Rumblings

Amid a profusion of major milestones in 2025, DOUG NYE presents another – the death of Antonio Ascari 100 years ago

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In this year of significant anniversaries - 75 years of the Formula 1 World Championship (NB - NOT as the marketeers would like us to believe “of Formula 1”, which has been around for two years longer), 80 years since VE Day, and of course also 80 years since importation to Britain of the first postwar banana consignment, there is another notable motor sporting centenary worth marking.

On July 26 it is 100 years since the great Italian champion driver Antonio Ascari - father of 1952-53 FIA World Champion Alberto - lost his life when leading the 1925 Grand Prix de l'ACF (aka the ‘French Grand Prix’) at Montlhéry Autodrome.

Ascari Sr had been the most capable and fastest racing driver of those early 'tween-war times. Like so many great Italian hard chargers he'd had a hard-handed mechanical background. Born in 1888, he was the son of a rural corn merchant, from the village of Moratica, some 17 miles south of Verona and barely a mile east of Tazio Nuvolari's boyhood home at Castel d'Ario.

In his teens Ascari landed a job as a mechanic with the small De Vecchi company in Milan, where he met and became friends with three-years older Ugo Sivocci. In 1909 he went with his brother Amedeo to Brazil, helping build a railway, only for his brother to die of yellow fever. Back in Italy by 1911, it was upon Sivocci's recommendation that Ascari made his debut as a competition driver, handling a touring De Vecchi in a modest Modenese regularity trial.