Ludovico Scarfiotti: The last Italian Monza winner who excelled at everything else

The 2026 Italian Grand Prix will take place this coming Sunday – and as you are reading these words, the Formula 1 circus will be duly making its way to Monza. Moreover, there is a pleasing possibility, although it is neither a certainty nor even perhaps a likelihood, that Kimi Antonelli, the current leader of the F1 drivers’ world championship, will win there. I say “pleasing possibility” because, if he does win there, he will become the first Italian driver to win the Italian Grand Prix for 60 years – since September 4, 1966, to be precise – when Ludovico Scarfiotti won it for Ferrari.

Scarfiotti is one of those drivers who becomes more interesting the longer you look at him, not least because his F1 stats, taken in isolation, do not prepare you for the breadth of the man. He started only 10 world championship-status F1 grands prix, yet he was an exceptionally accomplished sports car driver and an outstanding exponent of the hillclimb. Moreover, he came from a venerable family. His grandfather, also named Lodovico Scarfiotti (but note the subtly different spelling), was one of the founders of Fiat and became the company’s first president, a detail that bequeaths the younger Scarfiotti’s automotive destiny the air of something preordained, although in truth there was nothing inevitable about his becoming a race driver, let alone one of genuine distinction.

Or, to put it another way, although he was splendidly well connected to Italy’s motoring aristocracy, connection and ability are not the same thing, and in Ludovico’s case the latter was considerable. Born in Turin in 1933, he began to enter a few local races in the early 1950s, but it was not until he was 22 that he tackled an event of any real note, at Monza in 1956, at the wheel of an Alfa Romeo 1900TI saloon car. Later that same year he stepped up a grade considerably, taking on the Mille Miglia for the first time, in a humble Fiat 1100TV fettled and tuned by Gino de Sanctis, finishing 57th overall and first in the T/GT1.1 class, driving the entirety of his 14-hour stint without a team-mate and undaunted by heavy rain in which accidents killed six people (three drivers and three spectators) and injured 14 more.

By 1957 he had become a regular on the Italian mountains, first in an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint then in a Fiat Zagato 8V, so-called because Fiat’s grandi formaggi were of the erroneous belief that Ford owned the rights to the term ‘V8’. In those cars in that year Scarfiotti secured class victories on two historic mountain events – the Bologna-San Luca and the Aosta-Gran San Bernardo – going on to win his class in the 1957 Italian Hillclimb Championship. In 1958 he campaigned an OSCA 1100 Sport – a neat, compact, and rapid sports car – easily winning his class in the Italian Hillclimb Championship again. The following year, 1959, he became a works OSCA driver, duly upgraded to the larger and faster 1500 Sport model.

In January 1960, now aged 26, he got his big break: Enzo Ferrari selected him to partner the Argentine F1 legend Froilán González in the Buenos Aires 1000km. Their Ferrari Dino 246S failed them after 38 laps, but Scarfiotti had shared tarmac with not only his illustrious team-mate but also a galaxy of other F1 stars – Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Dan Gurney, Wolfgang von Trips, Jo Bonnier, Richie Ginther, Maurice Trintignant, Hans Herrmann, Olivier Gendebien, Masten Gregory, Cliff Allison, and more besides. Four months later Scarfiotti, Willy Mairesse, and Giulio Cabianca drove the same Ferrari Dino 246S to a fine fourth place in the Targa Florio, and a month after that Scarfiotti and Pedro ‪Rodríguez‬ shared Le Mans 24 Hours duties at the wheel of one of Ferrari’s all-time greats, a 250 Testa Rossa, but they failed to finish.

In 1961 Scarfiotti reverted to OSCA, also making a few appearances for Scuderia Serenissima, then in 1962 Enzo Ferrari brought him back into the Ferrari fold, tasking him with spearheading his hillclimbing campaign. At the wheel of a Ferrari Dino 196SP he won at Trento-Bondone, Fornovo-Monte Cassio, Freiburg-Schauinsland, and Mont Ventoux, becoming European hillclimb champion, a title that he won again in 1965 thanks to victories at Cesana-Sestriere, Ollons-Villars, and Freiburg-Schauinsland again. By now Ferrari had come to value him greatly, because he possessed the mixture of patience, smoothness, and mechanical sympathy that endurance racing demanded, while the very different challenge of attacking a mountain road against the clock clearly also suited him extremely well.

