No ordinary amateur

With a run through the famed Futa and Raticosa Apennine passes, along with long blasts up the straights of Emilia Romagna still to come, what could stop this Teutonic machine? Certainly not an amateur driver with a mouthful of tombstone teeth, a serious fag and booze habit and, by all accounts, a keen eye for a well-turned ankle, surely…

Giovanni Bracco, however, was not just any old amateur. Apart from anything else, he was fast. Bloody fast. Scion of a textile empire, he’d been born in Biella in Northern Italy in 1908 and had developed an awesome reputation for speed and car control on Italian hillclimbs. These included his hometown course, Biella-Oropa, a searing 10km charge up 525 metres from Biella to the 1130-metre-high Sacro Monti di Oropa, a world heritage site of 12 Roman Catholic chapels.

Between 1939 and 1956 Bracco won this hillclimb outright six times. Go online and you’ll find a series of videos of the event shot in the Nineties, which not only provide compelling evidence of why you should never buy a used hot hatchback from a youthful Italian, but also gives some idea of Bracco’s ‘nerves of steel with balls to match,’ as noted motor racing historian Doug Nye puts it.

‘Either it goes, or I’ll crash it,’ was Bracco’s motto, which is almost irresistible. As Brock Yates in the brilliant Enzo Ferrari – The Man, The Cars, The Races puts it: ‘In an age when racing drivers have become sullen, money-grubbing technoids, men like Bracco seem almost Neanderthalian in their attitude towards the sport. But they brought to motor racing a brio and a kind of damn-the-torpedoes rashness that seems as out of date today as duelling over the honour of a lady.’

Too right. I’m a sucker for these ‘naturals’, whose sheer skill and Corinthian spirit leaves the pros with their vapid marketing strategies, positive-thinking coaches and self-adhesive smiles for dead. It’s the spirit of the underdog, epitomised by characters such as Alf Tupper the working-class Tough Of The Track, Sea Biscuit the tiny race horse, Roy Hobbs the legendary baseball player, or from closer to our neck of the woods: Sir Tim Birkin, Archie Scott Brown, Gilles Villeneuve or James Hunt, especially when racing for the Hesketh team.

Bracco had serious road-racing form, too. Having been a hillclimb maestro prior to World War Two, he returned to racing after the war. In 1947 he was ninth in the Mille Miglia in a Fiat 1100S, but later that year he crashed his pre-war Delage into a stranded Ferrari at the Modena circuit. Five spectators lost their lives in the accident, many more were seriously injured. Bracco jumped clear of the car in the manner of Masten Gregory’s famed elective dismounts, receiving a severely broken leg; he later confessed that the accident haunted him for years.

With the thickest of accents and an almost indecipherable speaking voice, Bracco was the four-wheeled Joey Dunlop of his era, as talented and as enigmatic. ‘They were players,’ notes Nye who groups Bracco together with the talented Marzotto brothers (also textile heirs) ‘who were sources of great revenue to Enzo Ferrari as long as he could provide them with something.’

‘Through this [Maranello] gate came the customers whom Ferrari, in his later years would unsentimentally divide into three categories: the sportsmen, the fifty-year-olds and the exhibitionists,’ wrote Richard Williams in his book, Enzo Ferrari.

I’d suggest that Bracco was firmly in the first category, in many cases faster than the professional drivers who were courted and paid by Ferrari to race his cars. Consider this: on the previous Mille Miglia in 1951, Bracco had driven a works 2-litre Lancia Aurelia B20 GT into a quite stupefying second place, just 20 minutes behind Luigi Villoresi in a works Ferrari 4.1-litre 340 America Berlinetta.

This was a purpose-built factory Ferrari prototype with an engine directly related to that in Enzo’s latest Grand Prix machine and over twice the size and with double the cylinder count of that at Bracco’s disposal. It’s hard to understate what a sensation this was or what was required to achieve it: Bracco’s thoroughly shaken co-driver, Umberto Maglioli, recounted that he must have lit and handed over 140 cigarettes across to the Italian ace during the 13-hour race.

Remember that the little Aurelia was effectively a road car, driven by Bracco on rain-swept roads against a field including works Ferraris, Alfa Romeos, Aston Martins and Jaguars. What talent must have been marshalled behind the Lancia’s two dim little headlamps as the tiny V6 coupé sped down the Adriatic coastline, past Rimini, Ancona and down to Pescara before turning into Rome and back up to Siena, Firenze and then to Bologna, Piacenza and Brescia.

