The Mille Miglia 10 hours on the roads of Italy, with the road written down in advance

Brescia, 7.22 am

In the Mille Miglia a car’s number was its starting time. The slowest classes had gone down the ramp in Brescia at nine o’clock on the Saturday night, 30 April 1955, and through the Sunday morning the big sports cars followed them, one a minute: Juan Manuel Fangio’s Mercedes-⁠Benz, No. 658, at 6.58, Karl Kling’s at 7.01, Hans Herrmann’s at 7.04, with a mechanic from the team, Hermann Eger, in the second seat. At 7.22 the 300 SLR numbered 722 went down the ramp with Stirling Moss at the wheel and Denis Jenkinson, the Continental Correspondent of Motor Sport, beside him. Six minutes behind them came the last of the big cars, Piero Taruffi’s Ferrari, No. 728.

Ahead lay about 1,600 km (992 miles) of ordinary Italian road. The route ran east by Verona and Padua to Ravenna, down the Adriatic coast to Pescara, across the Apennines by L’Aquila to Rome, north again by Siena and Florence, over the Futa and Raticosa passes to Bologna, and home across the plain by Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Cremona and Mantua. At eight controls on the way, Ravenna, Pescara, Aquila, Rome, Siena, Florence, Bologna and Mantua, the route card had to be stamped. There had been 652 entries, and 521 cars started.

No British driver had ever won it. Moss had tried three times with Jaguar and never reached the finish: in 1951 in an XK120 with Frank Rainbow, out early; in 1952 with Norman Dewis in a C-⁠type, close to 3rd place about 233 km (145 miles) from home when it failed; in 1953 with Mortimer Morris-Goodall, out again. This time he had a Mercedes-⁠Benz under him, and beside him the road itself, written down.

A second brain

The plan began in the passenger’s seat. In September 1954, talking it over, Jenkinson and the American driver John Fitch reached a decision: a driver who was not Italian could win the Mille Miglia only by applying science, with the passenger as a mechanical brain. Fitch was to have tried it. But when Moss joined Mercedes-⁠Benz for 1955, Fitch was not to drive the Mille Miglia for the team, and just before Christmas Moss telephoned Jenkinson to ask him to come instead. Fitch, Jenkinson wrote, agreed like a sportsman.

Early in January the two of them met for lunch, and Moss turned out to have much the same plan: the passenger as a second brain, to look after the navigation. They pooled what they had: the notes Moss had made in his Mille Miglias with Jaguar, and Jenkinson’s own knowledge of about a quarter of the course. Then they went to Italy to learn the rest.

Jenkinson describes three spells of practice. The first, in February, was in the prototype 300 SLR, and it lasted 2 laps of the course before a sheep leapt in front of them on an empty road and the car finished backwards in a ditch.¹ On the second visit they graded the corners again, spent 1 lap noting landmarks in Moss’s own Mercedes-⁠Benz 220A saloon, and crashed a second car: an Italian army lorry hit the 300 SL coupé they were using. Alfred Neubauer, the team manager, worried only that they were not hurt. The car was of no importance, Jenkinson understood; Mercedes-⁠Benz wanted to win the Mille Miglia and did not count the cost.

The third session, after Easter, started from Brescia. By then Kling and Herrmann had driven the prototype up and down the section from Rome to Florence with the technical department, and later accounts put the whole reconnaissance at the equivalent of several full laps; how many, the 1955 report does not say.² In the last week, at Hockenheim, they drove several laps in the race car itself, and the team cut and fitted the seats to them as a tailor makes a suit.

17 pages

Our whole plan was now nearing completion, we had seventeen pages of notes, and Moss had sufficient confidence in me to take blind brows at 90-100 m.p.h., believing me when I said the road went straight on; though he freely admitted that he was not sure whether he would do the same thing at 170 m.p.h. in the race, no matter how confident I was. He said he’d probably ease it back to 160 m.p.h. for, though that 10 m.p.h. would make no difference to the resulting crash if I had made a mistake, it comforted him psychologically!

