The brilliant Nicola Larini and his place in Italy's lost F1 generation

Since the Formula 1 world championship was inaugurated in 1950, nearly 100 Italian drivers have raced in championship F1 grands prix – 98 to be precise – and more than 100 if you add those who raced only in non-championship F1 races, of which there used to be plenty, many of them in Italy. Two Italians have won the F1 drivers’ world championship, Giuseppe Farina and Alberto Ascari, but that was a very long time ago, 1950 in Farina’s case and consecutive titles in 1952 and 1953 for Ascari. Just seven Italians have raced in F1 this century – and of that septet, with respect to Luca Badoer, Gianmaria Bruni, Giorgio Pantano, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Antonio Giovinazzi, only two, Giancarlo Fisichella and Jarno Trulli, were ever what you might call F1 stars. Now there are no Italian F1 drivers at all.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, F1 seemed to me to be pullulating with Italians. I have now totted them up, and it turns out that my perception then was correct: between 1980 and 1999 no fewer than 24 Italian drivers raced in F1 grands prix, but many of them did so in sluggish cars run by inept Italian teams and as a result the poor chaps achieved less in the very highest tier of global motor sport than they should have done. Alfa Romeo, Coloni, EuroBrun, Fondmetal, Forti, Minardi, Modena/Lambo, Osella, and Scuderia Italia/Dallara all ran Italian drivers in F1 cars during that period, but none of those teams did anything very well, with the exception of a smattering of decent placings for Alfa Romeo between 1980 and 1984. Its reasonably encouraging form was brought to a gloomy halt by the 1985 Alfa 185T, which Riccardo Patrese described as “the worst car I ever drove”. Perhaps the most embarrassingly bad Italian team of that era was First – which, rather ironically, upended the famous racing phrase ‘to finish first, first you have to finish’ by never even starting. It lodged an entry for the 1989 F1 season, and produced a car that passed the FIA’s mandatory pre-season crash tests but was going to be so slow that before it had even raced it was derided by the team’s own chief designer/engineer Richard Divila as “an interesting flowerpot”. The entry was withdrawn.

He raced for Ligier in 1990 and enjoyed a season glorious by comparison with his two dismal years at Osella, the highlights impressive seventh places at Estoril and Suzuka. But 1991 was a case of same old same old. Yes, he found an F1 drive, but yet again it was in an unsorted car managed by a chaotic Italian team: a Lambo 291 run by Modena. He entered all 16 grands prix, failed to pre-qualify for seven of them, failed to qualify for four of the nine for which he had managed to pre-qualify, and therefore raced just five times all year. At Phoenix he finished seventh, but he had been lapped three times by Ayrton Senna’s winning McLaren.

In 1992, understandably frustrated by F1, he decided to give touring cars a go, entering the Italian Superturismo Championship in an Alfa 155. He won at Monza, Binetto (twice), Vallelunga (twice), Imola (twice), and Misano (twice), and those nine wins earned him a championship that felt extremely good after so much F1 heartache. Moreover, he had triumphed against a cast of top-class fellow Italians including Alessandro Nannini, Emanuele Pirro, Roberto Ravaglia, and Gabriele Tarquini.

In 1993 he stepped up to a punchier touring car series – the punchiest in fact – namely DTM. Again he raced an Alfa 155, but the 1993 DTM-spec 155 was the magnificent 2.5 V6 TI DTM. The car was a beast – in a good way. Equipped with four-wheel drive, it was powered by a jewel of an engine: titanium inlet valves and other money-almost-no-object mods kept that wonderful V6’s weight down to just 110kg and it was good for 420bhp at 11,800rpm. The car’s body was carbon fibre, limiting its overall mass to only 1040kg. Larini won at Zolder (twice), Nürburgring (three times), Wunstorf, Norisring (twice), Donington, Diepholz, and Alemannenring, and became champion by a handy margin.

