Word: nuvolari
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Most men shrink from death. Tazio Nuvolari spent most of his life racing toward it. Born in the little village of Castel d'Ario, in the province of Mantua, he first challenged death at 13, jumping off his parents' roof with an umbrella for a parachute. Tazio got off with a few bruises...
Cheers for a Virtuoso. Death rode often with Nuvolari in World War I, when he drove a Red Cross ambulance. In 1924 he won his first auto race, and a legend began to grow. At first, crowds came to witness the early end of the tiny (5 ft. 4 in., 130 Ibs.) "Flying Madman." When they found that he was virtually indestructible, they cheered for a virtuoso of the wheel. Nuvolari steered his string of Bugattis, Alfa-Romeos, Cisitalias and Ferraris with profanity, main force and incredible finesse. No stylist, he seldom took a curve the same way twice...
...Road is part love song and part a dirge over what, and how, the conventional men are willing to drive. Not for Purdy the "chrome piled on chrome and tin upon tin." Lovingly he writes of Designers Ettore Bugatti, Fred Duesenberg, Frederick Henry Royce and of Driver Tazio Nuvolari. To Purdy, as to most addicts, Nuvolari is II Maestro, "indis putably the greatest driver who ever lived." Not on "dull" tracks like the Indianapolis Speedway did II Maestro show his genius, but in grueling road races run day & night. Nuvolari, now 60 and retired, was "hard on his mounts...
Favorite was blond Bernd Rosemeyer of Germany who last year won seven out of eight Grand Prix races in Europe, easily outclassed Italy's Tazio Nuvolari, the 1936 Vanderbilt Cup winner. Rosemeyer got away fast at the start this week, temporarily yielded his lead to his countryman Rudolf Caracciola until the tenth lap. Noisiest and swiftest (160 m.p.h.) on the straightaways, Rosemeyer roared up a lead of two-thirds of a lap before the race was one-third run. Headed only when he dropped out for tire changes on the 79th lap, Rosemeyer soon caught young Dick Seaman...
Asked about his rivals, 43-year-old Nuvolari had given out a statement: "I have great respect for several of them but I expect to win." A driver with such courage that he once won a race with his leg in a plaster cast, such endurance that he drove in another the day after a crack-up which doctors had said would keep him in bed for half a year, Nuvolari wears a little silver turtle on a string around his neck to remind him of the fable about the tortoise and the hare. Last week he remembered both...