GP: Germany
Date: 3 August 1952
Winner: Alberto Ascari - Ferrari
Pole position, fastest race lap and the win. It was here that Alberto Ascari clinched his first world title, also a maiden championship win for Ferrari.
Fangio was absent, seriously injured in an accident at the Grand Prix of Monza.
In Germany, Privateer Paul Pietsch was taking part in his third and final Formula 1 world championship race at the wheel of a Veritas Meteor.
Born in Fribourg on 20 June 1911, in 1935 he had raced for the Auto Union team alongside phenomenal drivers such as Hans Stuck, Bernd Rosemeyer, Hermann zu Leiningen and Achille Varzi.
Varzi was having an affair at the time with Pietsch's wife Ilse, a scandalous tale made more dramatic by the fact the pair were morphine addicts. They were forcibly separated by the Italian and German authorities.
Varzi duly went into rehab, after which he was back racing for Alfa Romeo, when he was killed while testing on 1 July 1948. Ilse married a German opera singer. It was only many years later that Pietsch revealed what had happened back in '35.
After the second world war, Pietsch became equally well known away from the racetrack, as the founder of the Motor-Presse Verlag publishing house specialising in motoring publications.
In 1946 he co-founded “Das Auto” magazine, which later became “Auto Motor und Sport” in partnership with former racing drivers Ernst Troeltsch and Joseph Hummel.
Pietsch recalled that, “at the time, a press officer from the French military administration in Baden-Baden told me that there would never be enough cars in Germany to justify a magazine on the subject!”
Pietsch died on 31 May 2012, less than a month away from his 101st birthday.
In 2025 Pirelli will hit the 500 F1® Grands Prix mark during the season.
Legacy of Speed series looks back at the fifty most significant Grands Prix from Pirelli's time on the F1 World Championship trail.
