It’s me, Mark Stone, and in this episode of the Backseat Driver Podcast, I turn the spotlight on the extraordinary yet often overlooked career of Lella Lombardi, one of motorsport’s true pioneers and the only woman to score points in Formula One.

Joined by Jon Saltinstall, I explore Lombardi’s life and career, from her groundbreaking achievements on the world stage to the barriers she faced competing in a sport dominated by men. We discuss why her story has so often been underplayed and what made her determination, talent, and resilience so remarkable.

John shares the motivation behind writing Lombardi’s biography, aiming to restore her place in motorsport history and ensure her achievements are appropriately recognised. This episode reflects on Lombardi’s lasting impact and why preserving her legacy matters, not just for motorsport fans but for future generations inspired by her trailblazing path.

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I'd like to introduce the Backseat Driver, an author, and I'm introducing him for the third time.

His ability to produce and write books is prodigious, to say the least.

And when you see the books he produces, it is stunning how he produces them and writes them with such regularity.

Well, John Salt Install has been at it again.

So, John, welcome back to the Backseat Driver.

Good morning, Mark.

It's great to be back with you.

Now, this time, it is on the one the only to give her her full name.

Maria Grazia Lombardi, better known as Leila Lombardi, the Lioness of Turin and one of the world's few F1 drivers.

There'd been many, many lady racing drivers, but one of the most famous ones being Helen East.

But Layla scored a point driving an F1 car.

How did all this come about?

How did you choose to write a biography of Leila Lombardi?

She's an enigmatic figure in many ways, and it's something I'd want you to do.

It's a book I'd wanted to write for about 20 years.

But Leonard is fascinating.

Niki Lauda and Jackie Hicks got in the way.

Yeah, there have been other things I've been bimbling around with for years, but it was.

It was doing.

Doing it.

And louder sort of gives you the.

The ticket to be able to do all the things because you've got a degree of credibility and people give you opportunities.

When I first saw her in autosport as featuring in, you know, the forthcoming F1 season, I'm thinking, right, you know, I might not know that much, but I know that you don't see many women racing in F1.

She's the classic punk Rose question, isn't she?

You know, who's the only woman to ever finish F1 in a point scoring position?

And the anoraks will say, yes, I know, but she scored half a point, didn't she?

And the other ax, I'll hopefully put them right and say, yes, but, you know, she finished in the top six at a time when it was only the top six that got your points, not top ten as it is now.

And the strength in depth was a bit different.

But the problem with that, of course, is that motorsport has got such a focus on F1 and keeps it under the spotlight all the time, that anybody who achieves anything or gets there.

It overshadows everything else.

And that is absolutely the case with Lela.

That.

That half point in F1 completely outshines everything else that she did for a lot of people.

As a consequence of that, her other achievements sort of disappear.

You know, this is a woman who.

You know, people like Georgia, Francia Collini.

She.

She won the Escort Mexico championship in Italy in 73.

She won three races in the World Sports Car Championship, admittedly when the series wasn't its top flyer, but nonetheless, she did it, you know, against proper, proper opposition.

Yeah.

First woman to ever hold an F1 contract or works F1 contract.

Record still stands.

Now, by anybody's career, you'd think that that's a fairly.

You.

That's a pretty good haul by anybody's mass.

Yeah.

But that, that half pointing F1, you know, only woman2 dot do just overshadows all of the rest of it.

And as a result of that, you know, I felt it did a disservice.

Yeah.

So it's something I wanted to sort of at least understand a bit more about for a long time.

And when I was given the opportunity to, you know, to do her biography, I felt great.

Happy days.

And then a fortnight later, I find out why nobody had ever done it before, because it was the, you know, I just couldn't understand why somebody with that kind of significance to the sport hadn't had their autobiography done, hadn't had their biography done before.

Yeah.

And a fortnight after being given the green light, I realized why.

Because it was difficult.

It was.

She.

She only gave.

She gave less than 20 interviews, you know, of any significance in her life.

I mean, I conclude that members of her family are still alive.

Yeah.

But not many.

She was the youngest three.

She got two older siblings.

Her parents, obviously, long.

And if Lila was alive Today, she'd be 84 or 85, you know, so, you know, so we're talking a while back.

Yeah.

But most.

Most of her siblings and nieces and nephews are gone.

You know, she's only literally got a handful of surviving relatives.

Yeah.

But the.

The big problem with trying to get behind Lela as a person, you know, you can find out what she did, you know, career wise and statistically yeah, with the right sort of research.

Which isn't easy, but, yeah, you know, you can.

You can get there.

I mean, just putting in one of the big things I found out a few years ago, funny enough, I was out in Italy at Monza with Jaguar, the number of small series that are indigenous to Italian.

I mean, I met a couple of young racing drivers who made a living driving in various Italian series.

They never needed to leave Italy to make a living at it.

