1000 miles in an Alfa

Italy’s 1000 mile road race from its northern industrial town of Brescia, down the peninsula to Rome and back is the stuff of legend...

The Mille Miglia (1000 Miles) route reads like a tour guide for the most charming of Italian villages and cities – from the impossible romance of Verona to the “perfect city” of Ferrara. Then it punches to Ravenna, through the spikey mountain republic of San Marino, before slicing through Assisi and on to the ancient delights of Rome. Then it turns north again into Siena before charging through Florence and over the ancient Futa and Raticosa passes to Bologna before streaking to the motor valley centrale of Modena and ending in a crazed 200km blast over the flat lands of the Po Valley back to Brescia.

The Mille Miglia is still run, but it is no longer a race. Too many deaths saw the end of road racing in Italy in 1957 (the Mille Miglia alone had killed 56 people by then), but the spirit of the 1600km-long event was revived in the 1970s. The ‘new’ event is open to any car that could have competed in the original.

It is now a regularity trial, the most exacting and exasperating of all motorsport offshoots. You go on a series of very long drives interspersed with short sections with (slow) target average speeds. If you take it seriously, it’s exactly as much fun as it sounds.

But few in the modern Mille Miglia take it seriously and fewer still know how you’re supposed to win it, especially if you’re not Italian!

What they take seriously is their machinery. This year, it was not a stretch to think that a billion dollars worth of cars gathered in the Brescia exhibition hall for scrutineering: a priceless 1955 Benz SLR; a horde of 300 SL Gullwings; the Carrera Panamerica winner from the early 1950s; a Ferrari Testa Rossa; glorious Maserati 200S and 300S models; priceless Bugattis; stunning body shapes from when Cisitalia existed and from when Lancia was relevant.

For all that, there is little pretention about the Mille Miglia’s competitors. There can’t be, because the Mille delivers bare-bones organisation, few opportunities to eat, fewer opportunities to sleep and no opportunities to drink. There is no time for pretention. There is a mountain of it, though, with the drivers of modern Paganis, Benz SLRs and Ferraris that haunt the route pretending to be important, but that’s another story…

AUSSIE ALFA AESTHETES
Among the Mille Miglia crews this year were fellow Australian scribe, Greg Kable, and myself in an Alfa Romeo. Not just any Alfa Romeo, either, but one wheeled straight out of Alfa’s museum just for this event – one of only two 1954 2000 Sportiva coupes ever built.

It’s a car Alfa should have put into production, with 101kW from its 2.0-litre four, fed by a pair of side-draft Weber carburetors and driving through a five-speed synchro gearbox. Decades ahead of its time, the Sportiva lost out as a production car to the Giulietta Sprint and remained a museum piece, until we got it.

Part of it’s the reason for its prototype-only status was that Alfa had no way to mass produce its aluminium body, which sat on a ladder-frame chassis and looked far longer than its 3.6 metres.

A beautiful thing, with hints of Corvettes and Jaguars to come, the Sportiva was everything Colin Chapman wanted in a sportscar two decades earlier. At a tick over 900kg, we could push it around with one lazy hand.

We could push it with one hand, sure, but stopping it took both feet. One quick drive in the carpark was all the pre-event testing we had, and it was an eye opener.

Beneath 4000rpm, the Sportiva was a coughing, spluttering nightmare with a neat little gearbox and a floor-hinged brake pedal that you had to push right over to its stopper before anything happened. It needed all the pressure of a 900kg man walking up a (very strong) ladder and even then, it only slowed a touch. And it pulled to the left under brakes. Hard!

It was raining with night falling when we started, at 8.30pm on a Thursday night. And we had no windscreen wipers. Well, we had them, but they were decorative. Worse, we had no headlights. I’d brought along my mountain bike light (an awesome Exposure unit) for emergencies. Each nightfall looks like it will provide hours of emergency.

You could see Alfa’s dilemma. They could update their Sportiva so that it had some more modern niceties (like the ability to stop and see) or they could leave it as original as possible as befits a museum piece. They chose the latter and we chose to drive around in it (even though the car wouldn’t have been allowed on the road in Australia), promising circumspection and long, long stopping zones.

