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WINNER - READERS' FAVORITE BOOK ABOUT SPORTIn this epic novel about the motor-racing heroes of pre-war Italy and Germany, legendary characters battle to win incredible races on switchback roads along the edges of ravines. Exploring the relationships between the champions as much as the sporting events themselves, this is a thrilling tale based on the true rivalries, triumphs and disasters during a fascinating period in European sporting history."Martini writes about the dawn of motor racing, a violent and treacherous sport where men serviced their addiction to speed and etched their names in history. Enjoy riding with the greats, it's a rush." - Ben Collins, aka The Stig from BBC'sTop Gear"Every fan of motor racing should readthis book. How the legendary Italian drivers of the past forged the sport we love today with blood and bone" -.Mario Andretti, motor sport legend"A great read! An incredible tale of skill and courage based on true events". -Alex Baldolini, 250cc/moto2 WSS rider"Meticulously researched, beautifully crafted, and a captivating read from beginning to end". - The Historical Novel SocietyABOUT THE AUTHORSandro Martiniis a seasoned journalist who has worked in Italy and the USA. He has spent years researching the facts and creating a story which tells us much about men, their addiction to speed and the love of the machine at a particular time in history.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Distributed By PublishDrive
Date de parution	21 décembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781906582449
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0229€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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SANDRO MARTINI
Sandro Martini is a seasoned journalist who has worked in three continents. He has spent years researching the facts and creating a story which tells us much about men, their addiction to speed and the love of the machine at a particular time in European history.
Published in the UK by Aurora Metro Books.
67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, TW1 4HX
www.aurorametro.com info@aurorametro.com
Tracks, Racing The Sun © copyright 2014 Sandro Martini
Cover Design: Paul Scott Mulvey © 2014
Editors: Cheryl Robson and Stephanie Charamnac
Aurora Metro Books would like to thank: Simon Smith, Neil Gregory, Richard Turk, and Suzanne Mooney.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights are strictly reserved. For rights enquiries contact the publisher.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
In accordance with Section 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the author asserts his/her moral right to be identified as the author of the above work.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBNs:
978-1-906582-43-2 (Print version)
978-1-906582-44-9 (eBook version)
TRACKS
RACING THE SUN
BY
SANDRO MARTINI

AURORA METRO BOOKS
This book is for Natalie .
Thanks to:
Hans Etzrodt, and Aldo Zana for their kind responses to my thick-headed questions, Birgitta Fella for her diligence, and Jon Denton for his motor-racing knowledge.
And finally, thank you to Sarah Gadd for her patience and love: This is as much yours as it is mine.
PART ONE
THE ITALIANS
We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a novel beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace .
– The Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti, 1909
THE ISOLATION OF SPEED
L Isola Del Lido, February 14th, 1968
‘So why are you here?’
‘As I explained in my letters – ’
‘It’s all been told already.’
‘Not all – not everything.’
‘And your interest is what, precisely?’
‘There are dead ends that I hoped you could – ’
‘You said you were writing a book? On Varzi?’
‘Varzi, yes, and – ’
‘But not about me.’
‘Well, you do come into it, of course.’
‘But not much?
‘Well that depends, I suppose…’
‘On what?’
‘On what you tell me.’
‘And what role would you have in mind for me, should I help you with your dead ends?’
‘I – hadn’t thought about it. Why, what did you have in mind?’
Lunch in the hotel restaurant where the waiter in jeans and white shirt escorts us through an archipelago of forsaken tables rising from a well-worn carpet to his table, this elderly man who I’d spotted easily enough in the lobby this morning, sunk into a deep leather chair with a brown suit swimming over a frail body and his long, bony nose pointing down into a pink sports newspaper. He’d mumbled sit, not even raising his eyes as I’d launched myself into the seat opposite, the rucksack on my lap making me feel like a homeless refugee. Fidgeting nervously, I’d glanced about the hotel lobby, a once-swanky place now fallen into disrepair and – if the dozy woman sitting alone by the door in her cheap low cut dress was any indication – disrepute.
‘So you’re the journalist who’s come all the way from New York to hear my stories,’ he’d said, folding the newspaper in half with one crisp flick of the wrists, a gesture well-worn with age. His eyes – brown and glossy – had lifted with casual reluctance to meet mine, but if there was an appraisal, it was well-guarded.
‘Joe Deutsch,’ I’d said, and held his cold hand in mine.
‘Hotels are like families,’ he tells me now as we sit in the dining room with the last glimmer of the afternoon sun fading fast. ‘Some generations prosper, others toss it all to the dogs.’ He looks down at the menu. ‘Still, they do have their ghosts.’
‘If walls could talk,’ I say, regretting my inanity instantly. He looks at me coldly with his dark Italian eyes.
‘If walls could talk,’ he says, ‘room 102 would be the ones you’d want to listen to.’
