BMW has long hailed itself as building ?the ultimate driving machine,? and never was that more true than when the company thoroughly dominated the 1940 Mille Miglia.
Even now, BMW considers winning the inaugural Gran Premio Brescia delle Mille Miglia its greatest auto racing success. The sleek and sexy BMW 328 racers, with their small but powerful engines and superlative handling, were so wickedly good that BMW scored the overall win, the team win, and third, fifth and sixth place.
?The victory in the 1940 Mille Miglia remains a milestone in the history of the BMW brand,? Klaus Draeger, a company board member who oversees R&D, said in a statement heralding the anniversary of the win.
That success followed nearly five years of hard work.
The story starts in 1935 when BMW quietly distributed a brochure to selected customers vaguely describing a new model called the 328. Although the lightweight car featured a 2.0-liter straight-six engine that produced 80 horsepower, nothing was said of the car?s performance, and nothing was said to the press. The company, which had started building cars just seven years before, only wanted to tantalize a few ?friends of the company.?
Nothing more was said until the BMW 328 was unveiled at the famed Nurburgring racetrack on June 13, 1936, ahead of the International Eifel Race. Ernst Henne, a record-setting motorcycle racer, drove the car to victory with an average speed of 63 mph, an impressive figure at the time.
It was the dawn of a new day for BMW.
The roadster scored its second victory in August, when H.J. Aldington, a British BMW importer, won the Schleissheimer Dreicksrennen race. Aldington convinced the brass in Munich to compete in races beyond Germany, so BMW sent the three 328 prototypes to Ireland for the Tourist Trophy.
The cars finished 1-2-3. Several more victories followed in the months to come.
Customers had to wait until April 1937 ? one year to the day after Henne first took the 328 to victory ? until they could get their own cars. By that time, the 328 had amassed a trophy case full of hardware, easily beating cars with far more powerful engines.
BMW?s little roadster had arrived.
By the end of 1937, BMW was dominating the 2.0-liter class in Germany and had established a reputation in Europe. But it wanted a major win on foreign soil. The company set its sights on Italy?s Mille Miglia, a 1,500-kilometer race from Brescia to Rome and back. It was, at the time, one of the most famous races in motor sports.
Four 328 roadsters entered. Thousands of people lined the course, and the BMWs set a blistering pace. The roadsters, with their little 80-horsepower engines, dominated their class but were outgunned by the supercharged Alfa Romeos, Delahayes and Talbots.
The fastest cars finished the course in 12 hours and change. But BMW surprised everyone when A.F.P. Fane not only took first in the 2.0-liter class but finished an impressive eighth overall in his 328. The others were close behind him, finishing 10th, 11th and 12th overall while giving BMW a clean sweep of its class. BMW finally had the international breakthrough it had sought.
But the best was yet to come.
Source: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/04/0428bmw-sweeps-mille-miglia/
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