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Italian hard-trier can say he was a GP driver

Author

• Mattijs Diepraam

Date

• 8W June 1998 issue, offers are kindly accepted to extend the length of this article!

Who? Alessandro Pesenti-Rossi What? Gulf-Rondini Tyrrell-Cosworth 007 Where? Österreichring When? 1976 Austrian GP

Why?

The seventies surely had their fair share of wildly overambitious forays into F1. This effort by the private Gulf-Rondini team was definitely one of them. Their driver Sandro Pesenti-Rossi was hardly anything more than a midfield racer in Italian F3 ('74) and European F2 ('75) before trying his luck in F1 with a year-old Tyrrell 007.

Here at Zeltweg he scored the best finish (11th) of his short F1 career spanning four entries and three starts. At his home race at Monza he did rather well to qualify 21st but still he only managed a lowly 18th at the chequered flag. After that he was back on the way down - and very quickly. In 1978, after a generally unsuccessful return to F2, he left the higher levels of motorsport altogether.