The notes graded every corner in three kinds, the “saucy” ones, the “dodgy” ones and the “very dangerous” ones, and each kind had its own hand sign. Another sign meant a slippery surface. Each place was fixed by the numbered kilometre stones at the roadside. Jenkinson had the notes typed, and checked and cross-checked them with a friend until he was certain there was not one mistake in them. By the end they ran to 17 pages.

He could not read them out. The two of them could not talk to each other in the 300 SLR, so every warning went from his hand to Moss’s eye: in the race he signalled with his left hand, turned the roller as the road unwound, and in between fed Moss sweets to suck. Mercedes-⁠Benz had tried a radio between the two seats, by a later account, and it worked while Moss drove at half-sensible speeds; at full attack he could hear nothing.

His report of June 1955, as Motor Sport’s archive holds it, speaks only of his roller device, the map roller, the roller-map. It gives no length and no box. The details everyone now knows come from the same report as the magazine reprinted it in May 1997, a few months after Jenkinson’s death, in a paragraph the archive’s copy of 1955 lacks. There he wrote that he copied out the route on a special sheet of paper 18 feet long; that Moss had an alloy case made for it on the map-roller system, the paper winding from the lower roller to the upper; and that the notes were read through a Perspex window, sealed with Sellotape in case of rain. The words are Jenkinson’s own. Whether they were printed in 1955, or the archive’s copy has simply lost them, is not settled.³

Whose idea the roll was is not settled either. Andrew Frankel, writing in 2018, gave it to Fitch; Jenkinson credits their talk with the decision to use science, and says nothing of who thought of the roller. Pace notes themselves were not new: crews had used them in the Carrera Panamericana.

The 300 SLR

The car was the sports-racing version of the W196 Grand Prix car, the W 196 S to the factory: a 3-⁠litre straight-eight with fuel injection and desmodromic valves, a five-speed gearbox on the rear axle, inboard brakes, left-hand steering, two short exhausts on the right-hand side and the fuel tank in the tail. Jenkinson gave its power as well over 290 bhp on ordinary pump petrol, and the race report gave 295 bhp at 7,500 rpm: the factory’s claims of the day.⁴ It was geared for 274 km/⁠h (170 mph) at 7,500 rpm.

The tank held 260 litres. Two stops were planned: a little fuel at Pescara, about 80 litres (18 gallons) from a gravity tank, and a full tank and new rear tyres at Rome. Two spare wheels rode in the tail, and quick-fitting aluminium aero-screens went with them in case the Perspex screen broke, for the team remembered Hermann Lang half suffocated at Donington in 1938. Moss’s car and Herrmann’s carried passengers and had two long headrests; Fangio and Kling drove alone, the second seat covered and a screen round the driver.

The four 300 SLRs were brought to scrutineering in Brescia’s main square on the Friday, two at a time on an enormous trailer. For a last test on the autostrada a new link had been fitted in the gate of Moss’s gearchange, to stop him going from second to fifth. In Brescia he and Jenkinson impressed the mechanics by changing a rear wheel in 1 min 25 s, from stopping to starting off, getting the tools out of the boot included. Mercedes-⁠Benz gave its drivers no orders. Each was to run his own race, so long as he brought the car back to Brescia if it was humanly possible.

Moss and Jenkinson had planned for 3rd place, and never expected to lead. They meant to average 145 km/⁠h (90 mph), Jenkinson calculated, about 3 km/⁠h (2 mph) faster than Giannino Marzotto’s record of 1953.

Down the Adriatic

On the straights to Verona the rev counter reached 7,500 in fifth: 274 km/⁠h, Jenkinson worked out, as close to 170 mph as anyone could wish. Later in the day it showed 7,600, and once, in a moment of excitement, the engine went to 8,200.

I sat fascinated, watching Moss working away to keep control, and I was so intrigued to follow his every action and live every inch of the way with him, that I completely forgot to be scared.

At Padua Moss came to a right-angle bend much too fast and hit the straw bales, and Eugenio Castellotti went by in his 4.4-⁠litre Ferrari, grinning over his shoulder. Jenkinson recorded what he did next: “As we set off after him, I gave Moss a little handclap of appreciation for showing me just how a really great driver acts in a difficult situation.”

