Drivers, designers, engineers, founders…The people who shaped motorsport ando those changing it now. No protocol.
Carlo Chiti, the Ferrari engineer who made Phil Hill a champion and then dragged him down with him The first American to win the Formula 1 World Championship did it in a car designed by a man most Americans have never heard of. Phil Hill took the 1961 title in the Ferrari 156, the “sharknose,” … Read more
Ferdinand Piëch’s Bugatti Volkswagen gave up on selling the Phaeton in North America after the 2006 model year, with around 3,500 found homes in three years. Analysts at Bernstein Research later worked out that the big sedan lost €28,101 on every unit sold worldwide between 2002 and 2012, and that the Bugatti Veyron lost about … Read more
In 1903 Benz & Cie. replaced Carl Benz with a 25-year-old Frenchman. The sales collapse, the Paris-Madrid, and the boxer engine nobody credits him for.
The 1940 Propaganda Ministry letter to Daimler-Benz, the seizure of his car, and why the 1875 date the ASME still prints is false.
Manuel Jiménez-Alfaro won the Renault 4CV license by threatening to go to Volkswagen, then founded FASA, Spain’s first private car plant. The real story.
Ferdinand Porsche Sold the Same Idea for 45 Years Ferdinand Porsche was not an engineer. He held no degree. The “Dr. Ing.” still baked into the company’s legal name carries an “h.c.” that nobody bothers to read: honoris causa. Honorary. The “Professor” is no better earned: the Stuttgart Technical University handed him an honorary chair … Read more
Alfonso de Portago: The Spanish Marquis Who Tried to Live a Hundred Years in Twenty-Eight Adam Driver’s Ferrari put a Brazilian actor named Gabriel Leone in the role of a Spanish marquis most American audiences had never heard of, and that’s the injustice this piece is here to fix. Alfonso de Portago wasn’t a side … Read more
Romano Artioli, the industrialist who decided what Campogalliano would look like when he was sixteen The easy version of Romano Artioli has been in circulation for thirty years. The Italian dreamer who came a cropper with Bugatti in the nineties. It comes neatly packaged, with its romantic adjectives, its scattered figures on the EB110, and … Read more
Dante Giacosa: the man who fit Italy inside a three-metre car Someone at Top Gear should have made a documentary about him. Someone at Netflix. Someone at Amazon. Someone at any of the outlets that pumped out hagiographies of Alec Issigonis (the Mini) or Ferdinand Porsche (the Beetle) in the last twenty years. Because the … Read more
Tazio Nuvolari: The Italian Who Humiliated the Silver Arrows On Their Own Soil On 28 July 1935, in the rain-soaked German hell that was the Nürburgring of the Eifel mountains, a 42-year-old Italian called Tazio Nuvolari climbed into a Grand Prix car carrying 110 horsepower less than the competition and proceeded to win a race … Read more
Achille Varzi: The Anti-Nuvolari, the Morphine, and the Helmet He Wasn’t Wearing Drop Tazio Nuvolari and Achille Varzi into the same room and the only thing they share is the language they speak. Everything else divides them. Nuvolari came from a Lombard farm, the son of a cyclist. Varzi came from a Piedmontese textile factory, … Read more
Vincenzo Lancia: the racing driver who became a manufacturer and refused to let his cars race Here’s a paradox that almost never gets told and that defines this man better than anything else. Vincenzo Lancia, before he turned thirty, was arguably the fastest racing driver in Italy. He drove for Fiat. He racked up podiums … Read more
