TAZIO ISSUE 10

Inside:

• Senna, by Berger. Thirty years ago, Formula 1 lost one of its greatest champions at Imola. In this issue, Gerhard Berger talks at length about his famous teammate at McLaren. “You always look for weaknesses in your team-mate. With Senna, I couldn’t find any.” Nonetheless, the two became firm friends. The Austrian takes us back to their first meetings, before F1. How they moved up the ranks, found each other at McLaren, and ultimately each going his own way.  “When I went back to Ferrari, Ayrton said: ‘Super Gerhard, you go and sort some things out there. And then I’m coming.’ I told him: ‘Not while I’m there.'”
• Al Holbert, the American Mr. Porsche. A portrait of the racer-engineer who perished in a plane crash in 1988. The multi-talented Al Holbert performed in every category he appeared: IMSA, NASCAR, Group C prototypes and Indycar. Together with Derek Bell, they are the only ones who ever won the Daytona 24 Hours and the Le Mans 24 Hours in consecutive years.
• The beginnings of the Ferrari Challenge. Natan Tazelaar reconstructs the early days of the Ferrari Challenge, now the most prestigious one-make series in the world. He gets behind the wheel of one of the early Ferrari 348 Challenge cars.
• Fabrizia Pons talks about her 45 years in the co-driver’s seat, reading the notes for rally legends like Michèle Mouton, Ari Vatanen or Piero Liatti. “Audi chose Michèle for her driving talent, not because she was a woman.”
• More rally, with the Mercedes 450 SLC 5.0 that handed Björn Waldegaard the World Rally Championship Driver’s title in 1979 at the Bandama rally in the Ivory Coast. Three years later, the car reappeared at the Spa 24 Hours in track form. With an automatic gearbox and big V8, the SLC defied its sedate image and turned out to be a surprisingly versatile and competent race and rally car.
• The TWR-Porsche WSC95 became the surprising winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1996… and 1997. In this exclusive excerpt, taken from the book ‘TWR-Porsche WSC95’, we uncover the lesser-known start of this project. TWR and Porsche – longtime rivals – looked each other deep in the eyes and said: ‘we have the chassis and you have the engine. What if together…’ Just before the planned debut race at Daytona in 1994, the project was brutally cut short.
• In 1952, for the first and only time, the Monaco Grand Prix was held for a sportscar field. We tell the story in pictures.
• Want to do Dakar Classic on a budget? Have you thought about the Lada Niva?
• And of course, the regular columns from Hurley Haywood, Steve Soper and Christian Geistdörfer.