STORY OF THE DAY: A Family Ferrari Reaches Brescia in Ninth

The rain-soaked 1950 Mille Miglia produced Ferrari’s first overall victory in the Italian road classic, while Vittorio Marzotto and Paolo Fontana brought the number 722 Ferrari 195 S home ninth overall. Their finish added depth to Ferrari’s result on a course stretching from Brescia to Rome and back, where hundreds of starters faced wet roads, mountain passes and crowded towns.

Their distinctive contribution was survival. While Giannino Marzotto and Marco Crosara won in another 195 S, Vittorio and Fontana managed a barchetta whose open cockpit offered little protection from the weather. Reaching Brescia after nearly a thousand miles required restraint over broken surfaces and sustained concentration through traffic, giving Ferrari another classified finisher on a day of unusual attrition.

The 195 S was an enlarged development of the 166, retaining a tubular chassis and front-mounted Colombo V12 but increasing capacity to approximately 2.3 litres. The number 722 car carried open bodywork associated with Paolo Fontana’s Padua coachbuilding concern. Its light construction and responsive engine suited the Mille Miglia’s mixture of fast straights, climbs and abrupt changes of direction.

Vittorio Marzotto was an Italian gentleman driver from the industrial Marzotto family, several of whose brothers raced Ferraris with distinction. He later won the 1952 sports-car Monaco Grand Prix. Paolo Fontana was an Italian coachbuilder as well as Vittorio’s accompanying driver, giving this entry an unusually close link between the person in the cockpit and the construction of its body.