Mercedes-Benz & Mille Miglia

Author: Andrea Curami, Hardbound, ISBN: 9788879113595, 160 Pages, English - Italian Text, Published, 2005

From the Introduction -

October 25 1929, better known as Black Friday,1 marked the start of the fall in share prices on the Wall Street stock market in New York and the subsequent Great Depression in the United States.

But the economic crisis did not affect the new workl alone; it soon crossed the Atlantic Ocean and hit Europe. We hare no interest in listing all the repercussions - political included - that this disastrous breakdown in the U.S. eamomy causee4 except to highlight the collapse of the world car market that inevitably followed the U.S. crash. To make matters worse, the First World War had stopped the diffusion of the private car in Europe, where it was slowly picking up momentum once more.

There was not the internal demand able to absorb the increasing number of cars being produced by a motor industry which had flourished during the war due to a sudden influx of aeronautical orders. When the war ended, though, the manufacturers were just as suddenly forced to find themselves themselves a civilian market outlet, so many of them turned to motor racing,using the sport as a publicity vehicle.

That is how a number of endurance races came into being as the first events of their kind in this pioneering period which, in the spirit of their regulations, were to benefit not only the speed but also the reliability of normal production cars.