Word: miglia
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Fine Tolerances. As soon as Daimler-Benz was making money again, it went out to recapture its old racing honors. In 1952, it sent the powerful, speedy 300 SL to Brescia for Italy's famed Mille Miglia (1,000-mile race). Along went a famed prewar Mercedes figure, vat-sized Alfred Neubauer, 62, pit boss in the 1930s. Neubauer, who wears two stop watches about his neck and likes to keep a cooling case of Munich beer close by, had lost none of his cunning. Under his split-second training, crews changed tires and refueled the Mercedes...
...test of cool driving skill and hot sports cars, Italy's Mille Miglia ranks with the world's toughest races. The 950-mile course-from Brescia to Rome and back -runs over the hairpin turns of four rugged mountain passes (one so grim that it inspired some of Dante's Inferno), through scores of towns and villages, and along straight ribbons of road where the racers hit it up as high as 150 m.p.h...
This week's Mille Miglia drew a record 573 entries, and a big reason was the increasingly keen commercial competition among the sports-car makers of Germany, France, Italy and England. With production booming, the makers feel that the postwar sellers' market is over, that from now on they will have to sell their cars strictly on performance. They saw the Mille Miglia as a public proving ground...
...hours after the race began, Frenchman Lucien Descollanges careened off the highway in his Jaguar and his co-driver, Pierre Gilbert Ugnon, was killed. A Fiat hit an Italian youngster, who wandered on to the road, and killed him instantly. Twelve others were injured. Bloody as it was, Mille Miglia hardly compared with when a car plowed into a crowd and killed...
...Rome, Producer Roberto Rossellini announced that, with the permission of his wife Ingrid Bergman, he was going to drive his twelve-cylinder Ferrari in Italy's famed Mille Miglia (1,000-mile) auto race this month. Said Ingrid, with the voice of experience: "Forbidden things are always so desirable. I thought if I said yes he wouldn't enter the race. Now I'm surprised...