Absolutely right, yeah.

And that, you know, that has been the case for.

For decades over there.

You know, it's a.

It's a sort of journeyman career sort of career, if you like, but it works.

I mean, Lala was trying to get up the ladder, but, you know, racing in the junior stuff in Italy, and she'd started in the Academy Formula Formula850@.

And found a feat in that.

But, you know, trying to.

Trying to find that information is difficult, but, you know, you can get there.

She was an Italian, came from a Catholic country.

She was actually quite devout herself.

But she was gay.

Yeah.

So she put her life behind a wall to protect her partner, Fiorenta, and really didn't let anybody behind it.

So she.

She never really let the mass drop.

You know, when she would.

She'd be interviewed by journalists in the 60s and 70s, and you always get this question of, will you stop racing when you get married?

Or what, you know, what would your boyfriend or husband think about it?

Or whatever?

And she.

She would always just sort of say, oh, well, I'm, you know, I've got no plans to get married, or, you know, why do I need a boyfriend?

I've got a car.

She was good at one likeness, so she'd say all of this sort of thing, but she'd never really say, well, you know, although she never made any secret of the fact that she was gay, she didn't promote it.

And she would have certainly not subscribed to the LGBTQ community in that sense, because, you know, she had no mental differentiation between the sexes.

As far as she was concerned.

Everybody was just the same.

She was.

In many ways, she was kind of asexual in that way.

Well, I mean, in many ways I've said this, it's about women racing drivers and they tried their own series and that didn't really work.

And I mean, when I was on the circuit, somebody said, oh, there's a woman racing.

I said, look, it's a car with a driver.

I said, I'm not bothered what they are or who they are.

I said, she wants in that corner before me, I want in that corner before her.

I said, racing is racing.

I said, it doesn't make any difference what gender you are behind the wheel of a racing car.

That was very much her philosophy of the world.

I mean, a couple of things that sort of come out of that.

First, she would never have described herself as a woman racing driver and actively made the point of saying, I'm not a woman racing driver, I'm a racing driver who's a woman.

And that's a distinction that I can care about deeply.

But she would.

She also said, under the helmet, men and women are completely equal.

And, you know, that was very much her philosophy.

Original.

Yes.

But she was very aware, if you like, of how society could have made life difficult for Firenzia.

She hadn't really experienced much prejudice as a child, but she was very keen to make sure that ferencing really get sort of drank into all of that.

So as a consequence, she put a laugh behind a wall.

Yeah.

Even to the extent that the.

The journalists from magazines like Autosprint or Auto Italia, who knew the couple well enough to build around and have dinner with them, didn't know fear and to surname.

All right.

And if you.

If you go on the Internet and have a Google around and look for the name of Lela Lombardi's partner, you will find Fioretta.

Yeah.

But you will not find a surname.

Right.

It took me a long.

I got it out of a guy.

And nearby hangs another story of things that you don't know about people.

I got the story out of Lela's dance partner.

Yeah.

So who knew that the teenage Lela Lombardi was a regional champion jive dancer before she became a racing driver?

She, you know, she was an athlete, but she was also a very good dancer.

It's like if you.

The little bits of research I've been able to do, the first.

Her first drive was the family's delivery van.

Absolutely right.

Yeah.

She was the first person in her family to know how to drive, although her parents own vehicles, because her parents were butchers, basically.

Her dad was a butcher who made salamis and processed meats and delivered them all around the Ligurian coast.

But they even drive themselves they had a delivery driver.

None of them were interested in driving, so she was obsessed with motorized things from an early age.

One of her childhood friends told me how she used to put her hands in her roller skates and run around the floor pretending they were cars.

Rolled their stiff and I'm on her feet.

That was her all over.

But, yes, she, she, she learned when she was about 12 or 13 of how to drive in the delivery van with the, with the delivery driver.

Her Dan's partner was also one of the guys who worked for work for her dad and used to go out driving with us.

So that, you know, he told me all sorts of stories of the jokes they got up to on these things.

She, she sounded like, you know, she was, she was a live wire.

Yeah, as a teenager.

Absolutely.

You know, they got up to all sorts of appeties.

But I mean, how did you initially make contact with the remaining Pete, the remaining family and her friends?

I mean, because that would be research in its own right, wouldn't it?

Yeah, well, I knew that.

I knew that she had a surviving niece, Patricia.

Italian.

Italian law is a funny thing because over there, the legal heirs of people own the image and name and whatever of the deceased.

So.

And I knew that Patricia was her niece.

Patricia.

So this is her.

Her brother's daughter was Lela's legal heir, if you like, owns her name and rights.

So I wanted to contact her, if you like, to authorize the project.

But as a consequence of that, we, you know, we had a number of conversations and dialogues and Patricia actually wrote the preface for the book for me, which is, which is superb because Patricia herself is a fascinating lady and it's a very, very bright lady.