His winning ways had not gone unnoticed – and Ferrari duly hired him as an F1 test driver. Just before the end of the 1992 F1 season, one of the worst in the Scuderia’s history, Ivan Capelli was given the boot – and Larini was drafted in to replace him for Suzuka and Adelaide. He acquitted himself well, finishing both races in a version of the already tricky and underpowered F92AT made less competitive still by the recent addition of a 30kg active suspension system that worked only erratically. Nonetheless, at Suzuka he had outqualified the Scuderia’s regular driver, which was no mean feat when you consider that he had not raced in F1 all year and that that regular driver was Jean Alesi.

Larini made no grand prix appearances in 1993, but he was again called upon by Ferrari in early 1994, to sub for the injured Alesi. At Aida he qualified an impressive seventh, just two places behind Gerhard Berger in the other 412T1, but on lap one he was punted out of the race (along with Ayrton Senna) by Mika Hakkinen. Next time out, at Imola, Larini did something very special. He qualified sixth and kept a level head on a shambolic afternoon to finish second in front of the adoring tifosi, beaten only by Michael Schumacher’s world championship-winning Benetton B194. In F1 terms, it was Larini’s day of days. But very few noticed it then, and almost no-one remembers it now. You know why. Roland Ratzenberger had been killed in qualifying the day before, and, soon after Larini had appeared on the Imola podium alongside Schumacher and Hakkinen, TV stations worldwide were beginning to broadcast the news that one of the very greatest drivers in F1 history had just died.

Larini raced in F1 five times more, for Sauber, in 1997, as part of a deal via which the Swiss team was able to use Ferrari customer engines. He started well – he was a promising sixth in Melbourne – but after Monaco, disillusioned with not only Sauber but also F1 itself, he called it a day. He returned to touring cars, and he raced them with distinction until 2009, when he retired, aged 45. That final year he won a World Touring Car Championship race, in Marrakech, in a Chevy Cruze.

I will end with a personal anecdote. In 1994 I was invited by Alfa Romeo to Mugello, along with a group of British motoring writers (which is what I predominantly then was, not transferring my journalistic focus exclusively to F1 until 1996). Our visit was a promo for the Alfa 155, which the company was then pushing hard in the UK. We interviewed the top brass, and a few senior techies, and the fun part was being whizzed around the Mugello circuit in a 155 2.5 V6 TI DTM into which a temporary passenger seat had been squeezed. Yes, the four-wheel-drive 420bhp 1040kg monster. Both Alfa DTM drivers were on hand to do the honours – Larini and Nannini – and my chauffeur was Larini.

Thirty years later those few laps remain among the most viscerally thrilling memories of my motor sport career. I was in a fantastic car, on a superb circuit, alongside a great driver. If Turn 1, San Donato, a slowish right-hander, was impressive, the next 14 corners were extraordinary: left through Luco; right through Poggio Secco; flat blat to Materassi and Borgo San Lorenzo, a quick-ish left-right combo; another flat blat to Casanova and Savelli, a yet-quicker right-left combo; two long and fast right-handers, Arrabbiata 1 and Arrabbiata 2, tyres shrieking in response to neat dabs of oppo applied by fingers light on the wheel; a challenging right-left direction change through Scarperia and Palagio, using rumble strips aplenty both in and out, meticulously controlled; a perfectly balanced drift through the long right-hander at Correntaio; a flick-left and flick-right through Biondetti 1 and Biondetti 2; a mirror-image-of-Correntaio drift through the long Bucine left-hander; finally a joyously raucous sixth-gear unleashing of those 420 horses on those 1040 kilograms along the long, long straight to the big, big braking point for San Donato again. I think we did about six laps. A couple of times Larini looked at me, gave me a thumbs-up, and inclined his helmeted head to the right: universal racing driver body language for “are you OK, passenger?” Oh yes, I was OK. Very OK.

No, there are no Italian drivers in F1 in 2024. Yes, there have been only two Italian F1 world champions. But, in the latter fifth of the last century, several fine Italian drivers wasted their F1 careers in very, very bad cars. Nicola Larini, 60 today, was one of them. He was good. Very, very good. Happy birthday, maestro.