The 1940 BMW 328
Top Gear’s coolest racing cars: BMW 328. 76 years on from its 1940 win, Top Gear drives the 328 at the Mille Miglia.
The stars align to spectacular effect on this week’s ‘coolest racing car’. How often are we likely to actually compete in said car in the very race it was originally conceived to contest?
OK, so the modern Mille Miglia isn’t anything like as racey as the original, and the configuration is different to the 1940 event BMW won – back then it was known as the Gran Premio Brescia delle Mille Miglia, and consisted of nine laps of a 103-mile route that triangulated Brescia, Cremona, and Mantua. But as TG.com prepares for the 2016 Mille Miglia – which involves a bewildering immersion in daily route books the size of a Beijing telephone directory, and an induction into the arcane art of rally trip computers – we can’t help feeling a tiny bit heroic. Whatever this is, it’s emphatically not a leisurely, elongated tootle through the Italian countryside.