She's a professor in Sustainable Environmental Development at the University of Turin, off addressing the cop 25.

And she's addressed the GA before.

You know, she's an absolute, very, very intelligent.

But there was a chap in over in Italy as well, called Giovanni Ferreira, who ran a sort of fan blog, if you like, about Lela, because he'd been fascinated about from her racing days.

And he was able to connect with people like Giuseppe Bonadeo, who's the dance partner I mentioned earlier, who worked with her dad.

And it's then you, Daisy, change these things on.

If you're speaking to this person, they say, oh, you need to talk to so and so and so and so.

One of the most helpful people I spoke to was a fellow called Oscar Vercelli.

Oscar was the fixer for Count Dugu Zanon and Gudi Zanon for those people who perhaps don't know about him, Zanon was a most fought benefactor.

Erical Chow choose.

His wife was Puki Lavazza, the Lavazza coffee brand.

And Zannon was the benefactor of Ronnie Peterson.

He funded Ronnie's early years.

He helped buy Ronnie out of his Lotus contract.

He incidentally helped buy it and sent her out of his Toleman contract and helped Alberta as well.

But a lot of people don't, you know, he's one of these guys who's in the background.

Yeah.

But he became aware of and fascinated by the story of this sort of feisty Italian girl who was a butcher's daughter, who taught herself to drive and drove herself up through the junior formula to get, to get to where she was.

And Lela and Zalin's wife, Puki Da Vaza, got on quite, quite well quite quickly.

And it didn't take much for them to persuade Gui to fund her passage into Fortuna.

What?

Yeah.

March was absolutely on its uppers at the time.

And that was, that was how she, she got, got the gig, if you like.

Yeah.

But how Max Mosley tells it is that he had been, he'd been considering her anyway and that it was his wife who'd said to him, if she was a boat, you wouldn't be thinking twice about this.

So why are you thinking twice about it?

Yeah, just crack on with it.

So he always credited his wife with giving him the kick up the backside to, to hire her for 75.

But, you know, she, she, she would have made it on, on merit compared to the cohort that were joining F1 at the time.

Yeah.

And, and let you remember that that was, there was a pre, there was a lot of strength in debts on that grid that year.

I think I did the numbers.

There's about 17 drivers on the grid either were Grand Prix winners or would become Grand Prix winners.

Yeah.

So that, you know, that's the only achievement driving cars that have got, you know, no power steering and 500 horsepower and crash gearboxes and great big split tires and the rest of it, you know, it was a physical Occupation.

Yeah.

Which is why they claim that.

No, no, no doubt, no doubt this will get criticized no end.

That's one of the reasons they claim a lot of women don't achieve great things in motorsport, because it's basically a strength factor.

And I've spoken to women racing drivers who said we are not as strong as the men, thereby is the problem.

But modern racing cars with the power steering and everything else are easier to drive.

But as you said back in the 70s they weren't.

They had to be manhandled all the time.

Well, that's one of the ironies when she's driving at 4 by 5,000 people.

Again, for those not the ironic thing.

It was one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then with a, a great big five liter stop block muscle car engine stuck in the back of it.

Usually a Chevrolet.

Yeah.

Which is knocking out 500 horsepower, similar to a contemporary Formula One engine, but probably three times the torque.

But also with a center of gravity that's somewhere above your shoulders.

The back end of the car is forever trying to overtake the front of it.

Great big F1 sized, super wide slick tires on it.

Not a lot in the way of downforce, crash gearbox.

And these things were very, very physical.

Now the contemporary journalists, you know, the guys from Motoring News and Autosport would like to do, you know, they would often do track tests of these things and you know, write on what they thought about driving them.

And.

One of the guys from Motoring News said to lala, these are heavy duty cars.

These are, you need to be a truck driver to drive one of these.

Because I mean, just looking at photographs of her, she wasn't a big built girl, was she?

She was just Norma sized, she was.

5 foot 2, she was a bit stocky, but you know, that was it.

So.

But when the journalist said to her, said, you know, you need to be a truck driver to drive one of these, she just pointed to her muscles and said, yeah, but have you seen these muscles?

I am a truck driver.

You know, bear in mind that that's what she'd learned to do when she messed around on The Ligurian Peninsula.

She was quite good at sort of little one liners.

She'd been invited over there alongside Christine Beckers and Janet Guthrie had also been in March.

And so you got three racing drivers who are winning who've been brought in to contest this NASCAR race and basically as part of Bill France's attempts to see if they could bring women drivers into the sport.

So what are the.

One of the redneck journalists says to Lella before the race, as a little itsy bitsy girl like you managed to handle one of these 2 liter behemoth Daniel Matthews tube chassis shit.

And she, she just looks at him and says, I've got to drive it, I'm going to carry it.

Yeah.

I mean, just putting in.

