Vittoria Tessarini

Vittoria Tessarini
Details
Name	Vittoria Tessarini
Born	1940
Nationality	Italian

Vittoria Tessarini (born 1940 in Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna) is an Italian former racing driver and the daughter of an OSCA engineer and occasional sportscar driver, who was best known for her time as an owner-driver in the disastrous 1978 Dywa Grand Prix Series.

Early Life

Vittoria grew up surrounded by racing cars. As a teenager she watched her father compete in the Mille Miglia and saw his OSCA cars win Grand Prix. Her hero was Maria Teresa de Filippis, whom she met while she was still an OSCA-affiliated privateer driver. Unfortunately, by the time Vittoria was in her early twenties, the time when you could rent an old OSCA and turn up for your home Grand Prix was firmly over. She took part in some local hillclimbs and a few sportscar races around Imola.

Dywa Career

At 38, now successfully running the car dealership founded by her father, she decided to fulfil her childhood dream and finally race a Formula One car, even if it had to be a Dywa. She and her father decided to revive his old team, Scuderia del Savio, but thanks to some regional politician wanting to promote the Emilia-Romagna region, and Tessarini needing a little sponsorship for the season, the team will competed as Scuderia del Made in Italy e dell'Emilia-Romagna.

Before long, Tessarini's Formula One dream turned into a nightmare. Although her expectations for the Dywa car were low after she saw it run slowly at the Trofeo Dino Ferrari, Tessarini was content with getting her taste of Formula One in what she expected to be an Italian equivalent to the Aurora series in Britain. This optimism disappeared once her team received their cars: she described the suspension geometry as "scary" because she "could see, without having driven the car, that it wasn't going to go in a straight line." She criticised the Dywa organisation for being out of their depth trying to assemble two racing cars, let alone the 28 that would run in the Dywa Grand Prix Series.

When Tessarini fired one of the cars up for the first time, the engine literally shook the chassis to pieces within 500 metres. Later on, it transpired that although the cars were based on Dydo Monguzzi's design, he had outsourced manufacturing to Renzo in order to meet demand. They rebuilt both cars from the ground up, which was an improvement on how they had arrived from the factory, and commenced the season with trepidation. As teammate, Tessarini hired Timo Fuchs, an ambitious German who - like Tessarini - had Formula One ambitions he had been struggling to realise.

Tessarini's pace was strong but her car was not: on both occasions that she finished a race, she did so in the top five despite not having the confidence to drive the car as fast as it would go. When she did let go and push, she had the pace to put it on pole position - as she did at the Norisring for the Internationaler Dywapokal Frankens. Fuchs managed to do what Tessarini could not, and found it within himself to drive the car at full pace. He was rewarded first with a horror crash that saw him miss track time to recover from an injury, but later a race win for Tessarini's team.

After Dywa

After the 1978 season, Tessarini withdrew from the season, stating that she felt no pride putting these Dywa cars out on track, and that she was not having a good time trying to race them. In the end, and that the promise of an affordable Formula One series was too good to be true. She declared the days of privateers in Formula One to be over, expressing regret for chasing an impossible dream.

Tessarini sold the Dywa cars at the first opportunity. Unconcerned with where they'd end up, she sold them to a questionable Yugoslavian businessman called Stefan Zoranovic via her father's car dealership, but they never reached their destination after being impounded by Albanian customs authorities. But that is another story.

She would later be approached in 1979 to step back into the car to replace the injured Paul Pott, which she declined to do without hesitation, decrying the series as "sheer idiocy", citing recklessness and irresponsibility on the side of the organizers. She proffered that it had nothing that Formula Two did not offer, but came with ten times the risk.

In 2005, Tessarini published an autobiography titled Fifty Years In Motorsport, detailing her career all the way from its beginnings when, as a child, she used to pass her father wrenches with which to work on OSCA Formula One cars.

Racing Results

Dywa Grand Prix Series

Season	Team	Car	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Pts	Pos
1978	Scuderia del Made in Italy e dell'Emilia-Romagna	Dywa-Renzo	ENN Ret	IMO Ret	ROU Ret	NOR 5	SYR 5	MUG Ret	PAU Ret	CAS Ret	CLE Ret	MNZ Ret	5	21st