Driving The Most Exotic Road Rally In The World In A Beetle

The world of exotica converges on Italy in May. There’s the Concorso d’Eleganza in Cernobbio, on Lake Como, for the ultra-polished and restored machines, but there’s nothing like the Mille Miglia to get out and enjoy big-buck historic cars.

Yet it’s easier to say what the Mille Miglia actually isn’t than to explain what it is. It isn’t a road race. It isn’t a tarmac rally. It isn’t a gentle tour through the Italian countryside.

It’s famous, for sure, because even today Italians talk about Sterling Moss averaging more than 157km/h for 1000 miles – including fuel and tyre stops – in 1955 before the road-race part of the Mille Miglia ended tragically.

The 1957 version killed nine people, including five children, but the Mille Miglia had taken 56 lives over its 30 years and it only stayed alive as a prime-time motorsport event that long because five million spectators lined the roads every year and it was was bigger than every soccer game played in Italy all year.

It’s now officially a regularity trial, one of the most exacting, precise and utterly boring experiences known to motorsport (though some people seem to like it, presumably because they’re accountants or mathematicians or masochists).

Yet the current Mille Miglia is somehow far from boring.

The “regularity” part is taken disturbingly seriously by a lot of crews, but is really a two-atom-thick veneer of moral responsibility that allows the turning of a blind eye to the rest of the event, which is in essence an officially sanctioned Gumball rally. In old cars. With old brake, steering and suspension systems.

And this year, alongside all the pre-1957 classic sports cars from Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Bugatti, Maserati and Mercedes-Benz, there lurked the little Volkswagen Beetle that gave his all.

Bruce the Brave, as we christened him, charged again and again at the spaceship Benz SL Gullwings, sometimes passing them, sometimes being passed, but never faltering even at 6000rpm in fourth gear. 190km/h in the rain? No problem.

He scrambled past an amarda of Stuttgart-bred Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes through cities and towns, on winding mountain roads and, when he could, by surprising them when they’d eased off their stupendous power.

For four days, from Brescia to Ferrara to the Adriatic Sea, to Rome, to Siena and Florence, to Bologna and the heart of Italy’s sports-car scene in Modena and back to Brescia, the little bug’s arrival signaled the start of wild cheers of “Maggiolino!!!” from the locals.

But how did a Beetle sneak in to a field of exotics? Well, that’s its own story.

Day One – Brescia to Milano Marittima

Volkswagen is killing off the modern Beetle this year and officially this two-car entry was to say goodbye to one of the most underwhelming retro machines of all time by showing once again how loved the original was.

There’s another way to look at it. This year is the 91st birthday of the Beetle, but it’s a birthday Volkswagen can never officially celebrate.

That’s because most of the people photographed alongside the first Beetle off the production line were hung, shot, swallowed poison or retired to mysterious Argentinian villages without learning Spanish.

So its birthday is not a cork-popping moment, but the car didn’t deserve to have its place in history erased, and neither did the millions of people whose lives the Beetle touched.

And here we are, sitting in a big tin shed on the outskirts of Brescia. Volkswagen Group boss Herbert Diess is here driving an old Bugatti, but there are two Beetles from Volkswagen Classic – a split-window that is a replica of the Paul-Ernst Strahl class winner from 1954 and ours.

Greg Kable and I strap in (a loose term for a looser lap belt) to a pair of seats that look like brutally modified medieval armour and fire up the car-that-would-become-Bruce.

Bruce is a replica of the 1956 Mille Miglia entry, built to its original technical specifications and drawings, right down to its Porsche 356 motor sporting 55kW of power. Allegedly. There is possibly more. Ok, there is probably more. Ok, I have no doubts whatsoever that there is a lot more.

Downtown Brescia is chaos on MM day, with tens of thousands of people lining the northern Italian city’s streets in a celebration of history, then it’s off onto the streets of Italy for a four-day immersion in few-holds barred craziness that would see you locked up on any other day. Even in Italy.

See, one of Italy’s favourite concepts is that of “Furbo”, or trying to sneak a little win here and there that might take some line blurring to achieve. That’s why Italians aren’t the masters of queues, for example.