Still, a fuel filler cap that actually sealed wouldn’t have taken much away from the originality...
Minutes after being waved off the ramp in pouring rain, we’re slicing through Brescia trying to keep the Alfa above 4000rpm, because it works better there. And that makes the crowds wave harder, which generates its own enthusiasm inside the car…

Suddenly, the higher engine revs, the sight of other priceless artifacts sliding willfully between the barriers, the noise of people screaming “Alfa!!!” and pointing and clapping as we pass combine... It’s a sensory overload and, by agreement, circumspection is removed from our dictionary and driving plan!

The ‘disease’ of the Mille Miglia remains. Ordinarily sensible people become frenzied in cars that severely punish mistakes and taking risks they wouldn’t normally take if they lived inside a nerf ball.

And, after 10 minutes, we’re doing it, too. We’re lane splitting like a motorbike in a priceless museum piece to hit the front of the lights. And so is everybody else. Pushing oncoming traffic to the road verges to get further up the road, faster. Demanding other cars simply move over by body language and the horn…

Traffic lights and stop signs? They’re for civilians, not Mille Miglia drivers. Diving through service station forecourts to cut out a nasty piece of traffic? Well, we were just following Roger Penske and a Daimler board member…

It’s madness. It’s overwhelming madness and we aren’t the only culpable ones. The police are in the thick of it, encouraging it, displaying their anger at civilians who don’t regard it all as a marvelous jape and gesticulating with ever more enthusiasm as Mille Miglia driving becomes increasingly reckless and erratic.

And the public, lining the roads for hours on end, actively expect it.

What’s crazier is that as night falls, we’re taking more than our share of risk just by driving normally. Our lights emit a feeble yellow haze that allows us to see any lane marking within three metres of the Alfa’s nose and we’re trusting none of the spectators to jump out in front of because we simply can’t stop. My 49kg girlfriend physically couldn’t have stopped the Alfa, even from 20km/h.

And then it rains even harder. Comforted by our roof, Kable has mocked colleagues in C-Type Jaguars and Porsche Speedsters. Nature has turned the tables, because the door pockets of the Alfa now contain not only three litres of water, but also our road book and the glass and plastic box that used to be Kable’s phone!

There is so much rain that they cancel the intricate stages around Verona and, lacking contingency planning, the Mille Miglia grinds to a halt deep in the night as Romeo and Juliet central becomes a static motorsport museum.

For hours… Verona to the overnight halt at Ferrara is only 110km. We arrived there at 3:30am, then had to check in to a hotel, leaving our car on the street to catch more rainwater. There were no spectators left, there was no food anywhere and we got to bed after 4:00am.

We could finally see out of the windscreen, but that didn’t stop the Alfa from revealing another of its original-parts idiosyncrasies. There was something either missing or broken in its steering box and it would run straight with the wheel pointing a quarter turn in one direction. If the corner went that way, fine. If it went the other way, the steering wheel had a full quarter-turn blank spot where nothing (Nothing!!!) happened before it loaded up and then, when the road straightened up again, the wheel was pointing a quarter of a turn the other way.

It smacked of a mechanical problem that, like the brakes and the lights and the wipers, created uncertainties that didn’t bear too much rational thought.

What did, though, was the Alfa’s terrific, strong heart. That engine and gearbox kept gaining our respect. We found that it would push along beautifully between 4000-6000rpm and we never much bothered with the speedo. Its shifts were slick and sharp, and it pulled hard and often, and once it clicked into fifth, the thing just howled with gear whine, sent a frequency through the car that set every nut rattling and it ran like it had zero rolling or air resistance and had found another 50 horses.

Back in the day, Alfa claimed a top speed of 220km/h for the 2000 Sportiva. We saw about 170-odd and the car would have happily kept going. So did the police motorcycle rider who was alongside us as we were doing it, slicing ahead to push slower cars out of the fast lane with an assertive shoving gesture.

Most were happy, wanting to see the Alfa blast by, too. The only ones who didn’t want to go any quicker were Greg and I, who were, coincidentally, the only ones who knew how much road we’d need to stop from this speed. We calculated on it needing heaps, cubed!

Besides driving the daylights out of our Alfa, some of the day’s highlights were our running mates. We had 15 museum Benzes directly in front of us, but more interesting were jaw-droppingly beautiful things like a 1955 Ferrari 750 Monza, a Ferrari 375 MM Berlinetta, a Maserati 200 S, a host of Alfa and Cisitalia coupes and C-Type Jaguars. And all of them are being thrashed as hard as our Sportiva.

