Achille Varzi Print, Vintage Motorsport Poster, Italia Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

ACHILLE VARZI — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Achille Varzi, 1929-1948.

Italian motor racing in the 1930s had two poles, and everyone had to pick one.

Tazio Nuvolari drove on instinct and appeared to be permanently on the edge of disaster, which is why crowds loved him. Achille Varzi drove as though the corner had been calculated in advance, entered it once, correctly, and left it at the same speed every lap.

They were team-mates, then enemies, then rivals for a decade. The 1930 Mille Miglia, where Nuvolari is said to have followed Varzi at night with his headlights off before passing him near the finish, is the story everyone tells. Varzi's response, that he had been beaten by a trick rather than by speed, is the story nobody tells.

Varzi won the Targa Florio three times, the Mille Miglia, the Tunis Grand Prix, and grands prix for Bugatti, Alfa Romeo and Auto Union.

Then he disappeared.

In the mid-1930s he became addicted to morphine, introduced to it in the circle around his partner Ilse Pietsch. He lost his drive, his form and most of a decade. By 1937 he was effectively finished, at thirty-three.

He came back after the war, clean, and won again: the Turin Grand Prix in 1946, and races in Argentina where he became an enormous figure.

There is one episode that will not tidy up. The 1933 Tripoli Grand Prix was run alongside a national lottery in which tickets were drawn against drivers, and it has been alleged ever since that Varzi and others arranged the result to split the prize money. The accusation has never been proved and has never gone away.

He won the Mille Miglia in 1934 for Alfa Romeo, then moved to Auto Union in 1935 and won at Tunis and Tripoli with the German cars, which in the politics of the period was a complicated place for an Italian to be.

On 1 July 1948, in practice for the Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten near Bern, in the rain, his Alfa Romeo overturned. He was killed. He was forty-three.

The Argentine automobile club later founded a driving school in his name. It sent a young driver called Juan Manuel Fangio to Europe.

Of the two poles of Italian racing, the crowd chose Nuvolari. The engineering chose Varzi.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.