The Last Time Formula 1 Raced on the Banking

For several seasons around the turn of the 1960s, Monza offered race organisers a genuinely unusual option: run the Italian Grand Prix on the standard road circuit alone, or combine it with the Pista di Alta Velocità, a steeply banked oval loop built alongside the road course, to create a longer, faster combined layout that closed the lap using both configurations together. The banking itself, built in the 1950s, was punishingly rough by the standards of contemporary racing tyres and suspension — its surface had already begun to deteriorate within a few years of construction — and subjected drivers and cars to sustained high lateral loads unlike anything else on the calendar, an experience several drivers of the era compared unfavourably to driving over cobblestones at racing speed.

By 1960, the combined circuit's reputation for punishing cars and drivers alike had become a significant point of contention. Several of the British teams — including Cooper, Lotus, and BRM, representing the sport's increasingly dominant rear-engined manufacturers — announced they would boycott the race entirely rather than subject their cars and drivers to the banking, citing both safety concerns and the mismatch between their lighter, more delicate rear-engined chassis and the punishing demands of high-speed banked running, which favoured the heavier, more robust front-engined cars that Ferrari and a handful of others still fielded. The result was a startlingly thin, largely Italian entry list, dominated by Ferrari and a scattering of smaller independent teams, a far cry from the full international grid the World Championship normally attracted.

Ferrari, whose front-engined Dino 246 was well suited to the smooth, sustained speeds the banking rewarded, took full advantage of the reduced and mismatched opposition, filling the podium entirely with its own cars — Phil Hill led home teammates Richie Ginther and Willy Mairesse in a rare all-Ferrari result. The race turned out to be the last time the full combined road-and-banking layout was used for a World Championship round; the diminished, boycotted entry list and the widely shared sense that the banking had become more a liability than an asset for competitive racing meant Formula 1 never returned to the combined circuit again, using only the standard road course at Monza in every subsequent championship season.

Phil Hill won for Ferrari, leading teammates Richie Ginther and Willy Mairesse home in a rare all-Ferrari podium sweep, made possible largely by the absence of the British rear-engined teams that had boycotted the event. The result marked one of the last significant victories for front-engined Formula 1 machinery before the rear-engined revolution completed its takeover of the grid the following season.

1960 sat at the hinge point of Formula 1's transition from front-engined to rear-engined cars, a shift Cooper had begun and which Lotus and others were rapidly adopting; the reduced Italian Grand Prix entry, missing precisely the teams leading that technical revolution, produced a result that looked more like a snapshot of the sport's recent past than its immediate future.

The banked oval at Monza had been built in the 1950s partly to allow high-speed record attempts and partly to give the circuit a genuinely distinctive, spectacular character, but its punishing surface and the escalating cost, in both cars and driver safety, of running competitive machinery on it made it an increasingly awkward fit for a sport whose technical direction was moving toward lighter, more delicate rear-engined chassis. Its retirement from championship use after 1960 marked one of the earliest examples of a circuit feature being effectively abandoned by Formula 1 for safety and competitive-balance reasons — a pattern that would recur repeatedly at other circuits over the following decades, from Spa's original layout to the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

Dry and warm, typical of early September in northern Italy, with no rain to further complicate an already punishing surface for the cars that did take part.