At 978 miles, the route was impossible to memorise until John Fitch devised his box of ‘toilet roll’ pacenotes and lent both his idea and his co-driver Denis Jenkinson to Stirling Moss for his record breaking run in 1955. Instead, you needed to drive by the seat of your pants, drifting the little car through each and every corner as hillclimbers do, conserving tyres and brakes, fragile drivetrains and momentum. What an amazing drive, which as Doug Nye wryly notes: ‘it was if you’d entered a standard Austin Healey 100M into the Le Mans 24 hours and driven it to second place…’

Having an amateur ‘sportsman’ run his works car and driver such a close second persuaded Enzo into courting Bracco into the fold for the following year, with the promise of an unfancied experimental Ferrari.

Bracco’s 1952 Mille entry was a 250S Berlinetta weighing 907kg, with a crackling 220bhp Colombo V12 and a five-speed gearbox. It was lighter and more powerful than Kling’s Mercedes, but untried and unsupported by the Ferrari works to such an extent that at Pescara the mechanics didn’t have the right tyres available so Bracco and his co-driver, Alfonso Rolfo, were forced to run on odd-sized rear tyres all the way to L’Aquila, dropping them to fifth place.

Bracco has been criticised for his mad driving style (Brock Yates: ‘like all Italians tended to drive beyond [their] skills’), but the high attrition rate in 1952 rather gave the lie to that. Herman Lang in a Mercedes 300 SL crashed at Ferrara, Stirling Moss with Norman Dewis in the Jaguar C-Type had run off the road damaging the steering, Piero Taruffi in a 4.1-litre Ferrari 340 America lost his transmission, Eugenio Castellotti in a Ferrari 225 Sport Barchetta spider crashed out and Rudolf Caracciola in another Mercedes 300 SL couldn’t make much impact on the lead.

Kling suffered fading brakes and tyres but was no match for the hard charging Bracco. In his book Piloti Che Gente, Enzo Ferrari wrote that the mechanics had placed a flask of Chianti in the cockpit at Firenze, although other accounts speak of brandy. Doug Nye says that Maglioli, who came from the same town as Bracco, said it was definitely brandy.

So fuelled by the cigarettes and brandy passed continually to him by Rolfo, Bracco took almost five minutes out of the Mercedes over the Futa and Raticosa. If you’ve ever driven those passes, you’ll know just how treacherous they can be, slippery, with hungry looking stone walls like ramparts round each of the hairpins and unsighted corners lined with wildly enthusiastic spectators. Despite the weather, those spectators were then drawn to the roadside from Bologna up to the finish line in Brescia to watch this amazing driver push his Ferrari beyond mere sense to a win with over four minutes in hand.

It was an amazing drive; ‘probably the most spectacular success of all my racers,’ wrote Enzo Ferrari later. ‘Brave and alcohol fuelled,’ wrote Anthony Pritchard in Mille Miglia – The World’s Greatest Road Race. ‘His greatest race,’ wrote Hans Tanner in Great Racing Drivers Of The World.

Bracco was having none of it, though, with the modesty that attributes wins to competitors’ bad luck and losses to his own fault. Brock Yates reports that Bracco told journalist Gino Rancati that he was inspired by visions of German troops executing Italian Partigiani near the end of the war – with the end of World War Two just seven years distant, the Germans were still not well liked in Italy and the Mercedes team received criticism for its ‘arrogance’, though a perhaps more charitable interpretation would be ‘thoroughness’.

Bracco, the supreme natural, is a footnote to history these days while we celebrate the paid greats. That’s grossly unfair, but it’s how it is in the modern world. As usual, Ferrari proved almost vindictively ungrateful. Celebrating the anniversary of the win in 1962, Enzo handed Bracco a wristwatch. As Yates writes: ‘Bracco mused: “A watch worth a few thousand lire. And in order to compete with his cars, it cost me six hundred million lire. But it doesn’t matter.”’

No, it doesn’t, because in my mind and hopefully now yours, Giovanni Bracco is worthy of celebration as one of the most gifted drivers and a genuine hero of Italian motor racing. He died of natural causes in 1968, two months after his 60th birthday, back home in Biella. But whether time was called on his remarkable life by age or by mileage is not recorded.