The Mille Miglia (Italian pronunciation: [ˈmille ˈmiʎʎa], Thousand Miles) was an open-road, motorsport endurance race established in 1927 by the young Counts Francesco Mazzotti and Aymo Maggi.

[1] Like the older Targa Florio and later the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico, the MM made grand tourers like Alfa Romeo, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche famous.

The Mille Miglia race was established by the young Counts Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti, sports manager Renzo Castagneto, and motoring journalist Giovanni Canestrini, apparently in response to the Italian Grand Prix being moved from their home town of Brescia to Monza.

Together with a group of wealthy associates, they chose a race from Brescia to Rome and back, a figure-eight shaped course of roughly 1,500 km—or a thousand Roman miles.

[4] The winner, Giuseppe Morandi,[4] completed the course in just under 21 hours 5 minutes, averaging nearly 78 km/h (48 mph) in his 2-litre OM-produced car;[4] Brescia-based Officine Meccaniche (OM) swept the top three places.

The first one was in 1931, when German driver Rudolf Caracciola, famous in Grand Prix racing, and riding mechanic Wilhelm Sebastian won with their big supercharged Mercedes-Benz SSKL, averaging for the first time more than 100 km/h (63 mph)[4] in a Mille Miglia.

After performing a pit stop, they had to hurry across Italy, cutting the triangle-shaped course short in order to arrive in time before the race car.

Despite being populated mainly by Italian car makers, it was the aerodynamically-improved BMW 328, driven by Germans Huschke von Hanstein/Walter Bäumer, that won the high-speed race with an all-time high average of 166 km/h (103 mph), even though the 1940 event was run on a much shorter and localised 100 km (62.5 mi) circuit.

Mercedes made another good effort in 1952 with the underpowered Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwing, scoring second, with the German crew Karl Kling/Hans Klenk that later in the year would win the Carrera Panamericana.

Both young German Hans Herrmann, who had remarkable previous efforts with Porsche, and Briton Stirling Moss relied on the support of navigators.

Similar to his teammates, Moss and his navigator, motor race journalist Denis Jenkinson, ran a total of six reconnaissance laps beforehand, enabling "Jenks" to make course notes (pace notes) on a scroll of paper 18 ft (540 cm) long, which he read from and gave directions to Moss during the race by a coded system of 15 hand signals.

Moss was competing against drivers with a large amount of local knowledge of the route, so the reconnaissance laps were considered an equaliser, rather than an advantage.

Herrmann had already had a remarkable race in 1954, when the gate on a railway level crossing was lowered in the last moment before the fast train to Rome passed.

Driving a very low Porsche 550 Spyder, Herrmann decided it was too late for a brake attempt; knocked on the back of the helmet of his navigator Herbert Linge to make him duck; and they barely passed below the gates and before the train, to the surprise of the spectators.

Herrmann was less lucky in 1955, having to abandon the race after a brake failure on the Futa Pass between Florence and Bologna, while Kling crashed just outside Rome.

After 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, Moss/Jenkinson arrived in Brescia in their Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR with the now-famous #722, setting the event record at an average of 157.650 km/h (97.96 mph), which was fastest ever on this 1,597 km (992 mi) variant of the course, not to be beaten in the remaining two years.

The first crash involved the factory-entered 4.0-litre Ferrari 335 S. Eleven people were killed at the village of Guidizzolo: Spanish driver Alfonso de Portago, American co-driver/navigator Edmund Nelson, and nine spectators.

This was perhaps the fastest variant of the Mille Miglia circuit route- Bologna, Modena, Florence, and the Futa and Raticosa Passes were all bypassed as this variant ran largely along the Italian coasts; also bypassed was the whole northwestern section, which included Turin and Milan, with a new route going through Cremona, and rejoining at Piacenza, and shortened the route down to its intended length at 1,000 mi (1,600 km).

At Parma, the circuit ran south through another route through the Apennine mountains towards La Spezia and Massa, before rejoining the 1947 variant at Pisa.

However, more significantly, the Tyhrennian coast section first introduced in 1937 was eliminated, and part of the original route that ran from Rome to Florence via Viterbo and Siena was re-introduced.

[14] The route was not changed until 1954, when a new section was introduced to pay tribute to Tazio Nuvolari, which diverted from Cremona and ran through his hometown of Mantua, which was the final iteration of the circuit used for the original race.

[citation needed] The garment features goggles built into the hood and originally had a small circular window in the sleeve enabling the wearer to see their watch.

Adam Driver portrays the titular subject, and Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O'Connell, and Patrick Dempsey co-star.