Much maligned and misunderstood, the plaid interior isn’t always a crime against design. In the right car, at the hands of the right designer, it cannot be matched for charm. Every few years VW releases a Rabbit with plaid seat inserts, but I think it’s even been several years since we last saw them. Like our earlier look at blue cars with red interiors, it can look amazing in classic sportscars.
Sadly, I’m having a hard time imagining this looking good on a contemporary supercar. It looks fabulous in this Gullwing Mercedes, but I’m not sure it would be such a showstopper in a modern Mercedes SLR. I’d love to see someone do this in their modern 911. The car has enough of it’s heritage appearance (barely) that it might be able to pull it off.
The argument over who was the best driver was taken to new heights a few years back by the English journal Motorsports in an article naming the top 100 of all time, thus pitting Jenatzy against Clark, Ascari (pick one) against Hill (pick any) and so on. Comparing drivers of different eras is as silly as comparing tennis players of different eras. Comparing drivers of the same era is hard enough! IROC never seems to have proved much and the early races were run on road courses when many of the pro US drivers had no experience on them.
In the ’50s, drivers of the East Coast seldom came west and vice-versa. Being a California boy, I thought our West Coasters had the edge. Actually, in the big bore classes, it seemed a toss up between the two Phils–Walters and Hill. They were seldom on the same grid. Phil Hill was “pleased” to have beaten his former idol (Walters was a top east Coast Midget pilot when Hill made a few starts in one around LA in the late ’40s) at Elkhart Lake driving an XK C (the Hornburg car recently sold to Europe and visible on this website’s Villa D’Este video) to Walter’s 2.6 Ferrari coupe. At March Field in ’53 Walters waltzed away from the field in the Cunningham C5R’s last race, but failed to finish; Hill’s 2.9 Ferrari hadn’t the speed for an airport course with twin mile long straights.
In the small bore class–F modified__the matter is easier to resolve in the mid 50s because so many of the top drivers were piloting the same machine, the Porsche 550 Spyder. The first four cam engined Spyder raced in the US was Johnny Von Neumann’s which tore up practice at March Field in ’54. My Dad came off the track and reported that “Johnny was passing OSCAs like OSCAs pass MGs.” But an MG pilot pulled out of the pit lane in front of the Porsche and it crashed and burned. John had a second 550 but with a pushrod engine. It would be nearly a year before the next four cammer arrived. In it John had some good races with Pete Lovely’s Pooper and Miles’ R2 MG special, but then he hired Miles to drive for him when all the customer 550s arrived. In ’56-7 we often had six or seven on the grid at a race, and in order of speed the pilots were: 1. Miles 2. Ginther 3. Kunstle 4. McAfee 5. Weiss 6. tie between Porter, Beagle and McHenry. Lovely stepped into a Spyder a couple of times and was up near the top. Only Jack McAfee raced multiple times in the East, and he won nearly all of them, whereas he won only a few times on our coast.
A bit later the RS and RSKs arrived. At our first big pro event, the Examiner GP at Pomona. Miles was in an older RS and Sammy Weiss had a new RSK. Mid way they were running 4th and 3rd, with Miles dogging the faster car but unable to get by. In the turn entering the front straight Miles showed me the Pitt maneuver for the first time in sports car racing, bumping Weiss into a slide and then passing. It turned out to be for the win as the two big bore cars then leading them both retired. Ken raised the bar in the under 1500cc class beginning in ’53, and later became a top high horsepower pilot as well.
The grid for F modified at Santa Barbara in 1956 shows Miles, Ginther and Jean-Pierre Kunstle on the front row, with John Porter, Troy McHenry and Walt Turner also in 550s further back, as well as the 550 engined Lotus of Bill Eschrich with wheels poised in case Miles stalls! He didn’t, taking the win instead.
I headed to the InterMarque Spring Kickoff event this morning in St. Paul, MN, which had a very good turnout of vintage sportscars despite the gloomy weather. The highlight of the show for me was this homebuilt Crosley Special, garage-built in 1951 and with hillclimb and gymkhana history in Indiana going to back to the mid 50s. It was a stunning little car, and far and away my favorite of the day.
As gorgeous as this little Crosley was, it was by no means the only show-stopper on hand. There was a very strong showing from a variety of makes: Plenty of Citroens, MGs, Healeys, Triumphs, and Jags—with a few Maseratis, pre-war luxury cars, and a few vintage bikes as well. A wonderful mix of cars, in conditions ranging from Pebble Beach Competitors (the Daimler pictured below has competed there), to well preserved, to rusty and rattle-canned. Excellent variety of cars at virtually every level of collecting.
