Luigi Musso acclimates himself to the cockpit of his Maserati 300S prior to the start of the 1955 Grand Prix of Bari.
Photo: Maserati Archive
Luigi Musso acclimates himself to the cockpit of his Maserati 300S prior to the start of the 1955 Grand Prix of Bari. Photo: Maserati Archive
A rather prickly young man from Rome, Luigi Musso had all the qualities of a great champion, but he was killed before he could become one. Enzo Ferrari himself likened this Italian diplomat’s son to two of the sport’s greats, Felice Nazzaro and Achille Varzi.
In fact, Musso was a sports all-rounder, an especially gifted horseman, fencer and a crack shot. He tried his hand at motor racing in a Patriarca Giannini 750, which he crashed into a statue of the great Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, at Trapani, during the 1950 Giro di Sicilia and retired. He persevered, however, and was saved from the unhappy life of a soft under-bellied gentleman driver at the rather advanced age of 29, when he ran a semi-works Maserati A6SSG, in which he came a creditable 7th in the 1953 Grand Prix of Italy. He graduated to a Maserati 250F in 1954, when he came 2nd in the Grand Prix of Spain, followed in 1955 by 3rd in Holland and 5th in the UK, which was good enough to earn him an invitation from Enzo Ferrari to join Juan Manuel Fangio, Peter Collins and Eugenio Castellotti at Maranello.
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