A couple of years after Ascari’s success, luck, as it so often does, turned sour. When leading the 1955 Monaco Grand Prix his car spun furiously off the track finishing up in the harbour. Thankfully, quick-thinking frogmen fetched him out and he was stretchered to hospital with nothing more than a few minor scratches and suffering from shock. His miraculous escape, however, was short-lived as he was killed testing a sports Ferrari at Monza only four days after the Monaco incident.
Lots of sports people are superstitious, I guess, but none more so than Ascari who harboured a deep superstitious nature. He avoided black cats, for instance, and refused to allow anyone to touch his briefcase containing his racing gear such as his lucky blue helmet and T-shirt. He was also fastidious about unlucky numbers and ‘26’ is reckoned to be one of them. And on the day he was killed it was on the 26th of the month at the age of 36. Ironically, his father, Antonio - who won the inaugural Belgian Grand Prix in 1925 at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps - was killed on the same day of the month at the same age while leading the French Grand Prix in 1925 driving an Alfa Romeo P2 in the first race at the new Autodrome de Montlhéry south of Paris. Alberto was seven years old at the time.
Ascari was an extremely popular figure in motorsport and more than a million people lined the streets of Milan for his funeral. His great Argentinian-born rival, Juan Manuel Fangio - nicknamed El Chueco or El Maestro - lamented: ‘I’ve lost my greatest opponent.’ So distraught, though, was Gianni Lancia that he decided to pack in motor racing altogether and handed his team to Ferrari. Ironically, three days before Ascari died, he confided to a friend: ‘I never want my children to become too fond of me because one day I might not come back.’