The hook. A fresh F1 digest ran a note about Antonelli and "Monza's 60-year curse." A passing mention: grid penalty, "curse," that's it. But I went to check the numbers — a habit there's no cure for — and it turned out the "curse" isn't a pretty newspaper turn of phrase, but a genuine hole in the statistics that can be measured in decades if you want. Four Italian podiums in 59 years. The last one — twenty years ago. And one more detail that turned curiosity into investigation: the anniversary is happening literally now, this weekend, 60 years and two days after that very victory. And the only person capable of breaking the curse is starting from the back of the grid, because he burned his own chance — by changing engines. This kind of drama doesn't write itself.
Let's start with cold arithmetic, because it's worse than any legend.
The Autodromo di Monza has hosted the Italian Grand Prix since 1922 — it's the oldest temple of speed — older than the world championship itself. Seventy-five victories are written into Formula 1's ledger at this track, and exactly four of them are Italian:
After September 4, 1966 — silence. Not "few wins," but zero. Italian victories in Formula 1 didn't end there, to be fair — twenty-five more happened after that date: Brambilla, Patrese, de Angelis, Alboreto, Nannini, Fisichella, Trulli, and now Antonelli in the current season. But at Monza — not one. Italy — a country where motorsport is religion — hasn't seen one of its pilots win the home Grand Prix once in six decades. Ferrari added 20 more victories to its Monza collection during this time (the latest — Leclerc, 2024), but behind the wheel sat Schumacher, Barrichello, Alonso, Leclerc — citizens of Germany, Brazil, Monaco. The irony is that the only team that's carried the burden of Italian hopes for decades chose its winners not by passport.
Now about "someone must have at least finished." Italian podiums at Monza after 1966: four. Second and third places for Alboreto (1984, 1988), Patrese (1984), and Fisichella (2005). Poles: Patrese-83 and Teo Fabi-86 — both failed to convert. All of Italy's hope over 59 years fits into one short paragraph.
Why it happened this way is a separate and instructive story. Mixing "curse" with mysticism isn't worth it: the mechanics are more prosaic and scarier. Two lines converged into one vortex. First: the best Italian racers of those years — Scarfiotti, Bandini — were leaving life, and Ferrari, having lost first Surtees, then Bandini at Monaco-67, started getting cautious with countrymen. Second: sports economics. By 2012, there wasn't a single Italian pilot in Formula 1 at all — no more budgets, sponsorship programs, and "home" seats in teams don't exist: a place on the grid is about convertible currency, not passport. The Monza curse isn't demons and it isn't track geometry. It's just sixty years during which Italy never grew a winner-level pilot — or couldn't put him in a winner-level car.
Scarfiotti's story is a story about how a man who won a Grand Prix entered history not for his career, but for its absence.
He was born in 1933 in Turin — and being born more "correctly" for motorsport was impossible. His grandfather, also Ludovico (with one "o" in the name — the family wrote it as both "Lodovico" and "Ludovico," and he never chose a final version), was Fiat's first president. His cousin — Gianni Agnelli, owner of the empire. You'd think the path was cleared. But it was precisely his background that became his curse: Ludovico was panicked about being seen as a "rich amateur" racing for pleasure. The press hurt him with comparisons to Bandini — a man who fought his way up from the bottom, without money. He wanted to prove he was a professional. He proved it his whole life.
And he proved it not where everyone else did. Formula 1 for Scarfiotti wasn't the main stage. His element was everything else: hillclimbs, where he took the European championship twice (1962, 1965), flying Ferrari Dinos up the serpentines of Mont Ventoux and Schauinsland; endurance marathons, where he won Le Mans (1963, with Bandini behind the wheel of a 250P) and Sebring (also 1963, paired with John Surtees); "1000 km Nürburgring," which he took in 1964 and 1965. Out of ten Formula 1 Grand Prix starts — six for Ferrari, three for Cooper, one for Anglo American Racers — not one became a comfortable home for him. The Formula 1 cockpit wasn't his comfort zone. The comfort zone was all the rest of motorsport.
And then there was one day — September 4, 1966, Monza.