‘You mean Varzi – ’
‘I mean the lassie back there,’ he interrupts dismissively. ‘Rather noisy at her job that one – they tell me she’s Albanian.’ He takes a sip of his blood-red Campari and soda, licks lips with purple tongue and gazes down at the menu once more. ‘So tell me, where does your – narrative begin?’
‘I – I’d planned to begin when Nuvolari and Varzi first raced each other, back in ’26 – ’ I watch his head bob about with the delusion of expectation. ‘But where,’ I ask uncertainly, ‘would you begin?’
‘No one cares about the back-story, I’ll tell you that for free,’ he replies, his goaded eyes watching thoughtfully as I draw a Norelco Carry-Corder 150 from my rucksack. I plonk it on the table, and he waits for me to peel the microphone out and extend it across to him. ‘But if it’s Varzi you care about,’ he continues after I click the record button on the mike, ‘the winter of 1930 is as good a place to begin as any. I was working for the Gazzetta back then …’

I was standing in my office staring out at the smog, thinking of that face, with its grimace of a smile, ever since I’d read the telegraph from Libya with its headline screaming, ‘The Death of Count Brilli-Peri’.
One of our stringers had covered the Libyan Grand Prix – a minor event out in Imperial Italy – and his terse report had landed on my desk that Monday morning. I’d read it with a mounting sense of bewilderment. During Saturday practice, the reigning Italian champion Brilli-Peri had been setting-up his Talbot when he’d come unstuck at the quick left-hand turn that led into the village of Suq al Jum’ah. It was just past midday and two miles out of Tripoli at 180kph when Brilli-Peri’s Talbot 1700 had flicked into a slide; correcting it, Brilli-Peri had borrowed too much and lost it all when the car speared into a stone wall. Thrown from his Talbot at full speed face-first into the wall of an abandoned house, Brilli-Peri had been killed outright.
I recalled my own impressions of Africa from my time there after the war: heat, filth, sand, disease. The memory of the desiccated heads of camels lining the market stalls teeming with flies suddenly came to me, and I imagined those blow-flies finding Brilli-Peri long before the marshals ever did, poor bastard.
How to write about it was the issue. The Death of a Champion perspective, I knew, would only enrage my editor for whom cliché was ample justification for the pink slip. National Tragedy had its merits, but I’d done that for Materassi at Monza back in ’28 when he’d misjudged a pass on Foresti and careened through a series of straw bales into the crowd killing himself and twenty-two spectators. Just before he’d lost control, he’d been battling against Nuvolari and Varzi, still seething that his protest against both before the race had fallen on deaf ears. I turned from the window and sat behind my desk, inserted a clean sheet of paper into the Littoria typewriter, and stared at it.
The Italian desert, the oasis of Mussolini’s delusion, Marshal Badoglio’s new world, Italy’s African empire, the curse of the first ever scuderia founded by Brilli-Peri and Materassi, all of it flooded before me and none of it would discharge from my fingers onto the virginal whiteness of that page … where to begin? In 1925, when the young nobleman, Count Gastone Brilli-Peri, had won the first-ever Monza Grand Prix? Or perhaps – the shrill tring of the phone interrupted my deliberations and a voice rasped, ‘Finestrini?’ into my ear.
‘This is he,’ I replied, searching for my cigarette pack on the cluttered desk.
‘This is Varzi, Achille Varzi.’
‘Varzi.’ The pack of Camel revealed itself beneath the soft pages of that morning’s Corriere . ‘Have you heard?’
‘Yes. A tragedy. I’m sure you’ll convey this to your readers in tomorrow’s ’paper.’ One was always unsure with Varzi: Was it contempt in his voice? ‘I’m at the Pidocchio,’ he announced, ‘come have lunch.’
‘I have a deadline.’
‘An unfortunate turn of phrase, Finestrini. I heard his girlfriend left him the day before he died.’
‘Really?’
‘Come past in about an hour. That should give you enough time to type-up the curse of Materassi, death in Imperial Africa nonsense. I have,’ he added, his voice distracted, ‘an idea for your comic strip.’
I abandoned my story, grabbed my new loden overcoat from the rack and headed out into the smog. Perhaps Varzi had a point: Brilli-Peri deserved more than a national hero dying for the patria epitaph.
I bought a copy of Avanti! and paged through it on the damp tram that trundled its way through the fog and mounting sleet. Avanti! had reprinted a story from the New York Times verbatim: “Fears Moron Types Will People Nation: Dr. Wiggan Says Democracy Will Not Outlast Century Unless The Intelligent Reproduce”.
The Duce’s almost completed Milano Centrale railway station hovering in a cloud of steam acted as a beacon for me to jump off the tram. A shower of icy hail stung my face as I made my way towards The Pidocchio.
Inside all was grimly quiet; a table near the back, shrouded by cigarette smoke in which shadowed faces emitted hushed words, offered the only sign of life. I was headed deeper into the restaurant when a firm hand, on my shoulder, slowed me in my tracks.
A face, behind me, lingered alone in the