Driving the Mille Miglia

At least in the English-speaking world it is almost impossible to mention the Mille Miglia and not also mention Stirling Moss, the legendary British race car driver (often called the greatest racer never to win the Formula One championship). Moss is one of only three outright winners of the Mille Miglia who was not Italian, and he is the only British one (the other two are German, Rudolf Caracciola in 1931, in a Mercedes SSKL, and Huschke von Hanstein, in a BMW 328, in 1940, when the war limited the race and its entrants). Moss’s 1955 victory, achieved in a little over ten hours, in a Mercedes 300SLR, with navigator Denis Jenkinson using hand signals to prepare Moss, based on their reconnaissance notes, for each bend in the road (the noise of the car made it impossible to communicate otherwise), is to the history of auto racing what Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is to major-league baseball or what Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points in an NBA game is: larger than life and likely never to be challenged. Moss averaged almost a hundred miles an hour for the entire 1955 Mille Miglia, and he did so thanks to achieving speeds on some of the straight-aways of close to 170 mph. That’s the stuff of top-level, closed-circuit racing. It is also part of the reason the original Mille Miglia came to an end. It was simply not possible to sustain speeds like that, as well as safety, on open, ordinary roads. It is therefore hard to imagine a scenario where Moss’s and Jenkinson’s achievement could be equaled.