The 66 race itself deserves a novel. The season was already decided: Brabham with revolutionary Repco V8s took the title, Ferrari looked colorful but not mechanically dominant. Inside Maranello — a smoldering scandal: Surtees, 1964 world champion, quarreled with sporting director Eugenio Dragoni (who managed to accuse him of spying for Lola), and Enzo Ferrari kicked "Il Grande John" out right before Le Mans. Surtees defected to Cooper-Maserati and came to Monza for revenge. Ferrari — a trio: Mike Parkes, Scarfiotti, Bandini. At the briefing, Dragoni announces team tactics that make Parkes's heart sink: pole-sitter Parkes is designated the "loyal lieutenant" who must cover the Italians. Bandini — number one, Scarfiotti — backup.
Bandini wins the start — and on lap two stops: fuel leak. Scarfiotti drops to seventh (second gear problems) — and begins the odyssey. He methodically claws back position after position, and his duel with Jochen Rindt is an episode Monza remembered for decades. By lap twelve he's in the lead. Ginther's new V12 Honda crashes at Curva Grande (got away with a collarbone), Surtees retires with fuel issues, Brabham with oil. Finish: Scarfiotti first, Parkes second, Hulme third. Ferrari takes Monza 1-2. Papers run with headlines "Great day for Italian sport" — on the same day as Ottoz winning the hurdle sprint in Budapest and Italian cyclists taking gold in Frankfurt. Scarfiotti becomes a national hero.
And here's where the bitterest part begins. The victory turned out to be the peak, not the springboard. In 1967, Ferrari gives him essentially one racing opportunity — and that's the non-championship Syracuse round: there he and Parkes finish nose-to-nose, deliberately leveling their cars at the finish. This wasn't a podium, it was a requiem: they split the victory in half in memory of Bandini, who died at Monaco a month earlier. "Although I came to Formula 1 relatively late, I didn't disgrace myself and even won the Italian Grand Prix. I believed I could defend that victory in 1967... Instead I was given practically no opportunity to prepare, and I was deeply disappointed to be effectively forced to leave Ferrari" — this is how Scarfiotti later described his departure. Enzo Ferrari responded with talk of "style incompatible with the refinement Formula 1 requires," and mentioned a letter from Gianni Agnelli, worried his cousin might crash. Who Maranello really expelled — a disappointed racer or cowardly relatives — nobody knows. One thing is certain: at Monza-67, Scarfiotti arrived not on a Ferrari but an Eagle — he would never see Maranello's winning machine again.
In 1968 he raced for Cooper in Formula 1 and for Porsche in the hills. June 8, 1968 — Rossfeld hillclimb near Berchtesgaden, practice on a Porsche 910. The car goes off the road down a forested slope, the pilot is thrown from the cockpit, catastrophic injuries. He dies in the ambulance — 34 years old. Causes never established: investigators have only a black mark on the asphalt, without the slightest trace of an attempt to catch the slide. The leading theory remains steering failure — at the previous round in Spain, Porsches had already "caught" exactly this problem. One of motorsport's most piercing unsolved paradoxes: a man who lived his life in the mountains and endurance marathons crashed precisely where he was strongest of all.
I don't want to arrange his life into a neat arc — it doesn't need it. He's not "a cut-short career," not "what could have been." He was a master of all genres of his sport in an era when a champion could win Le Mans, a Grand Prix, and a hillclimb in one season — and manage not to lose his mind. And Monza remained his only Grand Prix. There's something almost artistic in this: a man who won only once, but forever — in the very heart of his country, in the very heart of its religion. And then for sixty years nobody could even repeat it.
In 2019, Mercedes-AMG Petronas made a move that looked like PR then but looks like the best forecast in Formula 1 scouting history today: the team signed eleven-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Not "potential for the future," not a marketing project — just a bet on a kid from Bologna who by that point was already crushing junior championships.
Mercedes then built his career as a multi-stage project: championship in Italian karting, domination in European and world junior series, and then — a decision that made motorsport nerds' hearts skip: skip Formula 3 and put a teenager straight into a Formula 2 car with Prema. And since Antonelli needed a super licence to get into F1 right when he came of age, the FIA accommodated: the super licence age limit was lowered from 18 to 17 years. Formally — "in response to requests," actually — for a specific person. Toto Wolff didn't hide that he was considering him as a candidate for Hamilton's seat.
