Tazio Giorgio Nuvolari
Tazio Giorgio Nuvolari (16 November 1892 – 11 August 1953) was an Italian racing driver from Castel d’Ario near Mantua — nicknamed “il Mantovano Volante” (the Flying Mantuan) and simply “Nivola” — and is among the most acclaimed racing drivers in history. At 5’5” and 130 pounds, he was physically slight and outwardly unremarkable; behind the wheel he was ferocious, intuitive, and entirely without fear. Ferdinand Porsche called him “the greatest driver of the past, the present or the future.” He won 72 major races from 150 starts, including 24 Grands Prix, two Mille Miglias, two Targa Florios, two RAC Tourist Trophies, a Le Mans, and the 1932 European Championship in Grand Prix racing. He raced on motorcycles from 1920, winning the 1925 350cc European Motorcycle Championship, before concentrating entirely on cars from 1931 after Vittorio Jano personally recruited him to Alfa Romeo’s works team.
Nuvolari’s Alfa Romeo years produced a constellation of legendary moments. In the 1930 Mille Miglia, driving an Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 GS Spider Zagato with co-driver Battista Guidotti — and making the first Mille Miglia run at an average speed exceeding 100 km/h — Nuvolari was leading on elapsed time but lay behind his teammate Achille Varzi on the road (Varzi had started after him). In the dark of night, with the speedometer touching 150 km/h on flat country roads, Guidotti conceived the idea and Nuvolari nodded: they extinguished the headlights. Tailing Varzi’s tail-lights at racing speed in absolute darkness for kilometre after kilometre, invisible in Varzi’s rear-view mirror, Nuvolari closed the gap — and then switched his lights on and flew past “the shocked” Varzi near the Brescia finish. It took Varzi three years to forgive the co-driver Guidotti for the “joke.” In 1932, Nuvolari won the European Championship at the wheel of Jano’s Alfa Romeo P3, winning the Italian, French, Monaco, and German Grands Prix in a single season. In 1933 he shared the 24 Hours of Le Mans victory with Raymond Sommer in an Alfa Romeo 8C “Monza.” His absolute zenith came at the 1935 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring — where, in an aging Alfa Romeo P3 entered by Enzo Ferrari’s Scuderia, he defeated the vastly superior Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union Silver Arrows on their home circuit before 300,000 German spectators. Race officials were so unprepared for an Italian victory that the band reportedly did not know the Italian national anthem.
Two things became inseparable from Nuvolari’s image: his yellow jumper with blue trousers, and a golden tortoise. On 28 April 1932, the poet and provocateur Gabriele d’Annunzio — soldier, nationalist, cocaine addict, and one of the most vivid figures in Italian cultural life — invited Nuvolari to his estate at the Vittoriale and presented him with a gold tortoise badge. The inscription read: “To the fastest man in the world, the slowest animal.” Nuvolari wore it as a talisman at all times thereafter; it became as iconic as the man himself, and is still today the crest of the Automobile Club of Mantua. His relationship with rival Achille Varzi was the defining axis of pre-war Italian racing: the two were stylistic opposites — Nuvolari instinctive and emotional, Varzi cold and precise — and each had written clauses into their contracts preventing the other from being a teammate. They were mutual admirers as much as rivals. After a fire during the Pau race in 1937 destroyed his car and nearly killed him, Nuvolari left Alfa Romeo and drove for Auto Union in 1938–1939, mastering the notoriously difficult rear-engined German cars well enough to win at Donington and in Yugoslavia.
Nuvolari continued racing after World War II despite catastrophically deteriorating health from decades of petrol-fume and exhaust inhalation. He drove a Cisitalia to second place at the 1947 Mille Miglia while coughing blood. A doctor who examined him in the early 1950s was astonished he could still function. He died on 11 August 1953 of pulmonary emphysema and bronchial complications. Italy mourned as if it had lost a soldier. The British historian Cyril Posthumus wrote: “To Italy he became an idol, a demi-god, a legend, epitomizing all that young Italy aspired to be; the man who ‘did the impossible’, not once but habitually, the David who slew the Goliaths.”
Connections
- Alfa Romeo — drove_for, 1930–1937, source: motorsportmagazine.com
- Scuderia Ferrari — drove_for (Alfa-entered), intermittently 1930–1937, source: motorsportmagazine.com
- Enzo Ferrari — managed_by, 1930–1937, source: motorsportmagazine.com
- Vittorio Jano — recruited_by; drove Jano’s P2, 6C, 8C, P3, 1930–1937, source: tazionuvolari.it
- Alfa Romeo P3 — drove, 1932–1935, source: wikipedia.org
- Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 — drove (Monza variant), 1933 Le Mans, source: motorsportmagazine.com
- Mille Miglia — won 1930 (headlights story), source: wikipedia.org
- Achille Varzi — chief rival; 1930 Mille Miglia protagonists; mutual no-partner clauses, source: wikipedia.org
- Auto Union — drove_for, 1938–1939, source: wikipedia.org