F1’s first great racing machine
During the 1937 motor racing season when the Alfa Romeo cars raced by the Scuderia Ferrari were being trounced by Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union, rumour first announced that the famous Milanese factory intended to build a 1.5-litre machine, in a desperate effort to recapture some of their, and Italy’s, vanishing prestige in the sphere of motor racing.
However, as month succeeded month no new 1500cc Alfa Romeo appeared on the scene. Despite this, odd snippets of news created the feeling that Alfas were ‘up to something’ for varying sources confirmed that new vehicles had any number of cylinders, from six to 16. This peculiar fog of uncertainty surrounding Alfa Romeo was not unusual, as only a mere five years earlier the birth and growth of Germany’s new racers had been equally obscure.
The first real clue to anything definite came in June 1938, when the British motoring press revealed that Attilio Marinoni, head tester and mechanic of Scuderia Ferrari, had thoroughly tried out the new 1.5-litre Alfa Romeo and that it proved to be an eminently satisfactory motor car.
Barely had the news sunk in before three dull red 1.5-litre Alfa Romeos stood on the starting line in the annual curtain-raising voiturette [very roughly equivalent to today’s F2] race at Leghorn on 31 July 1938, with drivers Emilio Villoresi (brother of the volatile Gigi), Francesco Severi and Clemente Biondetti. The field consisted of the inevitable swarms of miscellaneous privately owned Maseratis, plus a works Maserati team led by Luigi ‘Gigi’
