Monza, Italy — This is hallowed ground. The Monza circuit was built in 1922 and this year it hosted the 73rd Italian Grand Prix. Built within the walls of a massive park once used as a hunting ground by royalty, Monza is now a northern suburb of Milan. Along with Indianapolis (built in 1909), it is one of the most historic racing venues in the world.
Construction on the Monza circuit began on May 15, 1922 and 3,500 workers using 200 wagons, 30 trucks and a narrow-gauge railway completed it in just 110 days. The track featured an interlinked oval and road circuit and could be used in several different configurations.
The banked track is nothing like you see at places like Daytona today. It was (and is) very steep, bumpy, incredibly narrow and scary. The banking hasn’t been used for decades, but it still stands there as a monument to the track’s epic history.
F-1 cars haven’t run on the banking since 1961, but sports cars continued to race on it until 1969. Driving a Ford GT40, David Hobbs won one of the last races to be held using the banking. It must have been a terrifying and exhilarating from both inside and outside the cockpit.
If you want to get an idea of what the banking is like, rent the classic film Grand Prix starring James Garner. Set in 1966, the movie has some fabulous shots of racing on the steep banks.
The banking was used in the famous War of The Worlds races in 1957 and 1958 when the Indy boys brought their giant roadsters over to challenge the F1 chaps. They ran the track backwards in an anti-clockwise direction to suit the Indy cars, and the F1 teams were not really well represented, so it wasn’t really a fair match up. Still, the two races have gone down as historic events with Jimmy Bryan winning the first and Jim Rathmann the second, and thus the Indy cars came out victor both times.
The circuit the Formula One cars race on these days has been modified over the years, most notably by adding chicanes, but it still retains some of the magic and corners of the old track.
Ford has been part of Monza’s history, especially between 1968 and1977 when Ford Cosworth-powered cars won seven times. Between 1967 and 1981 Ford Cosworth-powered cars set the fastest race lap 12 times in 15 Italian Grands Prix.
Before the chicanes were installed in 1972, racing at Monza was a high-speed drafting affair. In 1971, Peter Gethin won a thrilling race that saw five cars cross the line practically together. The five drivers had passed and re-passed each other, and at the finish line Gethin’s BRM beat Ronnie Peterson’s March Ford by 0.01 of a second. Gethin’s average speed was 153.489 mph. Both the average speed and the margin of victory are records that stand to this day.
With only hand-held stopwatches that could only measure to the tenth of a second in use in 1971, Gethin’s margin of victory was clocked at 0.010 of a second. That too, is a record although it will never be really known if Ayrton Senna’s victory margin of 0.014 of a second (measured by computer) in the 1986 Spanish Grand Prix was actually a closer finish.
Back in the 1971 race Henri Pescarolo set the fastest race lap at an average speed of 153.488 in his March Ford. Here at Monza on Saturday Juan Pablo Montoya set the quickest lap in F1 history as he averaged 161.448 mph in his Williams BMW to win the pole. That beat the 17-year-old record of 160.938 mph that Keke Rosberg set in qualifying for the 1985 British Grand Prix at Silverstone in his Williams.
If conditions are right in Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix, the winner could set a new record for the fastest average speed over a the race distance.
So what do Jaguar Racing’s Eddie Irvine and Pedro de la Rosa think of Monza past and present? Team Ford Racing put that question to them and you can read their opinions, (naturally they don’t agree!) soon on TFR.