In 1963 he shared a Ferrari 250P with John Surtees in the Sebring 12 Hours, the pair scoring an impressive victory ahead of a posse of Ferraris driven by sports car royalty, among them Willy Mairesse, Nino Vaccarella, Lorenzo Bandini, Pedro ‪Rodríguez‬, Graham Hill, and Richie Ginther. Then came Le Mans, where Scarfiotti shared the same 250P with Lorenzo Bandini, and they won the famous 24 Hours. ‘Ludovico Scarfiotti and Lorenzo Bandini’ is, incidentally, surely the most mellifluous 14-syllable two-driver pairing ever to win the greatest endurance race of them all – and, while I am in lyrical mood, I should add that the Ferrari they drove was a thing of rare loveliness. The 250P was an open mid-engined sports prototype conceived by the young Mauro Forghieri, its pretty aluminium bodywork draped over a tubular spaceframe, and behind the driver sat the latest version of the already legendary Gioacchino Colombo-designed 3.0-litre 60-degree V12 engine.

Scarfiotti made his F1 grand prix debut that year, 1963, at Zandvoort in June, standing in at Ferrari for Willy Mairesse, who had suffered minor injuries and burns at Le Mans the previous weekend, and he finished a creditable sixth. Even so, over the next five seasons his F1 appearances were only sporadic – just 10 world championship-status F1 grand prix starts, six for Ferrari, three for Cooper, and one for Anglo American Racers – and it would be fair to say that the cockpit of an F1 car was never his comfort zone in the way that those of sports cars and hillclimbers were. Nonetheless, his only F1 grand prix victory came at the place where every Italian driver most hankers to score one: the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza. On September 4, 1966, almost exactly 60 years ago therefore, he raced a Ferrari 312 to victory in the Italian Grand Prix, having started it from the front row, driving the fastest lap en route. In so doing, he became only the third Italian driver to win his home grand prix in the F1 world championship era, after Giuseppe Farina (1950) and Alberto Ascari (1951 and 1952, although querulous pedants should be warned that I am well aware that F1 was run to F2 rules in the second of those two seasons).

There is something almost magically Italian about the circumstances of Scarfiotti’s sole F1 grand prix win: Ferrari won at Monza, an Italian drove the winning car, and the man at the wheel bore a surname that reached back into the founding mythology of the country’s automobile industry. Yet his victory was not some ceremonial procession arranged for the benefit of the tifosi. No, it was a proper grand prix run in the wonderfully unruly F1 of the mid-1960s, a flat-out race around the pre-chicane version of the home of Italian motor sport, in which cars failed with alarming frequency and only nine were classified as finishers. He led at the start, then he dropped back a bit, after which Jack Brabham (Brabham) retired from the lead with an oil leak. John Surtees (Cooper-Maserati), still mathematically capable of challenging Brabham for the F1 world title, then lost his chance to a broken fuel pipe. Meanwhile Scarfiotti fought his way back through the chaos to take the victory that would crown and define his F1 career.

Then, the following year, came Syracuse, Sicily, where the story became sad and strange. On May 10, 1967, Lorenzo Bandini had died in the Princess Grace Polyclinic Hospital in Monte Carlo as a result of the gruesome burns that he had suffered three days earlier during the Monaco Grand Prix. Bandini had been not only Scarfiotti’s Ferrari colleague but also his victorious partner at Le Mans four years earlier – and his friend, too – and the loss was therefore personal as well as professional. Two weeks after the Monaco tragedy, Scarfiotti and Mike Parkes drove their Ferraris to a dead heat in the non-championship F1 Syracuse Grand Prix, a result that they arranged deliberately as a tribute, their joint victory dedicated to their fallen team-mate. I have always thought that that dead heat had, still has, and will always have the grace of something that could only have happened in another age, for modern timing systems would have determined which of the two Ferraris was fractionally ahead of the other; but as things stand we will never know, and I like that.

Scarfiotti continued to race sports cars on road courses, closed circuits, and mountains. He had always enjoyed the latter, and by 1968 he was hillclimbing for Porsche. At the Rossfeldhöhenringstraße hillclimb near Berchtesgaden in the German Alps, on June 8, he crashed a Porsche 910 during practice. The precise circumstances of the accident were never entirely understood, but what is known is that the car left the road and went down a wooded slope, Scarfiotti was thrown from the cockpit, and his injuries were catastrophic. He was 34 years old, and he died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

It is tempting to look at a life such as Scarfiotti’s and arrange it into a neat narrative arc: a privileged birth and a tragic death separated by Ferrari triumphs at Sebring, Le Mans, and Monza. But real lives are rarely so orderly, and the story of Scarfiotti’s is more affecting precisely because it resists the tidiness of the classic cinematic retrospective. He was not a racing superstar whose career was cut short, like so many. No, he was something harder to define and, in some ways, more characteristic of the period: a consummate all-rounder who moved between disciplines because motor sport itself was the thing that enthralled him. He belonged to an era in which a man could win at Le Mans in one year, win an F1 grand prix in another, and spend all his free weekends hurling sports cars up mountains because the mountains just happened to be there.