juan Manuel Fangio, Peter Collins, and Wolfgang von Trips.
Stirling Moss at the Mille Miglia
In 1955, Mercedes made another attempt at winning the Mille Miglia; this time, with careful preparation and a more powerful car, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which was based on the Formula One car (Mercedes-Benz W196), entirely different from their sports cars carrying the 300 SL name.
Both young German Hans Herrmann, who had remarkable previous efforts with Porsche, and Briton Stirling Moss relied on the support of navigators. Meanwhile, Juan Manuel Fangio (car #658) preferred to drive alone as usual, as he considered open road races dangerous after his co-pilot and friend was killed during a race across South America. Karl Kling also drove alone, in the fourth Mercedes, #701.
Similar to his teammates, Moss and his navigator, motor race journalist Denis Jenkinson, ran a total of six reconnaissance laps beforehand, enabling "Jenks" to make course notes (pace notes) on a scroll of paper 18 ft (540 cm) long, which he read from and gave directions to Moss during the race by a coded system of 15 hand signals. Although this undoubtedly helped them, Moss's innate ability and the 300 SLR's exceptional build quality were clearly the predominant factors. Moss was competing against drivers with a large amount of local knowledge of the route, so the reconnaissance laps were considered an equaliser, rather than an advantage.
Car #704 with Hans Herrmann and Hermann Eger was said to be fastest in the early stages. Herrmann had already had a remarkable race in 1954, when the gate on a railway level crossing was lowered in the last moment before the fast train to Rome passed. Driving a very low Porsche 550 Spyder, Herrmann decided it was too late for a brake attempt; knocked on the back of the helmet of his navigator Herbert Linge to make him duck; and they barely passed below the gates and before the train, to the surprise of the spectators. Herrmann was less lucky in 1955, having to abandon the race after a brake failure on the Futa Pass between Florence and Bologna, while Kling crashed just outside Rome.
After 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, Moss/Jenkinson arrived in Brescia in their Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR with the now-famous #722, setting the event record at an average of , which was fastest ever on this variant of the course, not to be beaten in the remaining two years. Fangio arrived a few minutes later in the #658 car, but having started 24 minutes earlier, it actually took him about 30 minutes longer, having engine problems at Pescara, through Rome. By the time Fangio reached Florence, a fuel injection pipe had broken, and he was running on seven cylinders. This race was unusual in that it did not rain at any part of the route; it almost always rained at least once somewhere along all the routes used throughout the race’s history. The extended good weather helped Moss and Jenkinson to set their all-time record.
The end
The race was known for its danger, not only to drivers, but also to spectators. Over its 30-year history, a total of 56 people died. The deaths involved 24 drivers/co-drivers and 32 spectators. Most of these fatal accidents occurred on the fastest parts of the route, and almost always involved spectator fatalities. The most notorious part was the very fast first 200 miles of the circuit between Brescia and Ravenna, where more than half the fatalities during the 1950s happened. With the exception of 1927, 1931–1934 and 1936–1937, there was at least one fatal accident every year, and of the 56 total known fatalities during this race, 35 of them occurred between 1948 and 1957—an average of nearly four per race.
Racing the Mille Miglia ended after two fatal crashes involving multiple people occurred during the 1957 race. The first crash involved the factory-entered 4.0-litre Ferrari 335 S. Eleven people were killed at the village of Guidizzolo: Spanish driver Alfonso de Portago, American co-driver/navigator Edmund Nelson, and nine spectators. Five of the spectators killed were children who were standing along the race course. Portago was called in as a last-minute replacement, and was already unsettled by a race he felt was too dangerous. The crash was caused by a worn tire striking the sharp edge of a cat's eye in the road. The second crash took the life of Dutch driver Joseph Göttgens at Florence, driving a Triumph TR3 in heavy rain.
From 1958 to 1961, the Mille Miglia resumed as a rally-like event, limited to legal speeds with a few special stages that were driven at racing speed. After 1961, this once-prestigious race was permanently discontinued.
Circuit variants