10 hours of driving is no big deal ...
Almost all of us have probably driven for more or less 10 hours in one day. It's no big deal, for example, to cover the Zurich-Essen-Zurich route in just under 10 hours, i.e. around 1300 km. Well-developed highways and numerous "assistants" (including the warning that a coffee stop is now required) make it easy to cover long distances.
But things used to be different. Stirling Moss won the 1955 Mille Miglia together with Denis Jenkinson in the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR in a time of 10 hours 7 minutes and 48 seconds. The average speed was 157.65 km/h and, God knows, this wasn't a coffee run. Although Moss and Jenkinson were also able to take a few short breaks and even a longer rest in Rome (1 minute 4 seconds), as Hartmut Lehbrink, who interviewed the now 85-year-old Sir Stirling for the current issue of Motor Klassik magazine , tells us, otherwise the hardest physical work and full concentration were the order of the day.
The winners had a few problems to contend with. They had driven around the track several times beforehand in production cars, wrecking two cars in the process, but when they raced through Italy at race speeds (well over 250 km/h), some sections turned out to be a little different. For example, Moss and "Jenks" were completely lifted out of their seats at a level crossing (there were no seat belts back then), so that they thought their spine had broken when they landed roughly ...
During the ten hours at racing speed on partly rudimentary country roads, maximum attention was required. While Jenkinson shouted over danger spots and clear roads from his rolling road sign, Moss otherwise drove largely on sight, bludgeoning the hard-hitting and very loud 300 SLR around the track with its eight-cylinder engine and without power assistance. Incidentally, many of the competitors drove without a co-driver ...
After crossing the finish line, the two Englishmen didn't even know that they had won; Stirling Moss describes this phase as an "absolute anti-climax".
But there was no time for long celebrations anyway, because at midnight Moss got back into a production car with his girlfriend and drove from Brescia to Munich, where he had breakfast and continued on to Stuttgart, where he had a lunch date with Mercedes directors. From there he continued on to Cologne. In the end, it was around 40 hours of driving in just under two days, so even the modern long-distance driver is at a loss ...
The winning car, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR from 1955, can still be viewed at the Techno Classica. If you don't want to make the journey to Essen, you can also find some photos of it in our trade fair report .