I mean, over the years I've dealt with a lot of lady racing drivers and rally drivers and the one thing I would say, the boldness of them over the men.

They have a fantastic sense of humor.

You can have a cracking conversation with the ladies in the paddocks.

Far better with them than the men at times.

But I think it was interesting that one of the interesting things I found about when I was doing the research, either people who knew her, who I spoke to, or people who spoke about her in contemporary reports and things, I didn't find anybody who had a bad word to say about her.

Yeah.

Now that's unusual in any kind of walk of life, isn't it?

But it's particularly unusual in school where rivalries and personalities get magnified by competition.

And she, everybody seemed to, you know, to get on with her.

Well and she.

Okay, some of them said, yeah, she kept herself to herself for the reasons that we know.

But she was, she was popular and outgoing, but she.

Something else that I discovered that I completely wasn't expecting was that she was a really good test and development driver.

Now again, that's probably my fault for not expecting to see that.

And when she was, after she left, after she finished in Formula one and she was racing for a seller in sports cars and particularly for Alfa Romeo in touring cars.

The, the other drivers in the team would get her to do the setup and she would then, and then, you know, they would race with the settings that she'd, you know, she'd identified for them.

Yeah.

And bear in mind that when she was driving for Alfa Romeo, a lot of the time her, her co driver was Giorgio Francia, now Francia, it was a Formula 2, Formula 3 job, who had been in, associated with Autodelta for a long, long time.

And from 77 onwards, he was Autodelta's official test driver.

So every race car of any description that came out of Autodelta from 77 onwards until his career ended was tested and developed by a franchise.

All of the F1 stuff and the rest of it all came through his hands.

So he was naming shakes.

But when they were racing touring cars together, half the time she'd be doing the setup and he'd be having a cube and so, but he was, you know, she, she was, she was in the real deal.

One of the mechanics was telling me that who, who used to work with her in, in the latter days of the etcc.

He was telling me that he, he tried the old mechanics trick on her once, you know, that she came in and asked for a tweak on the front roll bar.

And he pretended to do it and did do it.

Yes, Just to see if she knew what she did.

So she came in after one lap, pops up a vision, do that one more time and I'll punch you in the face.

So, yeah, you know, she was, you know, she, she would have great mechanical sympathy and understanding in that sense.

And I wasn't expecting to learn that.

Yeah, I mean, how were you able to track down all these people?

Did one lead to another, to another to another?

And who was responsible in the first instance for getting you access to these people?

And finally did you go over to Italy to talk to them?

It was very much a question of one person leads to another leads to another leads to another.

A lot of it is just the process of pouring through research where you, you know, you will read an article, find a name, see if you can then find that person, see if they're still alive, see if they can tell you anything, see if they can tell you where to go.

I did read seventeen and a half thousand pages of Italian newspapers to try and understand what was, you know, every reference, if you like, that I could find to her or for the early part of her career.

And that was useful for some of the early stuff.

So I conclude you're now fluent in Italian.

I can read Italian but still can't speak it.

All right.

I'm fluent in French, which helps because there's similar Rooted languages.

But I really do need to learn to speak it.

I've not been over there to do it.

I was fortunately able to do most of the research remotely, otherwise I would have spent an awful lot of time over there, which wouldn't have been a pet thing the way the rest are.

But other is, yes, you talk to one person, they say, oh, therefore you need to speak to this one and this one and this one.

There were a handful of people from the early days, people like Freire and Vonader and whatever were very helpful in signposting me towards other people.

But the passage of time has as.

As it means that people are now more willing to, to talk about that era than they might have been at the time.

Unfortunately, Firenza, you know, Lela's partner died a year after Lela did.

So, you know, she, she's.

She's long gone as well.

Yeah.

But I spoke to enough people who knew them and knew them as a couple to be able to form a properly three dimensional view of them, if you like.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I conclude they would have been happy to talk to you.

And were they at all surprised that after all this time somebody wanted to write what you might call the biography.

Bearing in mind that nobody had done it?

They weren't so much surprised as delighted.

Yeah, you know, everybody was, everybody was very pleased that her story was being told because the Valencia she came from was tiny, but there were 2,000 people who lived there.

So that little community is very proud of her in its own way.

You know, there's a, there's a little park that's named after her and a bus driver in there that actually looks nothing like her.

And.

That'S your next job.

Get one done that looks like hers.

And this was subject by the religious buyer or local sculpture or whatever, so it obviously means a lot to you.

But.

Surprisingly, she's not as well known in Italy and certainly wasn't at the time as well known in Italy as she was over here or in Australia.

Nearly won both of them.

Ran out of fuel in the first one and fuel packed up in the second one.

But, you know, she'd absolutely got, you know, got the local boys beaten.

And we're talking about people like Max Stewart and Kevin Bartlett, Warwick Brown, you know, who were, you know, who were the real Deal there.

