The ‘Temple of Speed’ with its steepling bankings and fanatical congregation: European motorsport’s most charismatic venue is 100 years old – and a bit.
Monza was completed in July 1922 and consecrated that September when it first hosted its country’s most important motor race. Only four times hereafter – and not since Imola in 1980 – the Italian Grand Prix has ventured elsewhere.
This parkland circuit on the outskirts of a city north of Milan – a combination of simplistic road course and (until 1969) a speed bowl ramped up alarmingly in 1954 – has never been the most interesting or challenging.
Its appeal and notoriety lay elsewhere: fervent fans worshiping at the feet of (mainly) Ferrari; slipstreaming eddies that tied fields together and enabled the very good to often cling to and occasionally defeat the very best in thrilling blanket finishes; and – unavoidable given a centenary of motor sport – disasters as well as triumphs.
Let’s deal with the latter first: Peter Gethin’s throwing up of a celebratory arm in 1971 to convince officials – and perhaps even himself – that he had pipped Ronnie Peterson and three others also desperately seeking their maiden GP victory; and champion-elect Jackie Stewart’s careful and perspicacious gearing of his car to beat Jochen Rindt in the 1969 sprint to the line in similarly swirling circumstances.
Monza was where Stewart had also scored his maiden GP victory – out-fumbling and upstaging BRM team leader Graham Hill in the process – in 1965; and in 1973, charging through the field after an early puncture, it would be where he secured his third world title.
It would also be where he strapped himself in sure in the knowledge that friend and champion-elect Rindt had just been killed in an accident during practice in 1970. Having tasted salt tears, within four laps the famously compartmentalised Stewart would set his fastest lap in a car he disliked. He would race, too, finishing an “aggressive” second. Not even the sternest critic could question his bravery.
Regazzoni leads on the weekend of Rindt’s death
DPPI
The crowd went ape that day, flooding the track to swamp the victorious Ferrari of Clay Regazzoni – a competitor whose on-track antics Stewart viewed warily. The Scot, gorge rising, zigzagged around them, sought sanctuary from them and passed out.
Monza and the sport today are much less gladiatorial, the former calmed and its fields strung out by the addition of chicanes (a gradual process from 1972), and the latter built on the safety foundations laid by Stewart.
Disaster, however, has continued to stalk triumph here.