There’s a pattern to the Mille Miglia. You have to drive dangerously to keep to its schedules – even more crazily if you indulge in its slow lunch stops… And then you arrive at a postcard city or village and it all stops again, with clutches overheating, head gaskets straining and drivers remembering what heat soak and vapour lock was all about.

Sometimes, like in San Marino, it stops for more than an hour on steep slopes. Think about 60-plus-year technology in the equivalent of modern stop-start traffic on a steep mountain for an hour, in very thin air, and you have an idea. Plenty of cars failed there this year…

The tempo became a recurring theme and one that irritated more than just us, with the organisers using the entrants and their cars as their own marketing tools all over Italy.

The core of the problem is that, besides the Mille Miglia entrants, the organisers also took money from a fleet of modern Ferraris which usually went through the scheduled towns first, then skipped the hard yards by flitting along the freeways to the next town – all the way down and up the peninsula. By the time number 312 arrived in any given village, even the first “real” cars had beaten us there by more than four hours, and the modern Ferraris had beaten them. Villager's eyes had long since blurred over...

Night fell again long before Roma arrived, with the Sportiva somewhere towards the rear two thirds of a 40-stong convoy of priceless artifacts all tucked up behind two police bikes riding moderately for 150km. Hardly the stuff of Mille Miglia legend, and made worse at the time control set up in a large, dusty layby in Rome’s outskirts.

We knew what time we had to check in, we knew which order we had to be in so parked up with the car numbers around us. Essentially, we’d self-policed to form a series of lines that would see everybody check in on time. And then the Italian organisers “helped”, by encouraging latecomers with later numbers to shove in where they wanted. And then we were late, even with the time control 30 metres away.

With dozens of cars queued up in front of us, we just couldn’t get there. It was ludicrous, made worse by having another regroup area just ahead of the time control, where cars were put back in order to be convoyed by police through to the middle of Rome for the official finish point.

At one point, when a marshal was insisting we make room for a car more than 40 door numbers (so, with a check-in time 40 minutes later) behind us, Kable exploded, leaping out of the car pointing at both door numbers until the marshal (and the drivers) cowered in fear.

So we arrived in Rome around 9.30pm. Two hours later we were still in this same dusty layby, a situation nobody was patient with given the same thing had happened at the midday time control, too.

Then we were finally escorted, slowly, around some of the most important sites in the western world, to our complete indifference. By now, it was 1:30am, we’d been in the Alfa for 16 hours and we needed a bed.

By 1955, the entire
European continent followed the Mille Miglia as intently as it follows
only soccer today. And in that year, the focus was on a silver arrow,
piloted by a pukka Brit racer. Updated via radio as Stirling Moss’s
Mercedes-Benz SLR scorched in and out of each checkpoint in the only
fully dry Mille Miglia in nearly 20 years, it was as though the whole
continent held its breathe.

They knew his exact average speed
and time for each ‘tween-city burst and marveled, knowing that Moss’ car
was a full-blooded Grand Prix racer with a road-going body taking on
local Italian knowledge and the might of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and
Maserati.

The Italians realized before even Moss that he might
become the first man in history to average 100mph over the race’s 1000
mile course.

The tension grew and the airwaves became
increasingly frenzied. By the time Moss reached Rome, the entire country
realized something very special was brewing. Five million of them –
more than 10 per cent of the population of Italy – left their homes and
jostled around the closed roads to see him bellow past.

Moss averaged (averaged!) a fraction under 100 miles per hour (160km/h),
including fuel, tyre and compulsory timing stops. On the 136km home
sprint between Cremona and Brescia, he averaged a tick under 200km/h. In
an open-topped car with no roll bars, no seat belts.

Moss never won the Mille again and neither did Mercedes-Benz. It didn’t matter.
This one race, more than anything else in his career, secured Moss his
place in motorsport’s Hall of Fame and this one race, more than Le Mans
and more than Formula One, built Benz’s lingering post-war engineering
reputation.

Perhaps that’s why Mercedes has made – and continues
to make – more international marketing mileage out of Moss’s Mille
Miglia victory than Alfa Romeo has out of its 11 wins.

But the third day is the big day. If it has taken two nights and a day to get this far, we’ve got just this day to get back again. On the road book timings, we’ve got 16 hours of driving ahead of us. We should be in Brescia at 23:28 tonight.

