Racing Across Italy In the Mille Miglia In a 1955 Mercedes Gullwing

Forget walking a mile in someone’s shoes to know him; try driving 1,000 miles across Italy in his vintage supercar at breakneck speed.

That’s precisely how I came to know John Fitch, an American racing icon who pushed a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL to a class win, and fifth place overall finish, in the 1955 Mille Miglia. When Mercedes-Benz entrusted me with the keys to a $1.5M factory-restored replica of the Indiana-native’s pedigreed steed and offered entrance to this year’s madcap sprint around the most achingly beautiful country in the world, I squealed my acceptance.

Then I got very nervous. Partially because of the second comma in the price tag but also because the Mille Miglia is “fucking lawless. Sheer chaos,” per a close friend who’d driven the thing several times. Granted, little tops the lunacy of the original. In 1927, a duo of enraged Italian Counts would no longer abide their hometown of Brescia playing second fiddle to Monza as the preeminent Italian racing hub, so they herded up eighty cars and rallied from Brescia to Rome and back.

The Mille Miglia—literally “1000 miles—carried on for two more decades until 1957, when a champion Ferrari driver blew a tire in a 335S, killing himself, his co-driver, and nine spectators. The tragedy saw the race shuttered for another two decades until the modern iteration reemerged. It’s tamer now, but you’re still driving as fast as you can on public roads for ten hours per day for three days straight.

Fitch made the trip in 11 hours, 29 minutes and 21 seconds. Stirling Moss, who won the race outright that same year in arguably the greatest showing in motorsport history, completed the journey in a little more than 10 hours, with an average speed of 97.97 miles per hour. Moss would crest 180 mph on the longer straights of “very bad roads,” as the Brit would later recall; all in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR rocket sans safety provisions. It’s astounding that only 56 people died over 20 years of the race.

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The gravity of our undertaking hammered home when I met our car in Brescia the day before we were to set off. The 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL I was to co-pilot was plucked directly from the heritage fleet of Mercedes. While it wasn’t the vehicle Fitch had deftly wheeled to victory—that unit had been lost over the decades—it held a chassis number that placed it coming off the factory line at nearly the same time as Fitch’s.

Merc bought it back from its owner and treated it to an overhaul at the factory. Missing or damaged parts were re-milled to original specifications and the set-up was identical to Fitch’s: a missing front bumper, a sole rearview mirror, a windscreen before the windshield to deflect bugs and rain above 100 miles an hour. The interior was period-correct, drenched in beautiful blue plaid upholstery and lacking seat belts or any other safety features. Even the gorgeous gunmetal grey paint was matched, and our chariot proudly bore Fitch’s entrant number: 417, a reference to his 4:17AM start time in 1955.

The 300 SL was–and still is—an engineering marvel. Besides being absolutely aesthetically stunning, the world’s first supercar was able to hit 160 mph in a time when triple digits was largely out of reach. Credit for the monster goes to Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Mercedes top racing engineer. Post-war, there wasn’t enough loot to fabricate a new race car from the ground up, so Uhlenhaut was given a 300 sedan and ordered to cobble together a sports car from the parts.

From the family car, he kept the 3.0-liter inline six-cylinder powerplant, the four-speed manual transmission and the swing-axle rear suspension and threw everything else out. His vision for car’s bones was a bombproof steel tube frame that wouldn’t succumb to the greatest of forces applied. For maximum rigidity, that frame came up high into the beltline, forbidding traditional doors and ushering in the iconic gullwings. Atop the tubes went a mostly aluminum body, to help shave weight. (A costly fully-aluminium body was an option, though only 29 such variants were produced.)

The 300 SL—Sportlich-Leicht, or sport lightweight—also boasted the first iteration of direct fuel injection and the gullwing’s prodigious engine was good for 220 horsepower and 203 lb-ft of torque, which gave it a 0 to 60 shuffle of 8 seconds. While all those numbers sound paltry against today’s hypercar norms, this 2,557 pound coupe was blisteringly fast in its heyday.

And it still is.

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Firing up 417 takes some careful choke modulation and steady throttle input to keep the revs up enough to warm up the engine, but nothing sounds as heavenly as this. I wondered if Fitch also smiled broadly the first time he turned it over. Sputtering rain necessitated a more gingerly acquaintance period that I would have preferred, but given that you don’t want to be that guy who immediately stuffs a seven-figure loaner, prudence abounded.

The car felt sturdy, comfortably gliding over the pockmarked Brescia backroads. The drum brakes had a charming quirk of yanking hard to the right under full pressure and kicking you out to the left under lesser force. The steering was loose by contemporary electrically-assisted standards, but direct when you factor in the vehicle’s age. The gearbox was smooth, with first running out fairly quick, but a tall second and third leaving you plenty of room for running up the revs. After some nervous short-shifting, I gained confidence and started to let the engine run out, pleasantly finding everything came alive between 4000 and 6500. The sonorous wail of that inline six at full tilt is so divine that the soundtrack is still playing on a loop in my head, some five months later.

