When the flag drops and Dr. George Verrilli sets off to compete in the Fifth Annual Targa Newfoundland Rally next month, his mind just might flash back to the moment he let in the clutch of a Lancia B20 to start a Targa event on another island more than half a century ago.
In 1953, American-born Verrilli, now 78, was a medical student in Italy with a passion for cars and racing, and had hooked up with Gianni Marzotto, scion of a wealthy and equally car-crazy Italian family. It was in their racing stable's Lancia he ran that year's legendary Targa Florio in Sicily, the event that provided inspiration for the current globe-spanning rallies: Targa Tasmania, Targa New Zealand and Targa Newfoundland.
Unlike the modern Targas, which see entrants compete in special closed-road stages over a five-day period, the Targa Florio — Targa was the plate awarded to the winner and Florio was the family name of the event's founder — was a flat-out road race.
It was contested by all the famous factories and drivers of the day and comprised eight laps of a rough 125-kilometre dirt and pavement course that took competitors from sea level up into the mountains and — not unlike our own Targa — through many small communities packed with avid enthusiasts.
Verrilli recalls that driving through the mountain towns with people waving and the exhaust roaring off the stone buildings "was just so . . . exciting. You just hoped you could fit through the crowd."
He remembers coming around one curve in a four-wheel drift "and there was this old lady with a cane — and of course there was just a stone wall on the curve — and my rear wheel knocked the cane out of her hand. Oh, my god. And they just didn't care. They were so enthusiastic."
When he came into the pits on one lap, he says somebody handed him a bottle of wine. "I guess he thought I'd race better if I had a little wine under my belt. It was such fun," he laughs.
Verrilli competed in the Targa Florio again in 1954, but also ran in the other epic open-road race of the time, Italy's Mille Miglia — a 1,000-mile run from Brescia to Rome and back — in 1953, 1955 and 1956. He finished poorly in the first one, seventh in class in the 1955 event at the wheel of his own Austin-Healey 100-4M and crashed it comprehensively in the final event.
"It was hair-raising. Every year, people were killed. Tourists would get angry and get out on the roads. And they didn't even stop the trains," which crossed the route in places, he says. "One year, we hit a chicken and it got caught up in the Healey's exhaust and when it came out it was roasted. It was an awful stink."
The crash, which "didn't total the car, but only because the Italians can rebuild anything," was on the run up into the Apennines near Pescara. "We slid on a donkey turd in the rain and hit one of those trees the Italians plant along the side of the roads."
Verrilli was born and raised (his father was a doctor) in Mamaroneck, N.Y., and wound up in Italy after beginning his medical training in Scotland where it was "cold, damp and stinky, there was no campus life" and no automobile action.
He transferred to Rome, but it "was so much fun" he didn't get anything done and moved again to the University of Padua, located not far from places of motoring magic like Modena, Monza and Imola.
