280 kilometres: that’s the distance from our factory in Faenza to Monza, the venue for the Italian Grand Prix, so the 14th round of the Formula One World Championship is our all-important home race.
Most of the factory-based workforce will therefore be making the trip to watch the team in action at a circuit that captures the very essence of motor racing. Driving through the gates of the Royal Park in the early autumn morning is a special feeling that no other track can match. The Autodromo di Monza was built in 1922, featuring a two-track layout, the normal road circuit and a banked oval. In 1955, the Italian GP was run over both tracks, so that cars passed the start-finish line twice every lap, once when completing a circuit of the oval and once on the road section, giving a total lap distance of almost ten kilometres. The banking, which can still be seen today in a sad state of disrepair, was last used in 1961, while the previous year, another F1 landmark was reached when Phil Hill, driving a Ferrari, scored the last ever win for a front-engined grand prix car.
Monza is rightly known as the Temple of Speed, the 2003 Italian Grand Prix holding the record for the fastest ever average race speed, at 247.585km/h, while the 1971 event boasted the closest ever finish in the history of Formula 1, when Peter Gethin beat Ronnie Peterson by just one hundredth of a second and the first five were covered by just 0.61 of a second. In those days the track was basically just five corners linked by straights and it was a slipstreaming special, while modern safety requirements mean that today, chicanes have slowed the speeds, putting a premium on a car’s brakes as much as its engine power, although the cars still run with minimum aero downforce.
This year’s event will be the 61st running of the Italian Grand Prix, all of them hosted by Monza, with the exception of the 1980 race, which was held at Imola. Scuderia Toro Rosso has stamped its name on the history of this race, with that wonderful win for Sebastian Vettel back in 2008.
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