Yeah, well, certainly, you know, In Britain in 74, if you look, you know, if you look down at the, the, the, the list of people who.

She was racing in 74 over here, and I can, I can actually do that because of what I'm working on at the moment.

But so in 70, 74, rother of 5,000 championship.

Bob Evans, Peter Geffen, Ian Ashley, Teddy Pillette, David Hobbs, Ver Sh.

Tom Belso, Brian Redman, Chris Craft, Mike Wiles, Clive Shal, Damien McGee, Guy Edwards, Tony Dean, Brian Maguire, Keith Holland, Derek Bell, Eddie Kaiser, and that's just the top end of the list.

These are serious, seriously competitive guys who don't mess about.

There's a good bit.

Yeah.

And probably one of the world's greatest sports car drivers.

Absolutely right, yes.

I'm just going all sorts of tangents there, but yeah, and similarly, if you look at, you know, who she raced against in Formula 1 in 75, you know, as you run down that grid, you know, you've got Louder and Regazzoni, Fittipaldi, Muss, Schecter, Depaye Brambia, Lafitte Jones, you know, just sort of nine or ten people who are Grand Prix winners straight up in the cup and World.

Champions, the future World champions.

You know, you've got half a dozen future, either present or future World Championship.

Peterson, you know, you've got half a dozen present and future World Champions, And I think 17 in total, guys who had won or would win Grand Prix.

And, you know, she's.

She's with all of them and manages to.

Okay, the Spanish Grand Prix was a bit of a.

Bit of an oddity in 75 because of the circumstances of it, but nonetheless, she was still there and was won six when a lot of people weren't.

And Romid Heard reckoned that her best race actually in 75 was the German Grand Prix, where she finished seventh, where she put in a real storming draft.

Everybody but the people.

So Reutemann won it and Lafitte came second.

Were the only two people in that race who didn't have a puncture.

Everybody else had at least one, but, you know, she came home seventh in that.

Just quietly gone on with it.

And in a strong field on the Nurburgring, which she'd never seen before, second in a car that wasn't handling well at all.

So, yeah, you know, she was there on merit, not just making up the numbers.

I mean, she did staggering things like the six hour of Pagusa and six Hour of Valle Lunga.

I mean, like a lot of the drivers of that era, besides single seaters, they drove sports cars and prototypes.

And by the looks of it, she did very well in that as well.

When you look at the appendix at the back of the book and the sheer number of races that she did, and as you've highlighted post Formula One, she did a huge variety of stuff.

She did the Group 6 prototypes, she raced into Siri, she raced touring cars, different levels of touring cars as well.

But in 81, Anna Cambiagi organized a drive with Luigi Racing of Belgium to do the European Touring Car Championships.

And she asked the letter to join them.

So if you've got two sort of five foot two Italian ladies driving in the European Touring Car Championship, what do you give them to drive?

I know, let's give them a shiver at Camaro.

So they had a great time with it.

You know, the car was going to be outlawed at the end of the year, but they had fun with this thing.

Although Anna said to me, she said, how do I put it?

The first race of that year was Donington.

She said donington is, how you say, a little break is feet break.

Camaro is a little break.

She said if you were at Monza and a smaller car went into was on your tail, you hope they didn't go into the corner ahead of you because if they did, you were taking them out because you couldn't stop.

So they were manhandling this thing all around the etc.

So she was driving things like 76 is an inch interesting year for her because that 76 was the year her Formula One career fell apart.

Yeah, but you've got a one end, you've got her racing sort of a march and for ram in Formula 1, but you've also got her racing in Citroen, Diane 2 CV Cross, Palikiro in Italy, so literally bouncing around in 2 CBS in Rallycross in the same year that she's in F1 and she's also doing sports cars and whatever, you know.

So a very, very eclectic career.

Yeah.

82 on which she only raced in touring cars.

So 82 through to 88, she was racing in touring cars.

But she was kind of the mainstay of Alfa Romeo's scene with the jolly cup squad.

Driving, you know, GTB6 is beautiful, beautiful things.

And with a succession of co drivers, you know, winning lots of aspect in those.

So yeah, very playful.

I mean in about 89 she retired from driving and founded her own team along by the autosport.

I mean how did that go?

Did.

How did her.

Was her team able to capitalize on her and what she'd done and what she could do?

Yeah, I mean that.

That team was founded very much.

She had a view of a life past driving.

You know, she always said, I'll stop driving when I, you know, when I'm.

Either when I'm scared or when I'm no longer competitive.

Yeah.

And the reasons were different, which we think I'm on to.

But so she is.

She.

But the idea of founding her team was to kind of have an academy for almost grassroots level motorsport to help young or poorly off Italian drivers.

Yeah.

Or guys who, you know, they weren't necessarily from the top draw, but to try and help get them on the ladder and help share her experience and skills with it.