Fortunately, apart from burning our eyes with petrol fumes and brake pads that felt like roller skates on wet marble, we’d gained confidence in the little Alfa through the day.

That powertrain delivered a heart like a racehorse. It had a 6000rpm redline, but wasn’t upset at the odd transgression beyond that and it just felt unbreakable. The same for the gearbox. Every now and again a throw to second would go gratingly wrong, but it was slick and sharp and accurate.

But it was the trustworthiness of the ladder-frame chassis, with its De Dion rear axle, that impressed us the most. We got used to the steering “flop” and drove around it. We got used to the lack of brakes and used understeer instead.

Once we’d sorted those little issues out, we found superbly comfortable seats, a steering position that gave lie to subsequent Alfa layouts and a chassis we could throw around the mountains with a confidence that frightened plenty of more legendary, faster cars out of our way.

Passing a Ferrari MM 375 Berlinetta was a buzz. Passing a Maserati 200 S was another… And hacking our way through the squadron of SL Benzes – repeatedly – was a real joy...

“Pass him!” my co-driver repeatedly shouted as another exotic showed up in the dramatically curved windscreen.

Roger Penske? Passed.
Yasmin Le Bon? Gone.
David Coulthard in the SLR? Err, no...

One jaw-droppingly beautiful Italian mountain top village passed into another as we crossed into Tuscany, with the little Alfa humming joyfully, happy to be out of captivity for a gallop.

Siena, perhaps the most beautiful of Italian city of them all, had the remnants of a crowd lining the piazza but where Palio horses slid on sawdust here months before, we meandered in a line of stop-start traffic, accepting the cheers of a crowd pointing at us and ignoring the Gullwings.

It was much the same story into Firenze, though the stop-start traffic was even worse and lasted for much longer.

Then the Futa Pass, a road I know intimately from cars far faster than this, beckoned. The run from Firenze to Bologna, which crosses two mountain ranges, is one of the great roads of the world. Even with our late start number, the roads were still hedged with people and everybody wanted to be part of the show, which is what it must be like all the time for the early runners.

These roads are spectacular examples of the art form, a series of cresting, sweeping, tightening monsters that flow as seamlessly uphill as they do down. And, for nearly the first time, we know we’re involved in something special.

It seems like every car club in Europe is here: Austin Healy clubs, Ferrari clubs, Maserati clubs and, of course, Alfa Romeo clubs. There are also MGs, a fleet of Mercedes-McLaren SLRs (including two 722 Stirling Moss editions) and a host of Paganis and they all do their best to dive out of the way whenever a Mille Miglia car looms large.

But it’s the people that make the Futa Pass special. Banners hung from the strangest places cheer on favoured brands, cars park randomly, cameras flash in broad daylight and the cheering never stops.

Re-invigorated by the crowd’s enthusiasm, we punch the Alfa past our two police escort riders and uncork it. Rising 60 years old, the Sportiva responds, letting us raise its redline a few hundred revs and driving its vintage Michelin X so hard onto the road it feels like it’s painted on.

Finally, this is what the real Mille Miglia is all about. The Alfa Romeo club, gathered at the top of the Raticosa Pass’s famous hotel, roars wildly, flags waving, as the Alfa crackles down a gear, rolls on its rear springs and squats hard under full power, diving fearlessly into the run down the mountains into Bologna.

The little four-pot responds to the Alfa club, echoing its soulful, sweet, strong blare off the hill cutaways to let them enjoy it for longer.

It’s too good to last, and it doesn’t – Bologna’s outskirts are so rammed with traffic that at least two oldies drop out with overheating. It takes a while to escape to the ancient Via Emilia.

Still, I was at least in very familiar country, having lived in Modena for six years, and I inadvertently giggled driving through the Ferrari factory and out onto the Fiorano circuit, even though I had been unofficially banned by the Prancing Horse years ago.

UK colleague Chris Harris was in the same position in his C-Type Jaguar, both of us thumbing our noses at the country that thinks it’s a car company.

If I had images of a wild, bucking blast through Modena, doing everything I’d wanted to do on the city streets for years, I was disappointed. It rained, traffic was thick and the event only organized to drive around some of its less romantic streets to the new Casa Enzo Ferrari museum in yet another nod to the Mille Miglia’s joint-marketing raison d’etre.

