1,000 Greatest Drivers: Achille Varzi

The Prost to Tazio Nuvolari's Senna.

I admit that probably like most of you, I didn’t know a great deal about most of the pre-F1 Grand Prix legends from this era, so I did have to do more research for this one. I have to say I find Varzi to be one of the more intriguing drivers of the pre-war years, especially after reading about his first Targa Florio win, where he actually won even though his riding mechanic set the car on fire (and to his credit, later extinguished the flames, but still…) That and the morphine addiction were both things I was surprised to read about. I decided to be polite in the actual entry and not mention that he was having an affair with the wife of another driver, who apparently is the person who addicted him to morphine, and I also decided not to mention his years driving for the Nazi-backed Auto Union team in the same time period, because honestly his best years came before that and the entry of Auto Union is really what marked the beginning of the end of Varzi’s career since from what I have read, it seems like Auto Union was favoring the German drivers like Bernd Rosemeyer over the Italians like Varzi. And then, after the war ended, Auto Union changed its name to Audi and they hoped no one would notice. Well, a surprising number of people didn’t I guess… Anyway, because I knew I would include Varzi in multiple seasonal top fives, I decided to go through all the top fives from 1929-1949 last night. This leaves only 15 years going back to the first year of motorsports in 1894 where I haven’t ranked top fives (excluding 1942-1945 obviously). These are: 1910-12, 1915-21, 1923-24, and 1926-28. I’m probably going to try to get all those done at some point this week, but I’ve got another entry coming tonight, and I’ve got to get some more paid work real fast (see my next entry).