The new season seems destined to be historic for an absence though a dozen nations have drivers on the grid
If the French more or less invented grand prix racing at the beginning of the last century and the story of the last 50 years is largely one of British dominance, then Italians surely did more than any other country to establish the sport's enduring image of glamour, drama and danger. Real racing cars are red and the most charismatic drivers are swarthy Latins, aren't they? Which makes it all the more astonishing that the 2012 Formula One season, which starts in Melbourne this weekend, looks like being the first since the world championship began in which no Italian will be seen in the cockpit.
When Jarno Trulli lost his seat in the team now known as Caterham over the winter, replaced by Vitaly Petrov, who brings considerable financial support from his native Russia, he became seemingly the last of an illustrious line. Arrayed on Sunday's 24-car grid in Albert Park will be representatives of Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Australia, Finland, Brazil, Japan, India, Venezuela and Mexico, as well as Russia, but apparently Formula One no longer has room for piloti from a country that gave the sport some of its most resonant names.
Felice Nazzaro was one of the original daredevils, a celebrated winner of the 1907 French Grand Prix in Dieppe and of Sicily's Targa Florio in the same year, driving a Fiat built in his native Turin. The following year, in his 18-litre chain-driven car, he became the first man to lap the Brooklands track at 120mph, and in 1922 he won the French Grand Prix again, aged 42. He was followed between the wars by a host of speed-crazed Italians, most notably Tazio Nuvolari and Achille Varzi, whose legendary duels found them driving cars from Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Bugatti (a French firm whose founder had been born Italian).
Their personal stories – Nuvolari, his lungs ruined by petrol fumes, coughing blood into his bandana and finishing the Mille Miglia in a car that was practically a wreck, the austere Varzi's genius dulled by an addiction to morphine – were the stuff of novels. One of their rivals, the portly Giuseppe Campari, had a parallel career as an opera singer until dying in his Maserati in 1933 at Monza.
So in 1950, the inaugural season of Formula One's world championship, it seemed only natural that an Italian, in the person of the tough, uncompromising Nino Farina, would secure the first title, driving an Alfa. His team-mates included Luigi Fagioli, a veteran of pre-war campaigns and known as the Abruzzi Robber. Two years later Alberto Ascari, the son of a pre-war ace, won the first of his back-to-back titles at the wheel of a Ferrari, built in Maranello by the man bearing a name that would come to be regarded as the sport's No1 brand.
The grids during that era included men with names such Villoresi, Taruffi, Cortese, Bonetto, Sanesi and Serafini, all of them driving Ferraris or Maseratis, built in factories only a few kilometres apart in Emilia Romagna. When an Argentinian driver managed to win the championships of 1951 and 1954-57, it was no surprise that Juan Manuel Fangio's parents had emigrated from villages in the Italian province of Chieti. The first woman to drive in a Formula One race was also Italian – the gamine Maria Teresa de Filippis, who finished 10th at Spa in 1958, driving her own Maserati – and so was the only man to win a grand prix on his debut: Giancarlo Baghetti in a Ferrari at Rheims in 1961.
Ascari, who turned out to be the last Italian world champion, had died in 1955 while testing a Ferrari. He was followed by the ill-fated generation of Eugenio Castellotti, Luigi Musso and Lorenzo Bandini, all destined to meet untimely deaths in the cars from Maranello. Since then a few Italians have made a respectable mark, notably Michele Alboreto, runner-up to Alain Prost in the 1985 championship, and Riccardo Patrese, a distant second to his team-mate Nigel Mansell seven years later. Elio De Angelis perished without reaching his peak and Alessandro Nannini was showing championship potential when he suffered a career-ending injury in a helicopter crash.
In 1989 there were 14 Italian drivers involved in Formula One, most of them pretty useful, with four Italian teams to help them along. Now there are only Ferrari, who long ago ceased recruiting Italians as anything other than reserve drivers, and Toro Rosso, formerly Minardi, nowadays acting as a driver-development programme for Red Bull, whose outlook is multinational. The last win for an Italian driver was by Giancarlo Fisichella in Malaysia in 2006, and the last point was scored by Vitantonio Liuzzi in South Korea two years ago.
Trulli's father named him after Jarno Saarinen, a great Finnish motorbike racer who died at Monza in 1973, but in every other respect Trulli Jr fitted the template of the Italian racing driver: handsome, expressive, capable of being blindingly quick or mystifyingly lacklustre, with a career record – just one win, at Monaco in 2004, in more than 250 starts – indicating that he did not quite live up to his bright early promise. By my reckoning the 73rd and last Italian to drive in Formula One, he will be spending his retirement tending his vineyard in the foothills above Pescara, his home town, where he produces a particularly excellent Trebbiano d'Abruzzo.
At least, unlike so many of his compatriots of earlier eras, he has lived to tell the tale. But Formula One needs an Italian driver more than Italy needs another winemaker.
• Check out the Guardian's Formula One season guide here