Underway, the calamity my friend noted became immediately apparent. You’re hauling ass in the middle of open public roads. All laws are ignored. Every. Single. One. Feel free to drive down the middle of a two lane highway at 80, forcing opposing traffic onto the shoulder; the Italians don’t care. They’re lining the streets, highways, and rural intersections cheering you on. Treat the brick inlays lining roundabout centers like track curbing, jostling over them with reckless abandon. Do absolutely whatever it takes to gain time. That’s the spirit of the Mille Miglia and it’s surreal to wheel such a pedigreed machina through the course under those conditions.

Hell, the Italian police will even give you an escort, pushing traffic out of your way.

What you cannot do is be indecisive. If you’re committing to a corner, that finicky swing axle behind you doesn’t like hesitation or lifting. Waver or, worse, brake, and the weight unseats and you’re rewarded with a snapping oversteer. Set the car at the beginning of the turn and bury your foot, lest you get flung into a tree. While speed is your friend—the 300 SL happily hums along the highways at 120 mph—the temperamental brakes mean you better have a solid plan for slowing down and plenty of runway to do so. A few close calls at night with blind corners left my heart racing and my palms slick.

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It all coalesced around the end of the second day, when I felt confident enough to drive Fitch’s tribute with a vigor befitting the man himself. I’m not a good enough driver to take the car to the limit, but my co-driver, an automotive journalist named Basem, was. Fitch once said, “I can’t contemplate being a passenger because they are always a pessimist. The driver is always an optimist.” Indeed, wondering how Basem was going to wiggle us around a corner with the speedo nearing triple digits was harrowing, but also an instructive experience. Studying how he’d flick the 300 into a corner, or note where the ideal spot in the revs was for an optimal heel-toe shift was edifying and there was ample time to apply the learnings. By day three, I’d gotten the hang of the fourth-to-third downshift, but still mashed the gears a touch trying to get from third-to-second. (Sorry, Mercedes!)

Right-seating also afforded patches of introspection and reverence for Fitch. Some traits overlapped: we were both rare Americans entrusted by the Germans with their prized possession; he was 38 when he ran in 1955, I am 37. Our venn diagram ends there, however. The man was a WWII hero, who shot down a German fighter plane only to be downed himself and spend two months as a POW, rescued by General Patton himself. He successfully drove for Merc in the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia, and the Carrera Panamericana. And his steadfast resolve and commitment to speed is something that I can start to appreciate, having driven this 300 SL, but I still fall short of completely grasping what it must’ve taken for him to dominate 63 years ago.

“The great thing about 1,000 mile races is you only get one chance to get it right,” Fitch once said. To emerge victorious requires a touch of luck, sure, but innate skill and unwavering fortitude play the largest part. Those are qualities that Fitch exuded in spades and that eluded countless other drivers. “Not everyone is made for this sort of thing,” Fitch told a panel years later. “My co-driver [in the Mille Miglia] wasn’t much help. Afterwards, he confided in me that he didn’t see how we could’ve possibly gone any faster in during the race. He was game for a while, until he dropped a water hose and drained all our water so we didn’t have any to drink. So he just periodically said ‘mein gott’ [German for ‘my God’] until we finished.”

After his win, Fitch would go on to Le Mans that same year, in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR. His co-driver Pierre Levegh took the first stint and during the third hour of the race, crashed into a retaining wall near a throng of spectators and the car disintegrated. Levegh died instantly and the flying car parts tore through the crowd, killing 83 and injuring another 180. It is still the single greatest motorsports accident.

Mercedes withdrew from the race (and abstained from all racing until 1987) though the incident prompted Fitch to design something that continues to save the lives of millions. “At the time, racing was terribly dangerous. I had to wonder what I’m being saved for. The result of that experience was realizing that there’s no way to stop an out of control car,” Fitch told Jay Leno a few years ago.

So, inspired by sand-filled containers that protected his tent from gunfire during WWII, Fitch filled old liquor barrels with sand to attenuate impacts and then personally crashed vehicles into them at high speeds to test his theory. It worked and Fitch barriers were born. Today, they’re the yellow barrels with black lids on the sides of every highway.

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When John Fitch passed away in 2012, the world lost a phenomenal race car driver, war hero, and incredible safety innovator. The measure of a man’s life is often reduced to his accomplishments, but there’s no doubt that had Fitch lived another decade, his lengthy list would’ve only grown.

While it may not have been his exact Mille Miglia thoroughbred, Fitch did get the chance to wheel this very car around Laguna Seca at the age of 89. Despite the grainy footage, the steeled look of a determined champion is obvious. Towards the end of the video, there’s just the hint of a smile creeping across his face as he cracks down the front straight.

To be able to drive a legendary car after the legend himself was a humbling experience that I’ll never forget.