The Mille Miglia gives everybody licence to do this, too, and liberties are stolen on assumptions of cooperation. But there’s a problem.

The Miglie Miglia competitors are one thing. We know if we mess it up we could very well die because we are, actually, the crumple zone. Also, people are (usually) cool with it.

The biggest dangers in the Mille Miglia are the modern “touring” Ferraris that run at the head of the field and the support staff for the old cars.

Those guys are nuts.

But we don’t see that on the first day as we’re waiting in the middle of Brescia, the Mille Miglia’s traditional home.

We are, instead, waiting. And it’s cold and about seven degrees and I’m not the only one without a coat.

Multiple Le Mans, Nurburgring and Spa winner, Romain Dumas, is here to punt Porsche’s open 550 Spyder, straight out of the museum. And he only has a light polarfleece on. Jackie Ickx has it worse, with just a t-shirt and a body warmer.

But Dumas, who holds the outright record on Pikes Peak in Volkswagen’s electric ID R, has people to get him warm clothing. I have to troll the shops along the central road in Brescia…

It’s a happy drive out of central Brescia to the official start at the Mille Miglia museum, then a bit of a trudge, frankly, in heavy traffic to the Lake Garda tourist town of Sirmione, where you can see the sun rise and set on the same lake.

Not that we did. We had miles to cover as the little Beetle warmed to its task, following the Po River down to Ferrara. And there we should have stopped, given that it was already nighttime, but that’s not the way of this event, so we poked down gently to across to the coast and down to the first overnight stop

An easy day, with almost no silliness, no problems from my little Porsche-powered friend and no major brain inflections from anyone else.

Day Two

That wouldn’t last into Day Two. We were cruising down towards Rome on a day worth more than 600km when a squadron of 300 SL Benzes began to swarm us.

They swarmed on the left, on the right, down the middle and overtook other cars over blind crests. Magnus Walker, of the long beard and cult status, was the most enthusiastic of them, taking lane splitting as a personal crusade to force three lanes where only two existed. At high speed, too.

But at least he knew what he was doing. Two of the pre-event Ferraris, a 488 and a California, tangled up a hill and took each other off into the trees, causing enormous and expensive destruction.

The actual event drivers shook their heads. This is always where we suspected the drama would unfold, and it did time and again.

And then we hit the regularity stages. Kable tried, bless him, but his brain wasn’t in it as he ditched the programmed iPad for a more analogue approach that may or (more likely) may not have worked.

Still, it all took us back to the coast from Urbino, then back inland again to the gorgeous Fabriani

And now, in what seemed like spirited competition from the likes of Macau-crash survivor Sophia Floersch and Walker, the little Beetle began to wake up.

Sure, his steering was still very much a 1950s construct, with a quarter of a turn of nothingness, broken up by heavier nothingness in its feedback, and the floor-hinged pedals lived on pressure and returned no feel.

So the trick was to throw it in as hard as we could, then wait for instructions from the surprisingly talkative rear end to judge whether to wash off a bit more speed or to pile it on. It became a game of toss and catch, because the swing-axles were waaaaay better disciplined than I’d been lead to believe.

See, this was the first Beetle I’d ever driven and I came into it with no expectations, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a cheery friend beneath me.

And then, as we charged down towards Rome, the games with Walker and Floersch heated up, with both of them having near-moments of locking up as their fast-but-unstoppable rockets met oncoming traffic where, to be fair, oncoming traffic should have been.

And then, with them stuck in traffic, we took the masterful approach of clambering over a roundabout to sneak in front. Walker countered by forcing yet more cars out of the way before we climbed a wide, vacant footpath to pass him into a tunnel.

As crazy as it sounds it was mostly at low speed, except for the near incident where Floersch emerged from her red machine with her hands trembling… Honestly, you’d think she’d have had enough of those after her Macau demolition incident.

Completely out of synch, but enjoying each other’s road games enormously, we rode through Rome together in a giant conga line lead by police motorbikes.

Heroes in our eyes, the police riders all took holidays to join the Mille Miglia, and controlled the pace, allowed you to pass them when they thought it was safe and pushed cars out of the way to let us through. They were fabulous.

