BERNINA GRAN TURISMO

Bernina Gran Turismo

Historic race cars take on the Swiss Alps at summer’s end.

Join us to drink in the scenes from up high in the Swiss Alps a few weeks back where the Bernina Gran Turismo rounded off the summer season with an annual hillclimb of historic and modern competition cars. Rising hundreds of meters into the steadily gathering snows, there are few more beautiful and daring landscapes to stage a motorsport event than this.

The route winds up the Bernina Pass, a road that has connected the foothill towns of Northern Italy with Switzerland’s Engadine valley for hundreds of years, beckoning drivers to test their nerve on its ancient hairpins since they were barely more than gravel cart tracks.

Unlike many of Switzerland’s high mountain roads, the Bernina Pass doesn’t actually close for the winter, but you only get so many months of the year where it can be called “sensible” to drive 50 year old race cars at their limit through these parts. Towards the peaks, the coming winter very much makes itself known in growing roadside snowdrifts, each one offering little comfort to those lacking in all season tyres and modern-day driving aids.

Our highlight? Watching a one of thirteen Porsche 908/3 Spyder fly its way up the climb in its original Gulf colours. Built to take on the Targa Florio and the Nurburgring, the Spyder was a compact variant of Porsche’s late 60s 8 cylinder endurance prototype adapted specifically to tight, technical road courses, excelling in these events where the better known 917 was comparatively disadvantaged.