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Driving Wild in a Bygone Racing Era
Tracks. Racing the Sun. By Sandro Martini. 336 pages. Aurora Metro Books. $20.66.
Grand Prix racing between the world wars was nothing like the sleek, international version of today’s elite racing. In that early third of the 20th century, life seemed to come cheap, with drivers killed at almost every race. The drivers were seen as he-men, considered national heroes known for both bravery and foolhardiness, as well as for heavy drinking and smoking, and they drove cars with few restrictions, pushing up against the mechanical limits of the time, pursuing the ultimate speed fix on tracks that had high banking corners and went on for kilometers. Safety was a non sequitur.
It was a time when racing was highly charged politically, with German and Italian drivers and cars dominating the sport, as Hitler and Mussolini took an interest in them and supported them as a show of strength. Racing cars, in fact, were central to the fascist ideals and manifestos — notably F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” which praised “the beauty of speed,” and said that a “racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Sandro Martini’s first novel, “Tracks,” tells a leading story of the era, involving one of the sport’s greatest rivalries, Tazio Nuvolari and Achille Varzi, two men of deeply contrasting characters, the one a family man and the other a high-flying drug addict and bon vivant.
Martini, a South African who studied law in Italy and has long been a New York-based journalist, manages to bring the historic characters and details of the period to life, and that is the strength of his novel.
The story is told by the narrator, Joe Deutsch, a journalist who is researching a book about Varzi, in 1968, and for that he is interviewing a former Gazzetta dello Sport journalist, Johnny Finestrini, who covered the period and who knew the drivers intimately, claiming to have brokered deals between them and team owners, and having been central to a reputed race-fixing incident.
Although it has never been proven, evidence suggests that there was a fixing incident at the 1933 Tripoli Grand Prix involving the leading drivers, including Nuvolari, Varzi and Baconin Borzacchini, to profit from the Libyan state lottery. A ticket was drawn before the race for each starter, and the holder of the ticket that indicated he was the winning driver would also win the lottery prize of 7.5 million lire.
Although the incident has been attributed to gossip by Alfred Neubauer, the Mercedes team director at the time, Martini takes the view in his novel that there was a deal between the drivers.
Martini, who said that he spent a decade researching the novel, has few connections to modern Formula One. The novel is clearly a work of passion, a job of extensive research into the life of a racing car driver in the early 20th century. And although there are few similarities between the kind of men who drove the racing cars in those days and the young men who race in Formula One today, there are nevertheless some shared aspects between the periods.
Accusations of cheating, race fixing involving some of the stars of the day, and winners decided with a coin toss (a ploy famously also used by Jean Todt, who is now the president of the International Automobile Federation when he led a rally racing team decades ago) are not unheard of today.
“Tracks” is written in a romantic, nostalgic tone, almost with a film noir feel.
“I glanced around the grid and spotted Nuvolari, who was here driving against doctors’ orders,” Finestrini says. “His leg was still in a cast, and he was smiling like a kid at Christmas. Moll, meanwhile, was already in his cockpit, and his eyes were watering from the fumes of Momberger’s Auto Union. The fuel mixture of the German car smelled like poison gas, transporting many of us back to the trenches of 1917.”
As is often the case with racing books, the endless descriptions of race details make for less-than-exciting reading. While the book’s narrative is tasty, Martini’s writing is sometimes overly florid: “Curly hair corkscrewed out from his shirt collar and sleeves, little maggots curling about his pale flesh like filthy thoughts.”
But as a contrast to today’s Formula One, his tale will be an eye-opener for many fans, especially regarding the drivers.
“Guys like Nuvolari,” Finestrini says, “war veterans, they needed the adrenaline junk like other survivors needed silence, a physical need, a rage of the spirit stilled only by the wind slapping their empty heads about at top speed. Men like this drove a car not to their own paltry human limits, but to the car’s mechanical limits.”
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