Tazio Giorgio Nuvolari (Italian: [ˈtattsjo ˈdʒordʒo nuvoˈlaːri]; 16 November 1892 – 11 August 1953) was an Italian racing driver who first raced motorcycles and then concentrated on sports cars and Grand Prix racing, where he achieved significant success. Originally of Mantua, he was nicknamed il Mantovano Volante ("the Flying Mantuan") and Nuvola ("Cloud"). His victories—72 major races, 150 in all—included 24 Grands Prix, five Coppa Cianos, two Mille Miglias, two Targa Florios, two RAC Tourist Trophies, a Le Mans 24-hour race, and a European Championship in Grand Prix racing. Ferdinand Porsche called him "the greatest driver of the past, the present, and the future".
Nuvolari was born in Castel d'Ario, near Mantua, Lombardy, on 16 November 1892 to Arturo Nuvolari and his wife Elisa Zorzi. The family was well acquainted with motor racing, as Arturo and his brother Giuseppe were both bicycle racers—Giuseppe was a multiple winner of the Italian national championship and was particularly admired by a young Tazio. Nuvolari was married to Carolina Perina, and together they had two children: Giorgio (born 4 September 1918), who died in 1937 aged 19 from myocarditis, and Alberto, who died in 1946 aged 18 from nephritis.
Nuvolari started racing motorcycles in 1920 at the age of 27, winning the 1925 350cc European Championship. Having raced cars as well as motorcycles from 1925 until 1930, he then concentrated on cars, and won the 1932 European Championship with the Alfa Romeo factory team, Alfa Corse. After Alfa Romeo officially withdrew from Grand Prix racing, Nuvolari drove for Scuderia Ferrari. The team was owned by Enzo Ferrari, who ran the Alfa Romeo cars semi-officially. In 1933, Nuvolari won Le Mans in an Alfa Romeo as a member of Ferrari's team, and a month later won the Belgian Grand Prix in a works Maserati, having switched teams a week before the race.
Benito Mussolini helped persuade Ferrari to take Nuvolari back for 1935, and in that year he won the German Grand Prix in Ferrari's outdated Alfa Romeo, defeating more powerful rivals from Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union. It was the only time a non-German car won a European Championship race from 1935 to 1939. The relationship with Ferrari deteriorated during 1937, and Nuvolari raced an Auto Union in that year's Swiss Grand Prix. He rejoined the Auto Union team for the 1938 season and stayed with them through 1939 until Grand Prix racing was put on hiatus by World War II. The only major European race he never won was the Czechoslovakian Grand Prix. When Nuvolari resumed racing after the war he was 54 and in poor health. In his final appearance in competition, driving a Cisitalia-Abarth Tipo 204A at a Palermo hillclimb on 10 April 1950, he won his class and placed fifth overall. He died in 1953 from a stroke.
Nuvolari obtained his license for motorcycle racing in 1915 at the age of 23. He served in the Italian army as an ambulance driver in World War I, and in 1920 took part in his first motorcycle race at the Circuito Internazionale Motoristico in Cremona but did not finish. He also raced cars, winning the Coppa Verona reliability trial in 1921.
In 1925, Nuvolari became the 350 cc European Motorcycling champion by winning the European Grand Prix. At the time, the European Grand Prix was considered the most important race of the motorcycling season and the winners in each category were designated European Champions. He won the Nations Grand Prix four times between 1925 and 1928, and the Lario Circuit race five times between 1925 and 1929, all in the 350 cc class on a Bianchi motorcycle.
It was also in 1925 that Alfa Romeo, seeking a driver to replace Antonio Ascari, who had been killed in the French Grand Prix in July, tested Nuvolari in their Grand Prix car with a view to running him in the Italian Grand Prix in September. He crashed when the gearbox seized, and severely lacerated his back. He was not picked for the team. Six days later, in bandages, with a cushion strapped to his stomach, and lifted onto his motorcycle by Bianchi mechanics for a push-start, he won the rain-soaked Nations Grand Prix at Monza.
In 1930, Nuvolari won his first RAC Tourist Trophy (he won again in 1933). Motor racing legend has it that when one of the drivers broke the window of a butcher's shop, Nuvolari drove onto the pavement and tried to grab a ham as he passed. According to Sammy Davis who met him there, Nuvolari enjoyed dark humour and situations when everything went wrong. For example, after he got a ticket for a journey home from the Sicilian Targa Florio he said to Enzo Ferrari, "What a strange businessman you are. What if I am brought back in a coffin?" Nuvolari and co-driver Battista Guidotti won the Mille Miglia in a Zagato-bodied Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 GS, becoming the first to complete the race at an average of over 100 km/h (62 mph). At night, leading on elapsed time but still lying behind his teammate Achille Varzi on the road because he had started after him, he tailed Varzi at speeds of up to 150 km/h (93 mph) with his headlights switched off, so that he could not be seen in the other car's rear-view mirrors. He eventually switched them on to overtake "the shocked" Varzi near the finish at Brescia.
Towards the end of 1930, Nuvolari decided to stop racing motorcycles and concentrate fully on cars for 1931. Regulations for the season required Grand Prix races to be at least 10 hours long. For the Italian Grand Prix, Nuvolari was to share an Alfa Romeo with Baconin Borzacchini. The car started from ninth place on the grid, and when it retired with mechanical problems after 33 laps Nuvolari teamed up with Giuseppe Campari. The pair took the race win, although Nuvolari could not receive the championship points. Apart from the Belgian Grand Prix, where he came second, the only other European Championship race was the French Grand Prix, where he finished 11th. The same year, he won both the Coppa Ciano at Livorno and the arduous Targa Florio, which was run on the 92-mile (146 km) Grande variant of the super-twisty course that year.
For 1932, Grands Prix had to be between five and ten hours long. It was the only season in which Nuvolari regularly drove one of the fastest cars, the Alfa Romeo P3, and he took two wins and a second place from the three European Championship Grands Prix, plus victory in the championship by four points from Borzacchini. He achieved four other race wins that year, including the prestigious Monaco Grand Prix and a second Targa Florio. Of the latter, his mechanic Mabelli said: "Before the start, Nuvolari told me to go down on the floor of the car every time he shouts, which was a signal that he went to a curve too fast and that we need to lower the car's center of mass. I spent the whole race on the floor. Nuvolari started to shout in the first curve and wouldn't stop until the last one." On 28 April 1932, the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio gave him a golden tortoise badge. Thereafter Nuvolari wore it as a talisman, and it became famously associated with him, along with his initialled yellow jumper.
1933–1937: Scuderia Ferrari and Maserati
The 1933 season began a two-year hiatus in the European Championship, and although Alfa Romeo ceased official involvement in Grands Prix their cars continued racing with Enzo Ferrari's privateer team. For economic reasons, the P3 was not passed on to Ferrari so they used its predecessor, the Monza. Maserati, with a much-improved car, provided the main opposition. It has been alleged that Nuvolari was involved in a race-fixing scandal at the Tripoli Grand Prix. The story is that he conspired with Achille Varzi and Baconin Borzacchini to fix the race in order to profit from the Libyan state lottery in which 30 tickets were drawn before the race—one for each starter—and the holder of the ticket corresponding to the victorious driver won 7.5 million lire. Others say the allegation was unfounded and that it originated with Alfred Neubauer, the Mercedes-Benz team manager at the time, who was well known as a raconteur with a penchant for spicing up a story. Neubauer's version does not altogether hold true with documented records of events, which indicate that Nuvolari, Varzi, and Borzacchini agreed to pool the prize money should one of them win.