Early in the morning the Berninapass is quiet. The wind crosses the Lago Bianco, the cold of the night is still on the summit, and the road that usually carries lorries towards Tirano and motorhomes into the Engadin is empty. Then, far down in the valley, a sound. First a hum, then a scream thrown back by the rock walls. Somewhere between La Rösa and the hospice, someone is wringing out an inline engine from a time when these bends had no guardrails.
That is the Bernina Gran Turismo. A hillclimb that ought not to exist any more, and is particular exactly because of that.
When Graubünden discovered the car
To understand why cars are something particular on this pass, you need to know that Graubünden did not want them for a long time. Until 1925 a broad ban on motor cars held in the canton. Hardly had it fallen when the Engadin wanted to show what it had missed. In 1929 St. Moritz invited guests to the first International Automobile Week, and its high point was a race up the Berninapass: about 16 kilometres on gravel, without barriers, without safety zones.
Hans Stuck, the "Bergkönig", won it, in an Austro-Daimler. A year later the Monegasque Louis Chiron won in a Bugatti. In the Puschlav they soon called him only "Giron": with his wild driving and his friendly manner he had, apparently, won the hearts of the valley. After that it went quiet. For more than eight decades nobody here raced against the clock.
A race that should not have been allowed
That there are start numbers on the Bernina again borders on a small miracle. The pass road is a main traffic axis, with border traffic to Italy, the weather above 2,000 metres is unpredictable, and Switzerland has had a complicated relationship with motorsport on public roads for decades. Still the race returned in 2015 as the Bernina Gran Turismo. Not as a nostalgic copy, but as a carefully curated event.
Today's course is shorter than it was. It runs for about five and a half kilometres and about 50 bends, from La Rösa up to the Ospizio Bernina at a good 2,300 metres. La Rösa is an old post station, where the muleteers changed horses before the last climb. Today the racing cars stand there in a row, doors open, engines idling, waiting for the flag.
Small, loud, honest
The field is limited on purpose, to a few dozen vehicles. Admitted are classic racing and sports cars from before and after the war, up to the early 1980s. They run in a timed competition class and in a regularity class, where the point is not the fastest run but the most constant one. The organisers do not want a field of twenty identical 1960s sports cars, but different shapes, sounds and ways of driving. You feel it.
An open barchetta of the 1950s, in which the driver sits more beside the body than in it, shares the road with rally icons from an entirely different era. Between runs the cars stand close together in front of the hospice. You can get near, you smell petrol and hot brakes, you hear mechanics talking shop in German, Italian and English.
And then an Audi quattro is standing there. White, striped in orange, the angular profile of the early 1980s. Four-wheel drive turned rallying over at the time, and up here it fits surprisingly well, next to cars half a century older. It is a reminder that the history of the hillclimb did not stop in 1930. It only took a very long pause.
Watching means walking
What sets the Bernina Gran Turismo apart from many other classic events: there is no grandstand. During the runs the pass road is closed between La Rösa and Lagalb, and anyone who wants to see the cars finds a place on the slope on foot. Access is free. The best way is the Rhätische Bahn to the Ospizio Bernina, and from there you walk up into the mountain. Sometimes you stand for hours in the wind, in the rain, now and then in snow. Fog can swallow a whole race day.
But when an engine howls in the valley and you hear it coming closer bend by bend, before you see it, you know why you are here.
Why it counts
You could dismiss the Bernina Gran Turismo as a luxury event for collectors. That would be too simple. It is also proof that historic vehicles belong where they were built to be: on the road, on the mountain, in motion. A car designed in 1955 for tight hairpins does not tell its story in an air-conditioned hall, but on 52 bends between the Puschlav and the Engadin.
When the road is open again in the evening and the racing cars roll down into the valley on trailers, a feeling remains. That Switzerland, this country of passes, has a car culture that reaches deeper than you think. And that it goes on, as long as people are willing to drive old machines up the mountain.
The Bernina Gran Turismo in brief
- Course: La Rösa – Ospizio Bernina (GR), about 5.5 km
- When: every year in September
- Getting there: Rhätische Bahn to the Ospizio Bernina, shuttles on site
- Admission: free
- Info: bernina-granturismo.com
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