Usually I try to space out my posts about cars for sale. The Chicane’s focus has always been about the larger world of classic motorsport, and car collecting and sales are only one small part of the sport. Furthermore, I always try to extend the time between posts about a particular make for sale and it was only 2 days ago that we featured a lovely Ferrari 500 TRC. Although I know I tend to prattle on about vintage Porsches, we really do try to represent many different makes and models of racing cars. It is, after all, the variety of cars that makes vintage racing so interesting. But when Jan Lühn contacted me about this one-off, Vignale designed, 212/225 Ferrari that just arrived in his showroom how could I not share it with you?
I’m a sucker for the European interpretation of the tailfin, which has become the hallmark of American automotive design of the late 1950s. It’s been made as big and as aircraft-inspired and rocket taillight adorned as possible stateside on businessman’s chariots and weekend cruisers. The european take on it though, has always appealed to me more—looking as functional and necessary as on this 212 as the solo tailfin of a D-Type.
Often the Ferrari coupes of the era are a little too much like a miniature luxury car to me. They look like lovely little cars, but lack the exotic good looks and racy stance of the spiders. Not so with this 212. The huge headlamps inset into the grille opening, the sloping roofline, and the great big competition fuel cap put this car’s appearance firmly in the utilitarian racer camp. The silhouette brings to mind the Ferrari effort at the 1952 Carrera Panamericana and the 340 Mexico, but this car predates them by almost a year, and—to my eye—looks like a more lithesome, subtle machine; simpler and more precise. Ferrari 0179 EL was originally built early in the lifecycle of the 212 engine. The V12 was still a bit persnickety and after cylinder failure very shortly after she was built, the engine was swapped at the factory with the 225 before it was ever delivered to her first purchaser. After changing hands in Italy several times, Luigi Chinetti imported the car to the States and delivered her to a sports writer in Texas, Loren McMullen. These bits of automotive history always get under my skin. I know more than a few journalists, some of them have been quite successful. I don’t know any that drive Ferraris. This guy McMullen wasn’t the owner of a printing group or the city paper’s publisher or even the editor in chief—he was on the sports desk and imported a Ferrari.
Naturally, McMullen raced the car a bit in Texas. In one race meeting in 1961, he raced against one of Jim Hall’s Chaparrals, one of which crashed out of the race. McMullen negotiated the purchase of the car’s big V8 and it was somehow shoehorned into the 212. The power of the American V8 was such that some modifications were required. An air scoop added to feed the huge volume of air needed, and a new rear windscreen—reportedly necessary after the acceleration force of the new engine caused air to push the rear window out!
Some time later the car was imported to Holland and restored—apparently immaculately—by Piet Roelofs. Today, the car looks absolutely majestic. Everything from the paint to the interior to the engine bay looks ready for a weekend drive up the coast or the next Concours. There’s no information on Jan Lühn’s site on the car yet, but I’m sure details will be arriving on their inventory page.
At the Coronado Speed Festival four years ago we had a Torrey Pines reunion; among the five cars there that actually raced at Torrey Pines were the ex-Phil Hill 2.6 Ferrari Barchetta and MG Magnette 0878, which my Dad had driven. Standing between the two cars on the pre-grid I was reminded of the last time I had stood in the same position, at tech inspection at the first Santa Barbara road races, Labor day, 1953. I told an amused Phil how while standing behind his former car–then owned by Howard Wheeler–Wheeler had started it up and sprayed wet carbon dust on my new blue denim trousers. For two months I wouldn’t let my mom wash them, and she refused to let me wear them!
