Mille Miglia memories

There is everything here. The restaurants are wonderful, the surrounding countryside divine, and the race track magnificent in the great tradition. Coming to Imola each year sluices away the discontent you feel at places like the Hungaroring and Kyalami Jr.

The good feeling starts even before you get into the place. Roads leading to the track bear names such as Via T Nuvolari, Via A Ascari, Via L Musso. In Italy they honour their gods. Long-retired drivers come to Imola, and are recognised and saluted wherever they go.

It is this quality in Italian motor racing I have always found so appealing, this impression of continuity. Many a current Grand Prix driver has literally not a grain of interest in the sport's history: the day they began to race was the day racing began. And while I feel sorry for them, I also believe they miss a lot that way, perhaps even a part of their professional education. Self-absorption has its price.

Wander anywhere around an Italian race track with Denis Jenkinson, and sooner or later someone will bound up to seize his hand: "Jenkinson! Mille Miglia!"

It is now 37 years since that memorable May Day when Jenks - with Stirling Moss in a Mercedes-Benz 300SLR - lapped Italy in a fraction over 10 hours. The winning car may have been German, but the 1955 Mille Miglia has passed into Italian racing folklore.

DSJ's subsequent story of the race stands as a classic piece of racing journalism, and how could it be otherwise? He didn't merely watch; he was there, a couple of feet from the greatest driver on one of his greatest days.

For Imola some of us always stay in a wonderful pensione nearby. Drive away into the hills behind the village, and soon you appreciate this is where God lives. Mountains and meadows without end, and road signs reading 'Futa' and 'Raticosa.' Over these passes they raced each May, on the way back to Brescia.

Last Friday evening Alan Henry and I drove up there with Jenks. "I'll have to drive," Jenks said, "because those roads make me feel ill if I'm a passenger..."

That being the case, I ventured, wasn't it a bit of a problem in the 300SLR? "No," Jenks said, "I got some pills to take care of it. No problem." There were some side effects, he added, but these need not detain us here.

Among those at the roadside that afternoon long ago was a skinny kid of 15. He watched, entranced, then cried on the way home. The family was emigrating to America the next month, and he believed he had seen a racing car for the last time. In this he was somewhat wide of the mark. Mario Andretti remembers the day well.

If he had been riding with Jenks in the Fiat Uno last weekend, Mario would certainly have approved of the way he whirled it through the hairpins: "The old boy really gets with the programme, doesn't he?" I can hear him saying.

There is a quite extraordinary romance about the Mille Miglia, and it lingers still over these roads. There is the odd bit of guardrail here and there, but otherwise the landscape is unmarred, and exactly as Jenks remembers it. At one point we passed an hotel: "That's where Herrmann parked his Mercedes - fuel tank split...

"People seem to think I literally guided Stirling the whole way," he said, "as if I was suggesting what gear he should be in, and things like that. In fact, when he had a clear view of what was ahead, I just let him get on with it. The route chart we had was only there so I could warn him of what he couldn't see."

Not all drivers took a passenger, however, and had therefore to drive 'blind'. Jenks says he and Moss prepared for the '55 race with unusual thoroughness: "We did a lot of recce work, first in a Mercedes 220 saloon, which gave us the chance to discuss as we went along, and then in a 300SL coupe, which was quick enough to give some idea of what it would be like, but still allowed conversation.

"The great thing was, I could look across valleys and so on, and see if the road was clear. If it was, I'd give Stirling the signal, and then he could go for it, using all the road. If you were trying to do that on your own, it was a bit dodgy..."

Piero Taruffi, who won the last Mille Miglia, in 1957, was one who always ran the race alone. "It was a bit different for him, mind you," Jenks pointed out, "because he knew stretches of the route by heart. They were local roads to him."

Up at the top of the Futa Pass is a memorial to Clemente Biondetti, who won the race four times. "It was so hot that day," Jenks recalls, "that the road surface melted, and this hill here was almost bubbling. We lost about a minute here, in fact, because we couldn't get any traction, and we crawled up, sliding all over the place."

The Biondetti plaque is weatherbeaten, but no less impressive for that - indeed, the battering of the elements rather confers on it that sense of permanence which is intrinsic to Italian motor racing.

In the same way, an Italian newspaper last week polled its readers, asking them to name their favourite Ferrari driver. Predictably, it was a landslide for Gilles Villeneuve, but an equally decisive second favourite was Niki Lauda, and that rather surprised me; I would have thought Niki perhaps too analytical, too rational, truly to capture the Italian imagination. In the end, perhaps, all that matters is that they drove Ferraris, and did great things with them.

It seems a long time now since 1983, when Patrick Tambay scored Ferrari's last victory at Imola, and probably it mattered a great deal to the tifosi that another home triumph was hardly in prospect last weekend. But still they were there, in their tens of thousands, on Friday and Saturday, as well as race day.

In Italy, it has to be red to be perfect, but any colour is pretty good. As long it moves fast and screams its song, they will stand on the hillsides and they will smile.