Castellotti led them to Ravenna by nearly 2 minutes, changed tyres at the control and blew his engine before Pescara. Beyond Rimini the sideways forces, the heat from the gearbox, the fumes and the smell of hot brake linings were too much for Jenkinson, and he was sick over the side; turning his head at 241 km/⁠h (150 mph) with his goggles lowered, he lost his spectacles, and put on his spare pair. On a straight lined with trees before Pescara a hump they had marked to be taken flat out in the dry threw the car into the air at 7,500 rpm in fifth. They had time to look at each other, eyebrows raised, before it landed: more than a second, Jenkinson estimated, and about 60 metres (200 feet).

At the Pescara control a slip of paper gave them the order. Taruffi led; Moss was 15 seconds behind, and Herrmann, Kling and Fangio followed. As Jenkinson shouted the news a uniformed arm reached in to switch off the ignition. He thumped it away, Moss crunched into bottom gear, and they were gone. The stop had seemed endless and had lasted 28 seconds; Taruffi’s took more than a minute. To Pescara they had averaged 190 km/⁠h (118 mph).

Just beyond it they overshot again into the straw, and in a cloud of it found themselves on the pavement behind the bales. Moss drove along it and bounced down off the kerb, past a Gordini. At Popoli about 50 monks in robes stood on a high mound and waved as the car went by. By L’Aquila, in the mountains, Moss was in the lead.

Rome and Florence

Over the last 10 km (six miles) into Rome the crowds were so thick that Moss dared not go much over 209 km/⁠h (130 mph), swerving from side to side so that those at the edge leapt back. They reached the control about 10.45, nearly 3½ hours after the start, in the lead by nearly 2 minutes, at an average of 173.021 km/⁠h (107.5 mph). The car took on fuel and a pair of rear tyres. Moss leapt out to relieve himself, his only time out of the seat all day, while Jenkinson was doused with water and handed an orange.

On the first bend after the Rome hairpin they passed Kling’s car well off the road among the trees, badly wrecked; Kling, determined to win at any price in Jenkinson’s view, had slid off and hit them, without serious harm to himself. Taruffi stopped at Ferrari’s depot at Viterbo with a broken oil pump.

After Acquapendente petrol surged out of the filler and sprayed Jenkinson for 16 km (10 miles) or more. Distracted, he missed one signal, his only mistake of the day, and Moss, who knew the corner, shook his fist at him while taking it at a fantastic speed. On the Radicofani Pass a grabbing brake spun the car into a ditch and dented its tail. Jenkinson thought they could probably push it out; Moss chose bottom gear and drove out, and they poked their tongues out at each other.

Between Siena and Florence, tired, Jenkinson looked across for strength at Moss, who sat completely relaxed, working at the steering as if they had just left Brescia. Behind them Fangio’s injection pipe had split, and he was running on seven cylinders; at Florence the mechanics hid his car while they mended it, and Moss and Jenkinson passed without seeing him. Mercedes-⁠Benz were 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

Over the passes

The mountain road from Florence to Bologna, over the Futa and the Raticosa, took them 1 hour 1 minute. Just over the top of the Futa they saw Herrmann’s car stopped beside the road, undamaged as far as Jenkinson could tell; accounts of what stopped it differ.⁵ On the Raticosa someone had painted a cheer for Perdisa and Maserati on a wall, and they both gave it the victory sign. At Bologna Moss led Fangio by nearly 28 minutes.

Jenkinson summed up how the day was driven: “Moss was driving absolutely magnificently, right on the limit of adhesion all the time”. Between Modena and Piacenza they overtook two aeroplanes, flying at about 90 metres (300 feet) to film them. Near Piacenza they passed a Citroën 2CV bowling along merrily, which had left Brescia the night before. From Cremona to Brescia, Mantua’s control included, they averaged 198.496 km/⁠h (123 mph). When the last of his direction signals was given, Jenkinson put the roll of notes away and thought that if the car blew to pieces now they could carry it the rest of the way.

