Ludovico Scarfiotti

Name: Ludovico Scarfiotti

Nationality: Italy

Date of birth: October 18, 1933 - Turin

Date of death: June 8, 1968 - Rossfeld, Germany

Patrician, impeccably mannered nephew of Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli, Scarfiotti captured the hearts of his countrymen with an enormously popular victory in the 1966 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. He started his career a little over a decade earlier at the wheel of a Fiat 1100cc saloon. He won his class in the 1957 Mille Miglia and continued to develop his reputation with some consistently respectable showings in an Osca sports car. He also developed into one of the most accomplished hillclimb drivers in the business at a time when the participation of Ferrari and Porsche made this a very popular area of the sport, particularly in Europe. Scarfiotti won the European Mountain Championship in 1962 and 65 with Ferrari Dino sports cars. He also made his Formula 1 debut as early as 1963, standing in for the injured Willy Mairesse to finish sixth in the Dutch Grand Prix, a couple of weeks after sharing the Le Mans winning Ferrari 250P with Lorenzo Bandini. A week later he crashed the Formula 1 car at Reims during practice for the French Grand Prix and suffered leg injuries. For the next two seasons he was only an occasional member of the Ferrari Formula 1 squad, but was reinstated alongside Mike Parkes and Bandini in 1966 after Surtees quit midseason. Despite winning at Monza in '66, Scarfiotti continued to be retained on an intermittent basis. When Parkes was badly injured at Spa-Francorchamps the following year Scarfiotti, already depressed by Bandini's death at Monaco the previous month, virtually gave up. But he returned to Formula 1 the following year as a member of the Cooper-BRM team and also signed to drive for Porsche in the European Mountain Championship. He was practicing at Rossfeld, virtually in the shadow of the site of Hitler's infamous "Eagles Nest" at Berchtesgarten, when his Porsche Bergspyder slammed off the road into a clump of trees. A stuck throttle was blamed for the accident which claimed Scarfiotti's life, although stories persist to this day that he deliberately drove off the road to avoid another injured competitor who had crashed shortly before and was lying in the road.

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