Ten years ago, when I was an undergraduate studying Italian, I spent a summer working at a hotel just outside of Monza, Italy, owned by a guy called Antonietto Fossati, who at the time was in his early 70s (at a guess). Apparently he had raced Alfas during the early 1950s, and the entrance hall to the hotel was a veritable shrine to the many hundreds of GP drivers and other racers who had stayed at the hotel during race weekends at the circuit since the early 1960s. (We had Gerhard Berger there that weekend in 1995, and as he was checking out on Sunday evening he told Antonietto and I what happened that afternoon when he was closely following Alesi's Ferrari down one of the straights, when he noticed something that made him instinctively jerk his head his helmet to one side. His team-mate's on-board camera had fallen off the bodywork and missed his helmet by a matter of inches ... at 180mph!)
Anyway, I digress. Antonietto was almost incapable of speaking anything other than dialect Italian peppered with some splendid vulgarities
, but he told me one evening that he was racing or testing a Disco Volante at Monza sometime during the mid-1950s and some kind of mechanical failure caused his car to spin off the track at a high-speed corner. He managed to scrub off enough speed to avoid serious injury to himself but he could do little about the trajectory of the Alfa, and he unfortunately hit and killed a policeman who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I've often wondered if this was just a tall story or whether it was just a case of my misunderstanding him, or maybe there was some truth to this?
Alex.