1,000 Greatest Drivers: Emilio Materassi

He should be remembered for more than just his fatal crash.

This week’s mini-focus is a handful of pre-World War II Grand Prix legends who died on this week in racing history. Materassi and tomorrow’s driver Giuseppe Campari were both killed in separate runnings of the Italian Grand Prix, while Robert Benoist was killed during World War II by the Nazis after retiring as a driver before World War II started. I will be writing about both Materassi and Campari on the anniversary of their deaths, but the date Benoist was killed is unknown and I have seen three different death dates for him (September 9, September 11, and September 14, 1944). I will be writing about him on September 14, which seems to have the most historical backing, although Wikipedia currently lists September 11.

You might not have heard of any of these drivers because the drivers who peaked in the era before Formula One was formed in 1950 tend to be ignored. Drivers tend to be ignored if they drove in races or disciplines of racing that no longer exist and that seems unfair. People don’t seem to be interested in the history of anything that isn’t relevant in the present day as I also noticed when I wrote my typing book and discovered that typing competitions were something of an American institution in the first half of the 20th century, but because that era of typing contests no longer exists and few people before me wrote about them online, no one cares. This seems to hold for a lot of the pre-World War II drivers too. But Materassi was clearly great even if it was short-lived and the circumstances of his death ended up overshadowing his life.