Rita Rampinelli - racing icon of the fifties
08/31/2011
Emilio Rampinelli, a garage owner from Schaffhausen, probably drove his best race on the Klausen Pass in 1934. Balestrero, Dusio and Stuber - all in Alfa Romeos - were the best-known drivers in the international class of sports cars up to 3000cc. Emilio Rampinelli took 6th place, almost 50 seconds behind the winner Renato Balestrero. His car: also an Alfa Romeo 8C (8-cylinder, 2300cc, compressor). His daughter Rita may have been just under 10 years old at the time. There is no need to ask where and why she got the racing bug.
I knew Rita Rampinelli very well as a teenager. Whenever she took part in the Mitholz-Kandersteg mountain race against her male, often loud-mouthed competitors, I was her silent admirer on the course. Of course, she had no chance against Willy Peter Daetwyler's roaring 12-cylinder Alfa Romeo in her 1.1-liter Cisitalia. The four-cylinder engine constructed from Fiat components was not designed to beat such monsters.
A young woman in a single-seater racing car had become the exception in the 1950s - even in international racing. The era of daring female racing drivers fighting for equality, such as the Frenchwoman Hellé-Nice, Countess Einsiedel or Emma Munz from Zurich, was long gone. Only in rallying did they exist, the fast women: Pat Moss, Greta Molander or Ewy Rosqvist. Motorsport was a "man's business" and Rita Rampinelli was the big exception in Swiss motorsport. In the prudish post-war years, women belonged in the kitchen and not on the racetrack! At least that was the mistaken opinion of most Swiss men and women! Finishing fourth in the racing car category of the 1955 Swiss Championship was more than just a respectable success.
In 1953, Rita Rampinelli drove the Monte Carlo Rally together with balloonist Max Brunner. She was not successful here - but she was very lucky. This is how Rita Rampinelli recounted the mishap: "... where the Opel spun on its own axis four times, hit an embankment again, rolled over and, with its wheels in the air, spun three more times on the ice..."
