Ostracised by the inter-ministerial Government Commission and also by public opinion incited, after Guidizzolo, by the very press that up to the previous day had exaggeratedly praised the race, the Brescia organisers were forced to change it into a regularity rally with speed sections similar to those in the Stella Alpina in Italy and in the Automobile Tour de France across the Alps.
The three Mille Miglia’s of 1958, 1959 and 1961, still run under the same name and over approximately the same distance, although without a serial number and the tribute to Franco Mazzotti, included in the race title, were completely different from those that had taken place previously.
Of the four Musketeers”, only Renzo Castagneto was still involved in the organisation of the event, along with the Mayor of Brescia, Bruno Boni, who had fought for the race to be revived in 1947. Aymo Maggi, who had already come into sharp conflict with Castagneto over the way the rules for 1940 race had disregarded the traditional formula devised way back in December 1926, had resigned in protest from the Automobile Club of Brescia Sporting Commission along with Giovanni Canestrini.
“I will never consider anything other than a proper road race”, said the Count, in opposition to the decisions of the patron Castagneto. Maggi suffered his first heart attack in 1959 and a second, fatal attack in 1961.
Maggi was probably right. Perhaps too little time had gone by and the memory was still too much alive to give the Mille Miglia name to an event that shared little more than the starting and finishing points and the race director with his Homburg hat and chequered flag, with the original race.
The few spectators on the roads showed little interest in the new Mille Miglia, almost certainly because of the disappointing formula that had to be adopted. The spectacular sight of sports cars traveling at full speed along an open road was gone - only the usual traffic with a few ordinary-looking cars slipped in that were just a bit noisier, had numbers on their sides and were traveling in line at an average speed of 50km/h, following the Highway code to the letter. There was nothing to suggest to the spectators that they were watching the Mille Miglia rather than, for example, the Economy Run.
The standard of the vehicles taking part was fairly poor as well, although the Brescia race had “nonetheless also attracted some official foreign participation, trying to conquer a little bit of easy fame, with questionable links - for publicity purposes only - to this great tradition”, as Giovanni Lurani sarcastically commented, looking down from the heights of his seven Mille Miglia races – including ninth and tenth overall in 1932 and 1938 and three class victories in 1933, 1948 and 1952.
There were not many participants “in spite of the abundant supply of prizes - too many for a race of this type and for the number and quality of the participants”, commented Lurani after the 1958 event.
The main reason for this was because success in the event had no wider significance: the Mille Miglia qualified for the European rally Championship only after 1961, so the press and public weren’t paying much attention to it as yet.
And one couldn’t blame the drivers, owing to the indifference of the CSAI (Italian Automobile Sporting Commission), the Mille Miglia dates clashed with other events that qualified for some or other national or international title. Furthermore, there was the excessive length of the tedious, low-speed transfer sections compared with the eight speed trials, which, in 1958, made up only 5% of the total distance. This improved to 13% and 9 trials in 1959 and to almost 25%, again with 9 trials, in 1961. “It may be because nobody killed themselves that very little is being said about the Mille Miglia”, commented the rally director, at the age of almost seventy, in 1961, after it again failed to arouse interest.
“The new directors of the Brescia Automobile Club, almost all of them excellent businessmen, ought to realise that, in this day and age, you cannot even sell toothpaste without an appropriate advertising campaign”
reported “Auto Italiana Sport”, the successor to “Auto Italiana” magazine which, together with the “Gazzetta dello Sport”, had done so much, back in 1926, to create public interest in the first Mille Miglia Cup to be run the following Spring.
The words of Enzo Ferrari, written in 1959 might serve as a fitting end to this sad, but fortunately brief, chapter in the history of this splendid competition.
"Neither the competition we saw last year nor today’s competion is the real Mille Miglia [and neither was the one held in 1961, we would add]; both of these, due to circumstance forced on the organisers, represent a touching act of faith towards a tradition, or rather an idea, that cannot and should not be allowed to die.
The Mille Miglia created a new motor-racing technique that generated those Italian-designed cars that we now see exported all over the world, a benefit for our economy and a worthy recognition of our Italian workmanship."
Castagneto died in 1971 in Sanremo, where he had retired after waving his chequered flag for the last time in 1968, wearing his historic bowler hat that had reappeared at the finishing line in Viale Venezia. The name 'Mille Miglia' had been given back to the rally the previous year, at the end of the “Commemoration of eleven Alfa Romeo victories in the Mille Miglia” – a non-competitive event in four stages, each lasting one day, in which around twenty 1750-type cars, winners of the Mille Miglia in 1929 and 1930, and a similar number of new 1750 saloon cars that Alfa Romeo was launching on the market, travelled from Brescia to Rome and then back to Brescia.
This is how “Auto Italiana” (which had returned to its original title), commented on the event:
“This was another positive aspect of the Alfa Romeo event, since the Mille Miglia seemed up to date and still able today to summon up the support it used to have. It is a race that never died, and it is more than ever alive today even though the idea that it could be repeated, not as a commemorative event but as a real race, is unfortunately only a beautiful dream.”
The event was a success with the public and this was probably what, in 1977, two years after the death of Giovanni Canestrini, gave rise to the idea of a commemoration to celebrate the anniversary of the beginning, in 1927, of the great story of this great race, the Mille Miglia.
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