That evening

At the finish they did not know that they had won. At the official garage Moss asked his passenger whether he thought they had. Jenkinson, not knowing that Taruffi was out, told him that they would have to wait for Taruffi to arrive, and that they did not know when Fangio had come in.

I’m so happy that we’ve proved that a Britisher can win the Mille Miglia, and that the legend ‘he who leads at Rome never leads at Brescia’ is untrue — also, I feel we have made up for the two cars we wrote off in practice

When the news came, Moss said what he felt on the drive back to the hotel, and then, Jenkinson wrote, he chuckled: “We’ve rather made a mess of the record, haven’t we — sort of spoilt it for anyone else, for there probably won’t be another completely dry Mille Miglia for twenty years.”

That night Jenkinson lay in a hot bath, elated at having spent the day with Moss, “sitting beside him while he worked as I have never seen anyone work before in my life, and harder and longer than I ever thought it possible for a human being to do”. Moss did not rest. After the prize-giving, by one later recollection, he drove to Stuttgart to thank Mercedes-⁠Benz instead of going to bed.

A year later, on 26 April 1956, the two of them received the Coppa Haig at a prize-giving. They started the Mille Miglia together twice more, both times for Maserati, and finished neither. In 1956, in a 350S, they slid off in heavy rain on the descent to Antrodoco and stopped against a tree on a steep bank, unhurt. In 1957 the brake pedal of their 450S broke about 12 km from the start.

The report

Jenkinson’s account, “With Moss in the Mille Miglia”, filled pages of Motor Sport in June 1955: about 10,000 words, for which the magazine held over its readers’ letters. It is still held up as one of the great pieces of sports journalism, and it is the source of almost everything on this page. In it he repeated a verdict he had given after earlier Mille Miglias, now, he said, in the certain knowledge that he knew what he was writing about: “he who wins the Mille Miglia is some driver”.

How it reached the printer is less certain. Motor Sport’s editor wrote in 2024 that Jenkinson had posted it the day after the race. Michael Tee, then the magazine’s production manager, remembered in 2026 that it had not come by post at all. On the road from Nice airport, more than a fortnight after the race and before the Monaco Grand Prix, Jenkinson told him that he had not yet written it: there were things to check with Moss. Tee then watched the two of them at the Hôtel Métropole in Monte Carlo, Moss with two chairs set side by side as if they were the car and the roll of notes to hand, going over the drive for more than two and a half hours.⁶

What the years added

The Mille Miglia was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. In a way, it was like driving through the Monaco tunnel, where you can’t see the exit of the corner until you’re past the apex, but all the time, for 10 hours.

Moss told the story for 65 years, and other people told it for him. In 2006 he called it the most important win of his career, though not his best race: “The Mille Miglia win was the most important to my career, I suppose.” Like most of his stories it grew. In 2012 he remembered passing an aeroplane on a fast straight: “I can remember going along a fast straight and overtaking a twin-engined aircraft that was flat-out at 140 mph. I was doing roughly 190 mph. That made me think, ‘Crikey, this really is a quick car.’” Jenkinson, writing within weeks of the race, gave the car’s top speed as about 274 km/⁠h (170 mph) and the aeroplanes as two camera planes flying at about 90 metres. The same interview had him averaging 165.1 mph over the last 340 km, which cannot be right as it stands; the figure of 1955 for Cremona to Brescia is 198.496 km/⁠h, about 123 mph.

Other tellings changed it too. A later account has Mercedes-⁠Benz ordering Moss to set a fast early pace to break the Italian cars; Jenkinson says the team gave no orders at all. The factory’s own history has Jenkinson reading the route aloud; he could not, and signalled it. The average is sometimes printed as 99 mph; it was 157.65 km/⁠h, or 97.96 mph. The account of 1955 needs none of it.

The car is still kept by Mercedes-⁠Benz, in its museum in Stuttgart. Moss chose a three-spoke steering wheel for the race and was given it as a souvenir afterwards; in later years, when he drove the car in demonstrations, he had his wheel fitted. On 19 May 2005, 50 years on, he signed its bonnet. Nobody ever beat their record.