But there again, after she retired, she was doing a lot of the setup work for them for all the reasons that were said and set up with a Bruno Raimondi who had been her mechanic at Alfa Maya.

Yeah, in the touring area.

I mean, you know, they were winning cost wins and junior championships almost straight after we tour.

It was toro karting.

Yeah.

Sort of.

Right.

Right from the off though they were doing it unfortunately in.

In the mid-80s, she'd had a.

She'd had a sailing accident.

She'd.

She'd been helming a boat, I think in Lasinji, in the lake of Lasing, and it had been hit by the Boo.

Yeah.

As the sail came across, hit her in the chest and she experienced pain for quite a while afterwards and eventually went to the doctor about it.

And the pain that she thought was a consequence of being hit by the boom was actually breast cancer and it was aggressive and quite severely advanced.

So it was that and the deterioration of health that forced her to stop racing rather than any sort of lack of competitiveness or ability.

You know, she was finding that she no longer had.

No longer had the stamina to do touring car races.

Yeah.

So she still tested the cars for the team and did all set up afterwards, but that's all caused her retirement at the beginning of H9.

But she had a brief but serious battle with cancer until the beginning of dawn now she too, and she died three weeks short of her 51st birthday.

Yeah, you know, so it's, you know, it's a bit of a twist in the tail for.

And the real, the real nasty twist with that.

As I said to you before, Firenza died the following year, but she died of the same thing, you know, so it was a bit of a suck around for all of them.

Yeah.

So, yeah, her life was an absolute roller coaster in many ways, but she was pretty much racing all the way through it.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, we've had various F1 lady F1 drivers, but from what I can gather, she was the pioneer.

Apart from Mike De Felipe, she was the pioneer of women in F1 and motorsport.

As I said, we had Helen east all those years ago, pre war, drilled Bugatti and various other things, but she really was the trailblazer for all this.

I mean, there are quite a few women pre war who had race in all sorts of classes at the squad and you know, you could write a book about that.

But the Philippish who was around in the 50s, as you say, was a different, different kettle fish from Lala.

Insofar as she was a wealthy, she was a countess, she was wealthy, she bought her own car, she ran her own team.

This was a time when you would approach a national organization and make your own race entry and the rest of it.

So she was coming at it from the point of wealth and privilege.

That's not to say that she was not capable driver, but she wasn't in Lela's class as a driver.

Yeah.

Interestingly, Graham Hill, who Lola said they didn't like him for a whole load of reasons.

Graham's a man who divides opinion, but there's a story in there in the book about why.

But anyway, Hill had raced against the Philippis and also against Lele in 74.

He.

And he made the comment, you know, he was the only driver on the grid at that time who raced against Defilipus and raced against Lela.

But he said, he said, yeah, defilippis was there, but this wasn't Lombardi.

Something else.

He didn't speak of them and say a breath.

I asked Var Musetti what he thought of Lulla because a lot of people, you know, rate of their contemporaries or almost contemporaries to see that Desiree Wilson was The best of them that he got the ad he had.

But I asked Val is actually what he thought about it because he'd raced against Lela and Desiree Wilson and David de Galitza imperially.

And he said, yeah, Lela was the best.

She was naturally the quickest and the most capable and also needed the less support.

You know, Desi was good, but she needed a bit more support around her and a bit more of a different system.

Yeah, but.

And Davina was a good skier but, you know, and a capable driver, but not of the class of the other two.

But yeah, musician was absolutely, you know, straight off the bat that Lela was the best in her career.

Yeah.

And when you, you need.

I've spoken to a lot of, a lot of the guys from that era as well as, as well as Piccolo with her.

I think I spoke to all of the surviving co drivers and you know, they all rated her very highly.

Yeah, you know, she, she was, she, she wasn't there just to make up numbers in any of the clashes that she did.

She was that she was there because she could do the job and she, but she would have been completely turned off by the idea of segregated series.

Things like, you know, Formula W&F1 Academy and that sort of thing.

She, she was dead against that kind of thing.

You know, she was very much of the dealer.

If the girls are good enough then now and they got you off, you don't need to create a separate series for us.

Funny enough, I've spoken to a few women racing drivers and they've all said the same thing.

They do actually do not agree with Formula W. They just said, if you're going to race, get in your car, get out there and do it.

The problem is it's of course, the size of talent pools that, you know, for any one guy to get to the absolute top, you need probably a thousand guys in the pool.

At the bottom, he's easier to find, you know, a thousand blokes to put into the pool.

And it's just a fun thousand girls reporting to the pool.

And because of that speed of the renewal of the pool or the, the, the apparatus of the pool means that it's very hard to, you know, to generate the ones who will go all the way.

Yeah, but it's, you know, I understand why there is a motivation for it.

I mean, the forward for the book is written by CZ Wolf, who's, who's obviously running the F1 Academy, which is, you know, trying to help with the, with bring, bringing women through to, to the high levels of the sport.

