Drivers, designers, engineers, founders…The people who shaped motorsport ando those changing it now. No protocol.
Ettore Bugatti: the patron who thought he was an artist When James May stood in front of a Veyron on Top Gear and called it the greatest car of the century, he was looking at a machine engineered by Volkswagen with a thousand and one horsepower, a four-turbo W16 and a price tag bigger than … Read more
The man who lost his name and built a bigger one Picture the kind of bloke who’d queue politely at a Baden-Württemberg bakery on a Saturday morning. Check shirt, glasses, big hands resting on the counter. You’d walk past him without a second glance. And then you find out he is the “A” in AMG, … Read more
Amédée Gordini — The Sorcerer Who Took On Ferrari With Nothing A Workshop Against the World There is a man standing in a workshop on Boulevard Victor in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, sometime in the early 1950s. The floor is concrete. The tools are worn. The parts bin is half empty because there is … Read more
Same Brain, Two Worlds: The Man Behind Your Wheel and a Miura’s Chris Harris once said the best engineering solutions look obvious in hindsight. He’s right. And there is no better proof than the small lever that holds your bicycle wheel in place. You’ve used it a thousand times without a second thought. Flick it, … Read more
Vittorio Jano: the engineer who designed the engines that won for Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Ferrari, and whom almost nobody remembers Here’s a question. If you walked into Goodwood next summer, stopped any ten people in the paddock, and asked them to name the most influential engine designer in the history of Italian motorsport, what … Read more
The Italian Who Walked Away From Henry Ford Detroit, 1920. The Rouge plant was still being built but Highland Park was already running flat out, churning out Model Ts at a pace nobody in Europe could match. Henry Ford himself sat down with a 27-year-old visitor from Turin and offered him a job. Stay in … Read more
The Engineer Ferrari Tried to Erase There’s a car that regularly sells for over fifty million dollars at auction. It is, by most measures, the most valuable automobile ever made. The man who engineered its engine never saw it win a race. He was fired before it crossed a finish line — handed a sealed … Read more
Emilio de Villota: The Spaniard Who Won the British F1 Championship When Spain Couldn’t Win Anything In April 1980, a thirty-three-year-old Madrileño walked into Frank Williams’ workshop in Didcot, Oxfordshire, and bought a Williams FW07. Not a sponsored deal. Not a lease. He bought the car, paid for it, took it back to the Spanish-funded … Read more
Heriberto Pronello: The Argentine Who Built Ground Effect Before Lotus Did In July 2023, the Brooklands Paddock at the Goodwood Festival of Speed put a 1969 Argentine sports prototype on display alongside two Ferrari 250 GTOs, Jackie Stewart’s Tyrrell, Carlos Reutemann’s Brabham, and the six-wheeled Williams that never raced. The crowd voted it “new favourite … Read more
Oreste Berta: The Cosworth Argentina Built and Then Abandoned In January 1975, a flatbed trailer pulled by a tired van crossed the country from Córdoba to Buenos Aires carrying a Formula 1 car. No transporter. No team uniforms. No sponsors on the bodywork. Just a small group of mechanics, a forty-six-year-old engineer named Oreste Berta, … Read more
The Man Who Saved Alfa Without Loving Cars: Nicola Romeo Most car brands that survive a century get a fairy tale stitched onto their origin story. There’s always a founder with petrol in his veins, a workshop epiphany, a sketch on a napkin. Henry Ford watching the Model T roll out the door. Frederick Henry … Read more
