Mille Miglia 2009 – Day 8 Team Ferrari Heading north to home - Stelvio at last

We depart the comfortable and quiet hotel in Brescia to head north to try the Stelvio once again. We say a tearful goodbye to the other teams who have a Car train booked in the evening to take them to Duesseldorf. They head for the Mille Miglia Museum while we have another 5 hours of driving to complete the pass then another 12 hours to get to Calais and then home. 


For the first time the weather is not kind to us and it rains most of the way to Stelvio. The pass itself begins gently enough but then the hairpins start. An old 'gent' in a Lancia slowed us and a German in a Merc down to a to a crawl. A few polite pips of the horn and a couple of inpolite blasts on it and the Italian pulls over. The Merc however had other ideas and continued a slightly faster crawl. Had to resort to the V8's full power to get past him on a small straight that appeared out of nowhere. The pass is relentless all the way up and then 48 hairpins down again, some extremely tight in first gear the others scarily fast in second or third. At one point we pass through a cloud an had to slow to walking pace. The the slowest motohome (German) then appears doing 1mph. The chap ignores all polite and impolite requests to pass to had to resort to brute force to pass him on a bend (do not try this at home...). Unfortunately the cloud cover prevented us from getting the ultimate photo of the ultimate road but it finished off an excellent adventure.....