Yeah.

You know, and I was keen to have sort of her view on it and that's why she wrote the forward.

But when I was, you know, able to get through the layers of personnel at Mercedes AMG to talk to her, she, she was, she was very keen to, you know, she said, yeah, I'd be honored youngest because she, although she, she, she'd obviously never raced against leather in period.

And then, you know, she'd been a child when longest career ended.

You know, she was aware of her and aware of her importance.

Yeah.

So, you know, even crikey, 50 years since she scored that half point, if 30 plus years since she, since she died, you know, the echoes are still there.

Yeah.

What's been the family, for want of better terms, reaction to the book and the other people that you spoke to?

Cause I conclude they will have all the seen a copy of the book.

Well, Patricia's copies are waiting for her back at her office because she's still in Brazil at the moment.

All right.

And won't be back until what, us the 18th.

Oh, she's back today.

Yeah.

So Patricia would have seen it for the first time.

Obviously she's read bits of it and she's seen rushes of parts of it, but she's not seen the whole thing.

Thing.

Yeah.

But those of them who have seen it have been, have been delighted with the, they're all delighted with the fact that it exists and the fact that, you know, Even though it's 30 odd years after the event, after she, after she went, that, that somebody's taken the trouble really to write some kind of celebration about their remarkable relative.

Yeah.

I mean in many ways I suppose you could say they'll look at it and they could be thinking, thank you very much.

About time.

Yes, I mean that my, my view is it's absolutely about time.

I can't believe that this wasn't done a long, long time ago.

You know.

Yeah.

You know, there were a few good sort of obituaries that were written.

Franco Leni did a good one for the Gazette della Sport, which made the front page of Gazette Sport.

But you know, not as there wasn't as much done as you would have expected there to be.

Yeah.

And I, I know, you know, it was still a difficult time early in.

People weren't necessarily as open as they are now.

But I've not been able to understand why at some point between the end of her career and now why nobody has really examined just her significance to the sport in general.

Yeah.

And that, as much as anything, was a motivation to do it, as well as just being the fascination of finding out more about it.

But, you know, it was one of.

It was a very rewarding book to research in the sense that the more that you researched and the more that you read, the more you.

You were entertained by it, the more you liked it.

Yeah.

Now the book is out.

What is the book's full title?

The book's full title is Lilla Lombardi, the Tigress Of Turin, her authorized biography.

And let's just reflect on the moment.

The Tigress of Turin is a name that John Webb of Brands Hatch came up with because he thought that British audiences would have no idea where Alessandria is, let alone Frugalo.

He's called the Tigress Of Turin, which was the name that he came up with.

Lella Lombardi, the Tigress Of Turin, her authorised biography, published by Douglas Lugid Publications.

Now, you alluded to it the last time we spoke.

What's next for John Saltonstone?

Because it's getting to the stage.

I can't keep up with all these books because they're vast things and you think, God, it must take him years to do.

No, it does take up a lot of time.

But unfortunate in that two years ago I retired from the day job, so I've now got a bit more time on my hands.

And the networks that you build up from doing one, help with the networks for the next one, the next one, and you can build up a bit of the body of research.

Ebro recently did a book on Formula.

3000, which is an excellent book, which.

I reviewed, which you enjoyed, as I saw from your review.

But inevitably these things always grow arms and legs, don't they?

And you've got a couple of years in Canada, 69, 70 and probably five year period in South Africa as well, where it was mixed with the other local formula.

So you've got three.

You've almost got three books with the usa, Europe and Australia.

But doing any kind of three book exercise is clear, impractical, affordable.

So we're trying to create a book.

It won't be as big as X.

Yeah, thank God for that.

I have.

I have trouble lifting that up.

All three and a half kilos.

Yes.

It'Ll probably be.

And.

But we've got all sorts of interesting stuff going on.

I've scoped it out, so I know kind of how it's going to feel.

I've got Brian Redmond writing the forward for the US bit, Bob Evans is writing the forward for the British bit and Warwick Brown has written the forward for the Australian bit.

So we've got three of the surviving Formula 5, as in championship, who have got the names on it.

I've got a lot of interviews to do now to try and torture it, but again, it's sadly, as is the case with Cyber Ellington, this era, it's a bit of a shrinking population.

A lot of the protagonists are gone and those that have left, a lot of them are knocking on a bit now.

So we have narrow windows of opportunity to capture stories and the recollections of these people and curate their memories.

That's why, that's one of the motivations for doing these things.

Quickly.

There's a few of us, the guys like Richard Jenkins, Dan Banks, Kevin Guthring, all have a similar sort of worldview of these things that we've got to try and capture these memories and recollections and get them down, get them recorded as pieces of social history as much as they are of pieces of sporting history, while the opportunity exists, because in 10 years time a lot of these people won't be here.

I've tried the similar thing with rally drivers.

