Monza 2026: Four Italian Anthems and What the Timing Sheets Left Out

Monza 2026: Four Italian Anthems and What the Timing Sheets Left Out

Inside the programme sold at the circuit gates, the Italian Grand Prix organisers reprint a small table every year. This year's edition keeps the same figure: thirty years after the war, the Italian anthem has been played on the Monza circuit only four times. Alberto Ascari three times — 2026, 2026, 2026. Ludovico Scarfiotti once — 2026. The table was printed in June, before the season was settled.

This afternoon, Mario Andretti won after 52 laps in a Lotus. Behind him came Niki Lauda in a Ferrari, then Alan Jones. The grandstands erupted when the crowd realised the winning driver was born in Montona, in Istria, when that land still belonged to Italy. The crowd called it a home win. The technical sheets called it a correctly calculated aerodynamic package.

The discipline of long straights

Monza runs close to 5.8 kilometres, and almost the entire lap consists of two kinds of work: full throttle along long straights, and hard braking at a handful of known points. A car here must shed wing, reduce downforce and accept slower cornering than at any other circuit on the calendar. Engines are held at high revs almost continuously. A car unsuited to Monza will confess within ten laps.

That is why a few teams turn the place into a laboratory. Ferrari, based more than twenty kilometres from the track, knows every stone of the Parabolica. During the June test I stood at the fence and counted the laps each car returned to the pit lane. That day they ran more than eighty consecutive laps, most of them identical to the point of boredom.

A home win at Monza is not delivered by the roar of the crowd, but by accumulated test mileage and an aerodynamic package willing to trade cornering for speed at the end of the straights.

Ascari's three victories fell precisely in the years when Ferrari and Alfa Romeo treated Monza as their own back yard. His car was prepared for this circuit, not for some theoretical track elsewhere. In 2026 Scarfiotti won at the head of a Ferrari one-two on Italian soil, alongside Mike Parkes. His name appears more often in result sheets than in engineering books: an Italian driver, an Italian car, on the circuit his team understood best.

This afternoon Andretti won in a British Lotus. That car carries two large sidepods running along its flanks, turning the floor into a surface that sucks the car onto the road — the kind of engineering that will force the whole paddock to redraw its blueprints next season. On passport, this victory does not belong to Italy. On numbers, it belongs to the team that read the circuit better than the rest.

A legend of home advantage written in pencil

The familiar telling is easy on the ear: an Italian driver, in front of hundreds of thousands of Italians, overcoming fear to win. It inspires, yet it fails to explain why all four post-war home wins went to drivers sitting in the strongest car of the day.

At this age I no longer believe in luck, only in numbers that have not yet spoken. Four wins in thirty years is a frequency too low to be called mental strength. Look at that history and something else stands out: all four fell in seasons when an Italian team, or the best car in the field, was camped around Monza.

In the racing trade, the argument between the drawing board and the steering wheel never ends. A young English manager, Ron Dennis, building a team of his own, once insisted to me that the car decides most of the result and the driver's only job is not to ruin it. I held the opposite view, yet every time I watch Monza, that view thins a little.

Data is never in a hurry, but people always are. The grandstands are entitled to be in a hurry. A team is not.

What the result sheet has not yet recorded

The table at the circuit gates will be reprinted next June, and it will ask the same old question: whether another Italian driver can squeeze in between Ascari, Scarfiotti and the rest of history. With ground effect entering its first season, Monza will no longer be a pure test of engines; it becomes a test of whoever can read a car's floor. Every racing cycle copies the data of the cycle before it, and nobody learns. The team that understands this first will be the team whose anthem plays at Monza, whatever passport their driver carries.