Tragic 1928 Monza Crash: Emilio Materassi and 22 Spectators Killed 🚗💥

The twenty-three fatal victims of the huge accident which happened during the Gran Premio d'Italia e d'Europa, held at Monza on Sunday, 09 September 1928, made it the worst motorsport tragedy up to date, and it would remain so until the ill-fated 24 Heures du Mans in 1955.

Prominent Italian race car driver Emilio Materassi, 34-year-old, started from the center of the front row, at the wheel of a red Talbot 700, bearing the race number #18. It was an advanced car, built in 1926 at the Talbot's Suresnes factory in Paris, and designed by former Fiat engineers Vincenzo Bertarione and Walter Becchia. The car which was fitted with a supercharged dohc 1.5-liter straight 8 engine, had a noticeably low and unusual steeply slopping radiator which gave the car a streamlined look. The driver was sitting low in the car, thanks to the offset position of the engine and transmission.

On the seventeenth lap of the race, Materassi tried to overtake Giulio Foresti’s Bugatti 35C on the start/finish straight, but touched one of the rear tyres of his opponent’s car. He lost control of his vehicle at top speed; it swerved to the left, in the direction of the grandstand, ran onto the grass, jumped over a three-meter deep and four-meter wide protection ditch and a fence, plunging into a crowd.

An article published by magazine Autosprint, issue of 11 September 1979, reported the evidence by engineer Pasquale Borracci, creator of the Circuito del Mugello road race, who at the time was at Monza just in the place of accident, working as reporter for magazine Auto Italia. The article read Materassi didn't touch the rear wheel of Foresti's car nor suffered any mechanical failure, but simply he lost control of his Talbot because he passed over the green verge on the roadside, trying to overtake Foresti.

The accident happened about 11h30. Besides Materassi, who died shortly afterwards, twenty spectators were killed almost instantly and twenty-six other persons were injured, twelve of them seriously, being taken to the Ospedale Umberto I in Monza and to other hospitals in Milan area. One of them succumbed to his injuries the next day, and another one nine days after the accident.

R.I.P