With 200km to go to Brescia, Kable takes the wheel across the flat land of the Po Valley. Night has fallen yet again and our lights are proving inadequate. Still, we’re happy. We’re on the way to the finish, we’re among the cars we should be among and they have much better illumination than us.

And then the Alfa coughed and spat. It had been doing that for the entire event, but only beneath 4000rpm. This time it didn’t matter what revs we used or what gear we were in. It spluttered again and died and the Po Valley never seemed so quiet.

I pushed it for 500 metres until it rested in the soft light of a country trattoria and we lifted the bonnet. The glorious little 2.0-litre engine was intact, the Webers looked in perfect condition and I called our backup crew with details of where to find us.

Their first thought was fuel. With so much of it fuming up the cabin, it was an entirely plausible theory to us, but the Sportiva had plenty. Four notches on the wooden stick, as befits the technology of the era.

There is much to frustrate the foreigner living in Italy, but there is an underlying joy of life that often bounces those frustrations clean out of your head some days.

While we waited with our stricken Alfa, the owner of the trattoria emerged unbidden with a table, which he planted down beside the car. He then returned laden with gnocchi e tigelli and salami and mortadella and glasses and a bottle of lambrusco.

And he wanted to talk about Alfas and our Alfa. And he’d take nothing for it, save an Alfa hat.

After much fiddling, a new battery went in behind the seats, supplemented by a battery booster behind my head and, sustained by our first actual meal in three days, we climbed back in.

Our mechanic told us to run back to Brescia (in the rain) with no lights at all, following their 159 Sportwagon. You’d be shot for trying it anywhere else in the world.

You’d be shot several times for what Kable did next. With no lights on and with his co driver now holding a mountain bike light out of the passenger window, he’s decided our support team is too slow and he overtakes the 159. Then he realizes he can’t see. Then he realizes nobody coming towards us knows we’re there, in our priceless museum piece. But he perseveres.

This goes on, with the only light available coming from overhead street lights and the Exposure, which is, incidentally, what its operator is suffering from… Then 120km from home, we are passed by one of the Mille Miglia sweep cars with awesome headlights. This guy knows what he’s doing and, more importantly, quickly figures out what we’re doing. Then he sets sail at around 130km/h with his lights on high beam, braking early when needed, indicating early where needed and generally proving that it wasn’t his first disco.

He even took us into the town with still-operating time controls, skipped us around those without them and flew across the Po Valley, spreading a resolve-stiffening patch of white light for the blind to follow.

Around midnight he whips us through Cremona, home of the violin, and we can almost smell Brescia.

He knows we’re running up against the clock and drops the hammer for the run home, Kable follows hard in our brave little Alfa, topping 160km/h on the wet, black two-lane road with no lights, aiming the car based on our new, trusted friend’s brake lights and his clear morse code. A short tap on the brake pedal means go down a gear, two taps is two gears.

This keeps up until we’re finally in the backblocks of Brescia and, if anything, he speeds up, pulling us harder into the finish. And then, just like that, he’s gone and so is our vision but we’re home, the second last car to scramble up over the finish ramp of the 2013 Mille Miglia.

Unburstable, too, is Alfa’s hold on this country. People stop and point and cheer and clap for a fast, hard-driven historic Alfa and the harder it’s driven the more excited their antics.

It left us with two conclusions. Firstly, if Alfa wants to recover the emotional hold it had in the 1960s, its upcoming 4C needs to be a spiritual successor of this very car – incredibly strong in the powertrain, responsive to the throttle, sweet engine note, faithful chassis poise, light handling feel, crisp gearbox and a bloody good drive.

For a 60-year-old prototype to turn up to be flogged for 1600km on minimal preparation – and perform this well, it must have been an awesome thing in its day. This is precisely the feeling the 4C needs to rediscover.

Secondly, the Mille Miglia itself is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in a car.

It’s badly managed, ill-conceived in many ways and in other ways it’s disrespectful of its core participants.

It’s also an exercise in sleep and food deprivation and, if it’s the driving you love, just enter Targa Tasmania and be done with it. It’s a better-run event and you get to drive your car properly on closed stages with no oncoming traffic.

I’d have to think very hard about doing the Mille Miglia again, if anybody asked me. The sensible part of my brain says no. But my heart knows what the real decision would be…