The best ever Monaco Grand Prix

We have been blessed with some fabulous Monaco Grands Prix, which is amazing given what an improbable place it is to hold a race. But which race was the best, taking into account everything that makes Monaco so beguiling: the cars and drivers of course, but also Monaco's unique architecture in the strictest sense of the word, its buildings, balconies and balustrades and its hillsides, harbor, its tunnel, its roads and the Mediterranean Sea that defines, confines and embraces the Principality.

Before the modern Formula 1 World Championship began in 1950, we had Bugatti T35Bs and T51s holding sway from the inaugural race in 1929 which was won by the mysterious "Williams" (William Grover, newly re-discovered as a French Resistance hero in Joe Saward's book, Grand Prix Saboteurs).

Indeed, so dominant were these cars that in 1930 that Bugatti took the first 10 places. Rene Dreyfus won by the legerdemain of having a reserve gas tank that let him go farther than the other Bugatti 35s in the race, running the complete 100 laps without a pit stop.

Later on in the 1930s another familiar feature of the Monaco landscape, Scuderia Ferrari, made its first appearance at Monaco, but not with a "Ferrari" grand prix car just yet.

Enzo Ferrari was at that point managing the Alfa Romeo race team (but with a Ferrari prancing horse insignia on the louvered bonnet of the Alfa Romeo P3s run by Scuderia Ferrari), and Ferrari's team won first time out in 1934 by half a minute.

Prior to the Silver Arrows completely taking over the last half of the decade, in 1932, Alfa Corse (Alfa Romeo's factory team) had a kind of 'team orders' victory at Monaco with Tazio Nuvolari's Alfa Romeo 8C edging out by three seconds his team-mate, Rudolph Caracciola, in a similar white-painted machine.