Champion racing driver of the 1950s and 60s
Held on the wild mountain roads of Sicily between 1906 and 1973, the Targa Florio ranked just behind the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Mille Miglia among the classic events of the sports car calendar. In 1964, Colin Davis, who has died aged 79, became one of only half a dozen British racing drivers – the others were Stirling Moss, Peter Collins, Graham Hill, Cyril Snipe, Vic Elford and Brian Redman – to win the trophy that was originally awarded by the Sicilian wine grower and automobile enthusiast Vincenzo Florio.
The moustachioed, pipe-smoking Davis was by some distance the least known of those six English drivers, thanks to an early decision to spend most of his career living and racing in Italy, and to retire from the sport in his 30s, dismayed by the frequency of fatal accidents on the track.
As the son of SCH "Sammy" Davis, a sports editor of Autocar magazine and one of the most prominent British drivers of the 1920s, Colin was born into the sport. His father was one of the famous Bentley Boys, a friend and associate of the engineer and designer WO Bentley, and winner at Le Mans in 1927, at the wheel of a car that had been almost crippled by an accident early in the race. It was no surprise that Colin would follow in his wheeltracks, particularly after Sammy bought him his first car, a V12 Lagonda.
Born in Marylebone, London, Colin worked in the advertising business but was barely out of his teens when he made his competitive debut at the wheel of a 500cc Cooper-Norton, taking second and third places in his first races at Silverstone. Moss and Collins had already moved on from the tiny Formula Three cars to bigger and better things, but over the next four seasons Davis's rivals would include Stuart Lewis-Evans and Ken Tyrrell.
In 1957 he moved to Italy, then the centre of motor racing, where he established a relationship with the Maserati brothers, who had sold their Modena-based team and moved back to their home town of Bologna, where they manufactured small sports cars under the name of OSCA (Officine Specializzate Costruzioni Automobili). But it was in a Maserati 250F, borrowed from the English driver Horace Gould, that he competed in the non-championship Formula One Modena Grand Prix that year.
A year later he made a mark when he and Alejandro de Tomaso, the Argentinian driver and businessman, drove an OSCA sports car to second place in the 12 Hours of Messina and won the coveted Index of Performance award – calculated on speed and fuel consumption – at Le Mans after finishing 11th overall in a 750cc model.
In 1959 he was entered in a Cooper-Maserati by the Scuderia Centro Sud for the Formula One French and Italian grands prix, retiring at Reims and finishing 11th at Monza in an outclassed car. Sports car racing became his speciality, along with the new single-seater Formula Junior, a category designed to replace Formula Three. His FJ successes came in Fiat-engined OSCA and Taraschi cars, a win in the Naples GP of 1959 in a Taraschi preceding a remarkable run in the summer of 1960, when within the space of a few weeks he and the OSCA won the Monza Lottery GP, the Circuit of Salerno and the Messina GP, followed in October by the Coppa d'Oro di Sicilia in Syracuse, giving him victory in the all-comers Italian championship ahead of such future F1 stars as Denis Hulme, Lorenzo Bandini and Giancarlo Baghetti.
The Targa Florio win, in which he shared the wheel of a Porsche 904 GTS with Antonio Pucci, came in the absence of the Ferrari team and after the failure of a trio of Carroll Shelby's powerful new AC Cobras. There was a second place in the same event a year later, this time in a Porsche 908 co-driven by Gerhard Mitter. In 1966 he achieved his best overall result at Le Mans, finishing fourth with Jo Siffert in a two-litre Porsche 906 Carrera behind three seven-litre Ford GT40s.
A neat, stylish driver and a quiet, unassuming man, Davis made infrequent trips to British circuits, on one occasion to race a Ferrari 250 GTO at Brands Hatch. He was seen in a Formula One car only once on home ground, finishing seventh amid a high-class field in the International 2,000 Guineas race at Mallory Park in 1962, driving a Lotus 18-Climax entered by Giovanni Volpi's Scuderia SSS Republica di Venezia.
After his retirement from racing he moved to Cape Town, where he worked as a radio broadcaster. He is survived by his wife, Eva, and their daughter, Francesca.
• Colin Charles Houghton Davis, racing driver, born 29 July 1933; died 19 December 2012