It's very slow process, but to try and interview some of the famous rally drivers from many years ago.

And the one thing I was due to interview, Paddy Hopkirk and very unfortunately he passed away before.

About a week before I was due to record the interview with him.

That happens a lot, you know, and if I was to look back, the people who I've interviewed for Louder or X or for the Forever Young book or for Lela and I think, well, hang on, hang on.

There's a fair few of them who aren't here now.

You know, there were three people I think who died between me interviewing them for Lela's book and it being published.

It's, it's quite a lolling really.

But you know, when you're dealing with a generation of people, a lot of who now are north of 80 years old, it's probably not surprising, but it's, you know, that's why it's important to do these things and just having the books exist.

Incidentally, one of the things that we did with Lela, and thanks very much to Guy Loveridge, my publisher, for facilitating this, is that with Lela's book we've held the retail price back to 40 quid, which for a book of the size and quality, the production job they've done on it's very reasonable for a niche publication.

But the reason for doing that was we wanted to try and make it accessible to a younger and possibly more female audience as well as the traditional anoraks like me.

Because, you know, I'm not suggesting that an 18 year old girl is going to go out and spend 40 quid on a book, but a mum might.

I don't think a mom would necessarily go out to spend 60 quid on a book, but hopefully by, by doing thing, you know, doing a move like that, the motivation was A for the book to exist and B, for it to be accessible for a readership to be able to understand Lilla's story and what sort of a person she was really.

Because she's, she was remarkable.

I mean, ironically, you mentioned that.

I mean a lot of the books I'm fortunate enough to review, which means I get a review copy sent to me.

You're telling people this is a great book, go and spend 80, 90, 120 pounds on it.

And you think the way things are at the moment, people won't be able to afford that.

Possibly.

And I still like books.

I am not a download person.

There is something pleasurable about holding a book and turning a page.

I, I agree with you entirely that there's, there's this kind of.

It's an almost visceral personal experience isn't receiving a book and opening it and you know, hearing The.

The creak of the spine and the smell of the new print pages and whatever.

It's a bit like, you know, back in the day when, you know, you'd buy a new gatefold LP and over it up and see all the colors and interaction and smell of iron and the rest of it.

But I agree with you about the, you know, the physicality of holding a book.

And also, photo reproduction on a page is very different from photo reproduction on a screen, I think, as well.

And for, you know, a lot of these books are all very visual and rely on imagery to illustrate the narrative.

Certainly where you've got, you know, something like the Lela book, where you've got really oddball early photos that nobody's ever seen, or with something like, you know, the 405,000.

But we talk about here, which, you know, because that was such a.

Such a.

A visual and really almost, you know, artistically impressive sport.

You know, the car.

The cars were very engaging, photogenic in a way, in a way that perhaps some of the modern stuff isn't.

And to have that on the printed page and to be able to linger over it is.

Is quite rewarding.

Well, it's like you said, one particular photograph of Lombardi shows you walking through a paddock, helmet in one hand, but her race numbers in the other, which.

Which not only gives it a location, but actually gives it a time, because she hadn't.

She'd only just got there because she was only just going to put the numbers on it.

Absolutely.

And there's so much that photos to tell you when you can take the time to sit and study them.

You know, what, what.

And that's a great case in point, isn't it?

You know, what is this picture telling me?

And there's all sorts of odd things.

How the hell did the person take that photo at the timing?

How lucky were they to be in the right place at the right time?

You know, there's a bit of a sort of grainy one of a.

There was a fire in a pit, but somebody's managed to snap her pulling her car away from the pit garage while all the bodywork's burning in the background.

You think just somebody happened to be lucky enough to be there at the time to snap that, because it kind of lasted.

It kind of happened for very long.

No, I will say that's the benefit, excuse me, of modern photographic equipment.

Everybody knows that.

One of my great friends is Marie Katharine Linnie, who's regarded as one of France's best motorsport photographers and with her latest up to date canning gear Some of the images she gets speciality is in the pits and paddocks and some of the images she can get because the speed of the camera and her ability to shall we say predict within a moment or two what's going to unfold in front of it that's where.

The right yeah that's the skill isn't.

It yeah and it's the.

It's the speed of the modern camera that allows it to capture these so but no long may you continue John Salt Install I shall be reviewing the book when Guy Loveridge sends me one apparently it is due to be on its way to me but once again it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you.

I conclude that in about two years time I'll be talking to you about.

That will be also It'll only be 12 months before I'm talking to you.

Well doesn't be getting the manuscript here there'll be another year of editing putting it all together and the rest of it so you probably will be at least a couple of years I've.

I've been working on it since we finished writing Lel say that you know we.

We.

I've already been playing around with it for the best part of the years.

But once again John Salt install thank you very much for joining me on the backseat driver thank you very much.

For having me Mark.

It's always a pleasure.