We arrived at the hotel at 1am, then the Volkswagen team wanted to have dinner, even though we needed to be in the car again at 8am…

Day Three

It was just outside Rome that we found the first live Dallara sports car I’d ever seen. We tried to run with it, but even a heavily modified Beetle doesn’t have that much gristle.

Instead, we drifted back until we found our friends again and gloried at watching the SLs from behind. Their tails are so long and their rear suspensions so soft that you never see the wheels touch the ground and they look like they glide over the ground like a Star Wars speeder.

But then we were stopped by another huge crash, with a Benz S-Class Cabrio support car striking a citizen’s E-Class Cabrio head on and blocking the road out of Viterbo.

It was in Viterbo that we began to notice something. People loved the Beetle. I mean, we were following 1950s Ferraris and Maseratis and Alfas in to packed town streets and they’d wave to the exotics and jump up and down for us shouting “Maggiolino!!! (Italian for beetle)”.

Our theory ended up being that they like the accessibility of it, that they could dream about a Ferrari but a Beetle was eminently reachable both financially and in their own histories. Someone in the family probably had one.

And they loved seeing it attacking the supercars of their day, like the little guy sticking it to the man. At least, that’s what one of them told us.

And then a classic Ferrari got wiped out in a road crash, blocking the road again and forcing traffic to be detoured on to a parallel road (where they crashed again, through no fault of the event) and the driver pulled the event stickers off it…

At the point of dusk and looking forward to a settler, Kable has the good news. We’ve only got 500km to go… The good news is that a good few of those involve the Futa pass. The bad news is that it’s raining and foggy.

Still, that won’t stop Bruce the Brave, and he leaves Florence’s pebbled streets to charge off over the mountain to Bologna.

And it’s about the most treacherous brisk driving I’ve ever done. There are areas on old cars when you realize how far things have come. Headlights and wipers, mainly.

We had headlights, in the same way that Kiera Knightly has breasts: there in name but not remotely useful. They’re not for seeing, our team told us, but for being seen.

And we could have wipers or high beam, but the six-Volt electrical system wouldn’t let us have both at the same time. So we chose whatever seemed most urgent.

The absolute traction of the Beetle’s rear end saved us again and again, rotating into oversteer that could be comfortably held to tighten the little car’s line and avoiding the so-so communication from the front.

And then the fog hit, and the surfaces changed again and again and we kept trusting Bruce and he kept delivering. It was more than just the engine that had been changed, even if we were still using the ‘50s era accelerator wheel (not a pedal).

We finally rolled in to Bologna well ahead of our target time, and even had time for a bit of dinner, which was a first.

Day Four

By now, we realized, the little Beetle was becoming something of a cult even within the Mille Miglia. Every time we stopped, someone would jump out of something exotic and ask: “What the hell is in that thing?” and we’d show them.

The price to pay for Porsche power was an engine so loud we needed rally-style headsets to save our hearing. He was Bruce the Brutal on ears, but sounded just like a dak-dak from outside.

Social media posts from all price points of the event were sharing pictures of Bruce as the coolest car in the event, and one of the quickest.

More Ferraris went down, including a Ferrari-badged, pre-war, cycle-guard Alfa that was wiped out leaving a petrol station in Modena and another that crashed mysteriously into a vineyard on a steep downhill section.

But not Bruce. He charged into Parma through Sesso (sex) and Bagno (bathroom), with hordes of spectators braving the rain to line the city’s streets at least five deep.

He tore off into the road to Brescia and, on the run in to the finish, overtook Walker’s Gullwing while pulling 6000rpm in fourth gear (about 190km/h) and held the lead into the regroup just outside town.

To finish a rally is not a small thing to do. To finish one in old cars with old parts and exhausted crews is something more special, even if it’s not a genuine speed event. It’s worse than that. It’s a some-holds-barred blast around Italy, in which most Italians join in and kids jump and scream with their parents.

But the finish line is very welcome after so many miles in a tin seat.

Day Five

I climbed into a Range Rover, pulled out of the carpark and braked.

And forget it had power assisted brakes so I smashed my head into the steering wheel.