The English gentleman racing driver with an Italian surname passed away on 03 June 2012, just 3 weeks after his 90^th birthday. He raced in Formula One for 10 years, between 1952 and 1962, with his best season being with the Cooper team in 1958.  That season he finished 4^th in the Drivers’ Championship, and scored a 2^nd place finish in the German Grand Prix, a 3^rd in the British Grand Prix, a 4^th in the Dutch Grand Prix and a 5^th in the Italian Grand Prix. However, his greatest triumph came in 1959, when he won the Le Mans 24 Hour Race, co-driving an Aston Martin DBR1 with the American legend Carroll Shelby, who also passed away less than a month ago. He followed that up with a 3^rd place at the great Sarthe classic the following year driving a similar car, this time partnered by another legend, Jim Clark. During the early and mid sixties he could mostly be found in sports racing and GT cars, including the Ferrari 250 GTO, the Aston Martin Project 214, in which he narrowly beat Mike Parkes in a 250 GTO on Ferrari’s home ground at Monza, Jaguar E-Types and AC Cobra.

I met him briefly in the late nineties, when he kindly contributed his thoughts and driving impressions of the 250 GTO and its racing counterparts as mentioned above, to the book that I was then writing on the model. He was accommodating, gracious and humble, a true English gentleman.

Keith Bluemel         
06/2012