When Enzo Ferrari (Alfa team manager) handed him a return ticket to Sicily, where he was to race an Alfa Romeo in the 1932 Targa Florio, Nuvolari revealed a fatalistic approach to his profession.
TAZIO NUVOLARI: "People say you're a good businessman, but I can see you're not. You should have given me a one-way ticket. When you set off for a race, you must be aware of the chance that you will be making the return journey in a wooden box."
Nuvolari won the Targa with a sensational drive, deeply impressing a riding mechanic who had never raced with him before.
PARIDE MAMBELLI: "Nuvolari asked me if I was afraid. Then he told methat, whenever he took a bend too fast, he would yell, so that I could protect myself as best I could, by wedging myself between the seat and the dashboard. I spent the whole race, from start to finish, in a huddle. He started yelling at the first bend, and he didn't stop yelling until the last one."
GEORGE MONKHOUSE (journalist and photographer): "The very sight of Nuvolari has for some reason which I cannot explain always sent tingles down my spine. Perhaps it was just his dynamic personality, but I know that I was not alone in this feeling. He is a wiry, dapper little man with a most purposeful chin. His racing get-up was always colourful, a bright scarf, a red or blue [linen] helmet, giving relief to the sombre brown sleeveless leather jerkin in which he usually drove if the day was cold or wet. In fine weather he donned a bright yellow pullover and white helmet, but wet or fine, round his neck he always wore his lucky charm, ironically enough a golden tortoise. To see Nuvolari in his prime, chin out, sitting well back in the driving seat, his outstretched hairy brown arms flashing in the sun as he made his blood-red Alfa perform seemingly impossible antics, not once, but corner after corner, lap after lap, the tyres screaming and the crowd yelling themselves hoarse, was quite fantastic. There was something soul-stirring about Tazio Nuvolari, for wherever he drove, thousands of spectators, whatever their nationality, 'squeezed' for him, hoping against hope that he would achieve the impossible, nor did he often disappoint them."
Nuvolari's Secret Weapon
ENZO FERRARI: "I have often been asked what there was special about Nuvolari's driving - in what way it was distinctive. All manner of things have been written and said about that famous style of his. It is always the same, in all forms of achievement: a man becomes a legend and, if he is a boxer, it is claimed that he can slay a bull with a blow of his fist; and, if he is a racing driver, he always takes all corners on two wheels.
"After racing against him several times, I began to wonder what there was special in the style of that grim little man, whose performance was invariably the more brilliant the greater the number of bends, which he referred to as 'resources'. So one day in 1931, during practice for the Circuito delle Tre Province, I asked him to take me along with him for a while on the 1750 Alfa that my Scuderia had allotted to him.
"At the first corner, I was certain that Tazio had taken it badly and that we were going to end up in the ditch; I braced myself for the shock. Instead, we found ourselves at the beginning of the straight with the car pointing down it. I looked at Nuvolari: his rugged face betrayed not the slightest emotion, not the slightest sign of relief at having avoided a 180 degree skid. At the second bend, and again at the third, the same thing happened. At the fourth or fifth, I began to understand how he managed it, for from the corner of my eye I noticed that he never took his foot off the accelerator, but kept it pressed flat on the floorboards. Bend by bend, I discovered his secret.
"Nuvolari went into the bend rather sooner than would have been suggested to me by my own driving instinct. But he went into it in an unusual way, that is to say, suddenly pointing the nose of the car at the inner verge just where the bend started. With the throttle wide open-and having, of course, changed down into the right gear before that frightful charge - he put the car into a controlled four-wheel skid, utilizing the centrifugal force and keeping the machine on the road by the driving force of its rear wheels. Right round the whole of the bend, the car's nose shaved the inner verge and, when the bend came to an end, the machine was pointing down the straight without any need to correct its trajectory. Seeing him do it so much as a matter of course, I soon grew accustomed to this extraordinary performance..."
-excerpt from FORMULA 1 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
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