Antonelli's first acquaintance with Monza behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car happened a year before his championship debut — and immediately showed both the price and the speed of this project. August 2024, eighteen years old, first Grand Prix weekend session of his life behind the wheel of the W15: ten minutes in, Antonelli catches the car at Parabolica and crashes into the barrier with a bang. Impact — 52g. He gets out himself, apologizes to the team and Russell for eating into FP2 repair time, — and says words better than any biography: "Just a mistake on my side, I was pushing too hard for those conditions. Lesson learned." Wolff on camera: "We have all this fuss and noise of Monza here: Italian guy, first time in a Mercedes... But if he wants to be a champion — he needs to learn to deal with this. And I have no doubt that he can."
He rolled through his 2025 debut, and turned the 2026 season from "promise" into "statement." By Monza-2026, Antonelli is championship leader (242 points, 59 ahead of Russell and Hamilton), with six wins in ten races: Shanghai, Suzuka, Miami, Montreal, Monaco, and Spa. He's twenty. He's Italian. He's driving to the home Grand Prix. Everything aligns — except for one "but."
Mercedes confirms: at Monza he's taking a new engine — and that's a grid penalty, back rows. The curse that stood for 60 years, about to break, demands from the hero not just a win, but a comeback through the entire field on a track where overtaking is quite the lottery. History itself seems to be testing his strength before handing over the keys to the legend.
You could, of course, say: well, 60 years, well, statistics, well, coincidence. But this plot has three layers that make it more than a sports anecdote.
First — sociological. Monza is a mirror of how Italy stopped being a motorsport superpower. In the 50s, Italians flooded the grid, Ferrari set the tone, "Scuderia" was a national project. By 2012, there wasn't a single Italian left in the championship — not one. The Monza curse isn't corner geometry, it's economics: Formula 1 became a sport where a seat is bought, not earned through national talent. Antonelli is the first Italian in a long time to return to F1 through a trajectory classic for "old Italy" — not through family money and not through a sponsorship check, but through a factory youth academy. And in this sense, his Monza victory would be not just a sporting event — it would close the gestalt of an entire era: that Italy can still produce champions, not just sell Autodromo tickets.
Second — dramaturgical. The numbers beg to be here. Scarfiotti won Monza on September 4, 1966 — the only Grand Prix of his life. Antonelli can win it September 6, 2026 — 60 years and two days later, in his second Formula 1 season, at twenty. One — heir to the Fiat empire who spent his whole life proving he wasn't a "rich amateur"; the other — son of a Mercedes dealership, taken into the project at eleven and put in the cockpit at eighteen. One — a triumphant driver his own team didn't allow to develop; the other — a triumphant driver his own team puts in catch-up position. Monza has been waiting for a new Italian winner for 60 years and two days — and by irony of fate, the only way to honor Scarfiotti's memory is to win exactly where he won. Coincidence, if you like. But if it comes true — it'll be a coincidence at the level of "series finale the writers wouldn't dare write."
Third — fatalistic. Motorsport loves rhymes, but doesn't love promises. Scarfiotti won Monza on his best day and left life 21 months later, never making a second attempt. The super licence age limit was lowered for a specific person — and he justified the bet, but sporting fate is notoriously non-linear: he already hit Monza's barrier at 52g when he was eighteen. Nobody knows if he'll get another chance — Monza-2026 might be not the beginning of an era, but the only window. The curse isn't a spell, but accumulated statistics of missed chances: Bandini's chance was taken by death, Scarfiotti's by Maranello politics, Patrese and Fabi's by mechanics, a whole generation's by absence of cars. Now it's Antonelli's turn. He's already tried the barrier. First place remains.
Conclusions. My subjective take: curses don't exist — structural conditions exist that people call curses when they get tired of counting. The Italian "Monza curse" is an honest, beautiful, and bitter illustration of how motorsport over 60 years turned from national romanticism into global business: a grid spot now costs money, not passport, and Italy, which gave the sport Ferrari and Monza, turned out economically unprepared for this conversion. Antonelli isn't "the chosen one," but the perfect coincidence of rare circumstances: talent, factory academy, super licence by individual quota, and — most importantly — a car capable of winning. Can he break the curse precisely on September 6, starting from the back? My head says: slim chances, Monza doesn't forgive starts from the rear. But my heart suggests: if you're going to break a 60-year drought — then on the anniversary, at twenty, on home turf, starting from the last row. If it's not him — then it's unclear who and when. And let the marketers correct me: such a coincidence can't be planned, it can only be earned.