Piero Taruffi: the 'pernickety' polymath with a sole championship race win

Designer Aurelio Lampredi’s Ferrari 500 Formula 2 car – promoted to GP car by external forces – was just powerful enough and sweet-handling even so.

Taruffi liked it and so it suited him to be in Enzo’s good books having supplied the marque with its first major win in the Americas: the 1951 Carrera Panamericana, co-driven by Luigi Chinetti Snr.

Though he was no match for sensational team leader Alberto Ascari and generally shaded for speed by Giuseppe Farina, Taruffi took his chance when he got it and stayed around long enough to capitilise on it.

Ascari was absent contesting the Indianapolis 500 for Ferrari and his mentor Luigi Villoresi had been injured in a road accident just prior to the 1952 Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten on 18 May.

So Farina qualified on pole – 2.6sec faster than Taruffi – and led the early stages before an engine problem forced him to pit. He commandeered newcomer André Simon’s car, which also burst underneath him.

Thus Taruffi, in typically measured fashion, scored the first win of the World Championship’s F2 interregnum.

The returning Ascari put that performance into context by scoring nine successive World Championship Grands Prix wins, but Taruffi seemed unusually settled. Whereas Farina railed against the former’s supremacy and primacy, Taruffi reeled off a string of strong results – third in France, second in Britain, fourth in Germany – to be third in the final standings.

Whereupon he fell out with Enzo over which car might better suit the demands of a Targa Florio and joined pre-eminent designer Vittorio Jano at (overly) ambitious Lancia in 1953.

Taruffi, who would win the 1954 Targa for Lancia, was a hard man to pin down.

Perhaps he found his most suitable home too late: at scientific and thorough Mercedes-Benz in 1955. Replacing injured hotshot Hans Herrmann, he fitted right in and promptly finished fourth in the famous 1-2-3-4 at Aintree’s British GP and a close second to team number one Juan Fangio in the Italian GP at Monza.

Taruffi had turned 50 by the time Enzo turned to him – in the aftermath of Eugenio Castellotti’s fatal testing crash at the Modena airfield circuit – for what would be the final Mille Miglia.

Taruffi had been trying to win this round-Italy race since 1930, with a best of third place in a Scuderia Ferrari-run Alfa Romeo 8C in 1933, plus runaway class wins of 1934 and 1938 in Maserati and Fiat.

He had led on occasion and challenged for victory often before failing to finish in his eight post-war attempts.

Enzo handed him a 315S fitted with the yet more powerful 4.1-litre version of the V12 – and Taruffi started on a promise to his much younger wife Isabella that he would quit for good should he win. (She had accompanied him on some of his practice laps.)

For the first third he shadowed team-mate Peter Collins, in a 335S with similar engine, but thereafter the younger man’s verve – even Taruffi, an advocate of physical as well as mental fitness, could not hold back the years – saw the Englishman draw inexorably away.

Indeed Kidderminster’s finest was on schedule at the return leg’s Bologna control to beat Stirling Moss’s record average of 1955. Taruffi in contrast – man and car wilting – considered withdrawal.

This is where Enzo chipped in, as was his wont. His version of events is that he told Taruffi to press on because Collins’ transmission was emitting a similar ominous grinding – while promising that he would in turn call off the chasing Wolfgang von Trips.

Taruffi would refute that the latter had obeyed team orders – the German aristocrat in turn graciously insisting that the better man had won on the day – but that’s how it looked as they crossed the finish line at Brescia. The former was just feet ahead on the road having started three minutes behind his rival – in the same model albeit with a 3.8 – some 10 hours previously.

Collins and his photographer/co-driver Louis Klemantaski had indeed ground to a halt, outside Parma.

Taruffi, aka the ‘Silver Fox’, had achieved his gold standard.

However, the crash that killed Ferrari’s ‘Fon’ de Portago and co-driver Ed Nelson, plus 11 spectators, five of them children, cast a shadow over all else.

The Mille Miglia in this format had run its course.

So, too, had Taruffi, the driver.

This (relatively) safety-conscious combatant had seen a great deal of death – a biker and a sidecar racer were killed in support races to the 1952 Swiss GP (and near contemporary Rudi Caracciola had broken a leg in the card’s sports car encounter).

It was time to stop.

Taruffi ‘settled down’ to write the book – the technique has dated but its insights into motor racing chime true – and practise what he preached at his racing drivers’ school.

Oh, and he team-managed until the early 1960s.

Enzo on Piero: “He threw himself into the sport with an inexhaustible enthusiasm.”

Add to that: with skill and expertise born of acute intelligence and the full panoply of experience.