Sport: The Last Race

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.

At 20, he patched up an old Bleriot airplane, which had crashed near his village, and took off from the same roof. Crashing in flames atop a nearby haystack, he counted only a few broken bones. His lust for speed swiftly led him to motorcycles and racing cars. He was happiest when he could feel wheels whirling beneath him, their treads screaming along some treacherous road.

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, yet he could slide through a sharp turn at 150 m.p.h., all the while holding his front wheels a fixed few inches from the fence.

Of 136 major auto races, Nuvolari won 72, could blame most of his defeats on car failure. He took every big European race at least once—the Grand Prix, Le Mans, the Mille Miglia. Superstitious, he liked always to have a hunchback friend nearby when he raced, for good luck. He always wore the same yellow sweater, blue pants and tricolored scarf. Italians said of Nuvolari, as they had long before said of their spellbinding violinist, Paganini. that he had "a pact with the devil." This belief was strongly supported by Nuvolari's chief European rival, Achille Varzi. In the 1930 Mille Miglia, Varzi was coasting along the homestretch at night, confident that he was far in the lead. For miles, he had noticed no headlights behind him. Suddenly, out of the blackness, a car emerged, shot past him, finished first. For hours, Nuvolari had trailed Varzi over tortuous roads with his headlights off.

Nuvolari's unearthly skill sometimes surpassed other drivers' understanding, though they acknowledged him as the greatest racer of all. At Monte Carlo's 1935 Grand Prix, heavy rains swept the racing route. A car's oil line broke in the middle of an already slippery S curve. The five cars following piled up and littered the road like tank barriers. Next came Nuvolari. In a few seconds, at high speed, he power-slid and threaded his way across the slick and between the crashed cars with only millimeters to spare, without touching one.