Seven shocking facts about pre-war Grand Prix ace Achille Varzi

The son of a textile magnate in Galliate, Italy, outside of Milan, Tazio Nuvolari lived one of the most surprising lives of his pre-war Grand Prix colleagues.

Though the details of Varzi’s life have been partially lost to time, those that remain make him one of the most fascinating drivers to compete both before and after World War II.

Achille Varzi started off on two wheels

Born on August 8, 1904, Achille Varzi got his start on two wheels. His elder brother Angelo had been gifted a bike from their father to use to travel, and soon Achille got involved trying to race faster and faster.

By 1924, he began racing in events like the Isle of Man TT and representing motorbike makers like Garelli, DOT, Moto Guzzi, and Sunbeam. In 1928, he began the transition to four wheels that would last the rest of his career.

It was in their motorbike days that Varzi first met his archrival, Tazio Nuvolari.

This story is a tie-in to Elizabeth Blackstock’s podcast, “ Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys .” Her latest episode centers on the morphine addiction that derailed the great Achille Varzi’s racing career.

Achille Varzi’s greatest rival was Tazio Nuvolari

Tazio Nuvolari, though 12 years Varzi’s senior, was competing in Italian motorcycle circles at the same time as the younger man — and while the two were both at the top of their game, they couldn’t have been more different.

Varzi was considered chilly and aloof, a very taciturn and stoic racer who maintained perfect order both on and off the track — which included his insistence upon racing in pressed linen coveralls and never putting a wheel wrong. In fact, in his career, he had only two major crashes.

Nuvolari, on the other hand, was bombastic and could even be seen as emotionally volatile. He raced in a “wild wardrobe” of knickers, argyle knee socks, and a yellow short-sleeved shirt adorned with a tortoiseshell brooch. That energy was mimicked in his racing style, which involved lashing his cars around a track as if he were riding a bull.

When Varzi and Nuvolari were at their peak, they were beloved by the Italian sporting community, in large part because they both represented such polar opposites on the driver expression spectrum.

Achille Varzi was involved in a race-fixing scandal

In 1933, Achille Varzi won the Tripoli Grand Prix — only to be accused of helping coordinate a fix for decades!

To drum up support for the African event, the governments of Libya and Italy arranged a lottery system. Fans could purchase lottery tickets, and a lucky few would have their tickets selected and assigned to a driver starting the race. If the lottery ticket winner’s driver won, they would take home millions of dollars.

Unfortunately, a belief arose that a group of drivers coordinated with a group of ticket holders that, if any one driver won, the ticket holder would share the winnings equally amongst the group. Varzi’s victory was seen to be arranged in advance.

The fixing allegations lasted for decades until a group of dedicated historians disproved the myth — but the allegations tainted Varzi’s name.

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Achille Varzi was a morphine addict

Some time in 1936, Achille Varzi is rumored to have tried morphine for the first time. He had just joined the Auto Union team the year prior, during which time he struck up an affair with the wife of his teammate Paul Pietsch.

The woman, named Ilse Pietsch, has long been blamed for causing Varzi’s addiction, though there is no proof she supplied him with morphine; after all, morphine was regularly prescribed at the time to solve all kinds of ailments.

We do know, however, that Varzi descended quickly into addiction. He was fired by Auto Union ahead of the 1937 season and only appeared at a few races between that point and the onset of World War II as he descended into a morphine haze.

Varzi was able to kick that addiction in 1941 with the help of his new wife Norma Colombo, but he wasn’t able to return to racing until after the war.

Achille Varzi won the first Formula 1 race (kind of)

The 1946 Turin Grand Prix is widely considered to be the first race run using using Formula 1 race regulations. Of course, a formalized F1 championship wouldn’t exist until 1950, but the Turin Grand Prix organizers decided to adopt the upcoming Grand Prix Formula technical regulations that allowed for either 1500cc supercharged engines or 4500cc naturally-aspirated engines.

The race was effectively a test of that incoming regulatory set, and Achille Varzi drove home to take the victory driving an Alfa Romeo 158.

Achille Varzi was Juan Manuel Fangio’s mentor

Achille Varzi met Juan Manuel Fangio for the first time at a 1948 race in Buenos Aires, where a young Fangio finished fourth and Varzi came second. After the race, Varzi approached Fangio to offer him some much-needed advice on how to race Grand Prix cars.

It was the start of a brief and unlikely friendship. When Fangio first traveled to Europe for a race in San Remo, he was shocked to find Achille Varzi join him at his dinner table.

There, “the normally austere and often grim-faced Varzi” struck up a comfortable kinship with a man seven years his junior, confiding in Fangio that he was thinking of retiring soon, and perhaps opening a driving school down in Argentina. He even went so far as to invite Fangio to visit him at his villa near Milan — but not long after that dinner, Varzi was killed.

Touched, Varzi’s father later offered Fangio and a group of Argentine mechanics a place to stay when the Argentine government paid for Fangio to attempt a career in Grand Prix racing. Fangio also hired the late Achille Varzi’s longtime mechanic, Guido Bignami.

That team was named Equipe Achille Varzi.

Achille Varzi is the reason the FIA mandated crash helmets

Sadly, Varzi’s postwar life came to a shocking close at Bremgarten, a track in Switzerland. After heading out onto the damp racing surface, Varzi lost control, struck a fence, and was killed when his Alfa Romeo flipped upside down.

Varzi was donning no protective gear, aside from the linen “helmet” he donned throughout his racing career. So shocking was Varzi’s sudden death that the FIA mandated crash helmets in its aftermath; prior to Varzi’s death at the 1948 Swiss Grand Prix, helmets were mandatory.

Though it’s not certain if a proper helmet would have saved Varzi’s life — after all, early crash helmets still offered very little protection — it was still one of the first moves the FIA made when it came to making motorsport safer for Grand Prix competitors.

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