Nuvolari!
by David Finlay (11 August 2003)
Tazio Nuvolari always assumed he would die at the wheel of a racing car. Fifty years ago today, he died in bed, the victim of a massive stroke suffered nine months previously, his lungs damaged beyond repair after decades of breathing in toxic exhaust fumes.
It's said that more than 50,000 people attended his funeral in his home town of Mantua. One of them was Enzo Ferrari, who had to stop at a plumber's shop to ask for directions. The plumber did not recognise him but appreciated the fact that this stranger wanted to pay his respects to the local legend. "Thank you for coming," he said. "A man like that will not be born again."
Nuvolari was the man heroes considered to be their hero. He was the childhood idol of, for example, Juan Manuel Fangio, whose record of five World Championship titles was unequalled for nearly half a century. Bernd Rosemeyer, one of the very few drivers who was able to get to grips with the ferocious Auto Unions of the 1930s, ignored the fact that he and Nuvolari shared no common language and chose him to be the godfather of his son; who else on the planet, Rosemeyer felt, was worthy of Bernd Jnr?
Prince Birabongse Bhanutej Bhanubandh of Siam, who under the name B Bira became one of Britain's most successful pre-War drivers, went to the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in 1936. A social gathering before the race brought out the English public schoolboy in him rather than the oriental royalty.
He was madly excited at being in the company of the world's best drivers, but despite the presence of Rosemeyer, Caracciola, Stuck, Farina and Taruffi, the one that made the biggest impression on him - simply because they were in the same building at the same time - was Nuvolari.
So many years on, it's difficult to say exactly why his contemporaries were in such awe of him, but we can make a few guesses. He was, of course, a brilliant and totally uncompromising driver. His competitiveness had been shown during his days as a champion motorcyclist, when he refused to let trivialities such as two broken legs prevent him from taking the saddle.
His riding exploits may have helped to make him a fearless driver (it would be by no means the only example of this). Sitting alongside him was certainly not for those of a nervous disposition, as a young mechanic found during the 1932 Targa Florio. The arrangement was that Nuvolari would give a warning cry every time he was about to fling his Alfa Romeo into an especially tricky corner so that his inexperienced passenger could take cover behind the dashboard. After the race, the mechanic was asked how things had gone. "Nuvolari started shouting at the first bend and finished at the last one!" he said, picking himself up off the floor.
Perhaps it wasn't just his driving that made him a legend, though. One of Nuvolari's fiercest rivals was his fellow Italian Achille Varzi, a man for whom the phrase "troubled genius" might have been invented. There was much discussion about which of them was the greater, and some people talked of running a match race between them to decide the matter. Varzi asked Nuvolari if he was interested. Nuvolari said he wasn't. If he won, he explained, he would feel sorry for Varzi. If Varzi won, he would never again be at peace. Best to leave things as they were.
Italian manufacturers dominated the racing scene at that time, but within a few years the Germans had reacted brilliantly to new technical regulations and built cars whose like had never been seen before. From then until war broke out, you had to be at the wheel of a Mercedes or an Auto Union to stand any chance of winning a major race.
For Nuvolari, impossible odds merely added a little spice to the game. Before he joined Auto Union (following the death of Rosemeyer) he battled mightily in hopelessly outclassed cars, frequently causing enormous embarrassment in the process. He may have been the only driver in the world who could have taken an Alfa Romeo P3 so far beyond its limits as to beat all the high-budget, high-tech local cars round the Nürburgring to win the 1935 German Grand Prix. Needless to say, when he made the move to Auto Union he was an excellent successor to Rosemeyer, winning among other races the 1938 event at Donington.
Bizarrely, he actually raced for MG once, in a K3 Magnette. This was at the 1933 Ards TT in Northern Ireland, and he obliterated the field. The story goes that when asked later about the brakes he replied that he didn't know much about them because he had hardly ever used them. That sounds authentic coming from a man who once said that he could make a car stop without brakes but could not make it go without an engine.
I'm not so sure. Three years ago I met an elderly fellow who, to my astonishment, turned out to have entered that race in an Aston Martin. The car didn't survive the practice session, so my new friend was reduced to the role of spectator for the event itself. He stood at the end of a long straight and noticed that Nuvolari was doing something no one else could. There was a small patch of new tarmac on the road ("about the size of a glove") and when the front wheel on the passenger side touched it, Nuvolari started braking. Every single lap. No other driver, I was assured, approached that level of accuracy.
He was never a young racer. Born in 1892, his bike career started when he was 27, and he didn't really get going in cars until he was 35. But the battering his lungs received also made him old before his time. When Fangio retired from the sport almost in the same minute that he realised he wasn't enjoying it as much as he used to, he was thinking partly of the time he watched Nuvolari racing an uncompetitive Maserati in the late 1940s and being beaten by inferior drivers. Fangio was appalled that the man who had inspired him long before was now reduced to this, and vowed that he would retire while he was still at the top of his profession.
But Nuvolari still had some great post-war races, like the 1947 Mille Miglia. He drove a little Cisitalia sports car which should have been outgunned by the far more powerful opposition, but he was leading by a huge margin - despite illness, atrocious weather and a route which stretched over 1800km in a single day - when the ignition packed up. Nuvolari fixed it, but the delay handed the win to Clemente Biondetti's 2.9-litre Alfa Romeo. Biondetti's reaction afterwards showed him to be, if not the greatest driver in the sport, then certainly one of the most honourable: "I did not win the race," he said, in acknowledgement of Nuvolari's incredible drive. "I merely finished first."
Nuvolari should have driven another Cisitalia in the same event the following year, but it broke in testing. He was offered a Ferrari at the last minute and, with no practice whatever, was leading by half an hour when the car started falling apart. The bonnet had flown off and the seat bolts had snapped before he was finally forced into retirement thanks to a broken spring pivot. It was his last great drive, but not his last event - that was the Palermo-Montepellegrino hillclimb in 1950. He won his class.
He was a daredevil, an incomparable racer, and in the words of Dr Ferdinand Porsche (designer of the original Auto Union GP cars) "the greatest driver of the past, the present and the future". He was delighted when the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio gave him, of all things, a little golden tortoise ("to the fastest man in the world, the slowest animal") and adopted it as his mascot. He knew all anyone needs to know about personal tragedy, having watched two sons die before they reached the age of 20. If his own death had occurred during a race, the motor racing community would have gone into shock, but it might have been a better end than the one he experienced, ill and in pain and no doubt desperately bored as he lay in bed.
"Thank you for coming. A man like that will not be born again." A man like that never was.