We towed from Pasadena on Friday and checked into the Mar Monte hotel next to the bird refuge, and I was sent to the dining room while our entourage left for the King Supper Club on upper Milpas St, where they watched a stripper while eating their steaks. At the hotel, my waiter pointed out to me Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie at the next table, there to film “Johnny Dark” at the races. In the film Curtis plays Johnny, an ambitious auto engineer who is unaware that the Brass see the sports car he is developing only as a publicity stunt. In the film Curtis’ rival for the Boss’ daughter (Laurie) wins the race in the experimental car after Hill’s Ferrari (pictured above) conks out while leading. In the real race, Hill in his 2.9 Vignale bodied car wins after Bill Stroppe spins his Kurtis into the ditch at turn two. The film car is the Woodill Wildfire, a Glasspar bodied Willys. When we went to the film at the Crown Theatre in Pasadena, they had the car in the lobby. Woodill built and sold only a few. It had a slightly different grill and tail from the standard Glasspar body and was quite good-looking. When I entered UCSB in 1960 I found Mike Woodill, son of the builder, living in my dorm. Mike and I had some success building push carts for the then popular college sport of push cart races. At this race only the pits were on the grass between the start/finish and the double back stretch rather than on the opposite side by the hangars. There was a little tower there, and the film has some shots of the cars from the tower, including a staged one of Hill’s car dying, and a real one of the Cannon Spl being pushed to the grid. Turn one was marked by bales and cones and was sharper than in later races; Stroppe spun there too, and Ernie McAfee in his new Siata 208s hit the hay three times on Saturday. His car was entered in the Concours at the Biltmore later in the day; after judicious hammering, he borrowed some red nail polish from my Mother to retouch it!
Most race weekends prior to this had practice on Saturday and four races on Sunday. Here, Ken Miles used his newly gained influence to have a program of six or seven shorter races each day. Hill and Jim Lowe in his new Le Mans Replica Frazer-Nash staged a good battle in the big bore production race, Lowe holding off Hill’s Ferrari for several laps. But though both models supposedly qualified for production status according to the FIA, both were disqualified for having locked rear ends! Miles, of course, won the semi-main in his first MG special R1. Dad finished seventh both days in Magnette 0878, pictured here at Palm Springs with uncle Pete Jacobsen at the wheel for the novice event.
On a clear, crisp Friday in April of 1953, with the sun beginning to warm the hillsides just north of San Luis Obispo, California, Harvey Mayer unloaded from its trailer the 1100cc OSCA belonging to Randy MacDougall—Pebble Beach bound—for the purpose of blowing the cobwebs out of the engine and fine tuning for the weekend’s activities, and took off up the road, the tow car in lame pursuit.
At Torrey Pines a few months earlier Randy had driven the car to second place, behind Von Neumann’s Porsche SL, wearing the blue paint it had arrived with from the factory. But now resplendent in its new Italian racing red livery, the OSCA managed to catch the eye of a wary California Highway Patrol officer, who duly pulled Harvey over. Now having very good eyes, our pilot had certainly seen the CHP as soon as he had seen Harvey, and in those pre-radar days, the officer had not been able to clock the OSCA over the mile necessary to issue a speeding ticket. But he circled the little bolide carefully, pulled out his ticket book, and began writing. The first OSCA on the West Coast, this car had the headlights recessed in the little round grill opening, and not fared into the fenders as later MT4s would. So despite being liscensed for the road, the car was illegal.
“Your headlights are too low to the ground, and too close together.” the cop said, handing Harvey the ticket as the tow car drew up behind. “You’ll have to fix it before you can drive it on the road again.”
Back the OSCA went onto the trailer, and I noted its passing from the parking lot of the Paso Robles Inn, where our equipe had stopped for early afternoon cocktails. Into the lounge I went.
“Harvey has just gone by towing the OSCA” I announced.
“What color was it?” asked my Father suspiciously. He knew it had just been painted, and figured I didn’t.
“Red” was the answer, but it didn’t convince the rest of them. They were made believers when, near Greenfield in a growing twilight, we came on the OSCA, on its trailer, hitched to Harvey’s tow vehicle, precariously tilted along the side of the two lane road. He had had a flat tire. This was fixed, but in pulling off the road where the shoulder was steeply graded, the carburetor of the tow car had become starved for fuel, and it would not restart. The tank was low on gas, and the pump was not getting any into the carb. We had no gas can between us, but we did have some fuel line, and eventually Harvey was able to siphon some gas out of our tank and pour it into the starved carb, and his tow car sputtered and off we all went, arriving at the Pine Inn in Carmel well past the dinner hour.
Harvey had become quite paternal about the OSCA, and for good reason. No more beautiful race car existed. Its thin aluminum skin was sleek and utterly unique, its little twin cam four an engineering jewel. Randy, a writer by profession, published a humerous little piece in one of the sports car journals of the day accusing Harvey of trying to keep him away from his own race car, of refusing to answer the telephone when Randy called, and of leaving teddy bears to bounce around in the cockpit to keep Randy awake when actually racing the car. This was not a bad idea. Randy put the car into the haybales twice in front of me during Sunday’s race, doing severe damage to the carozzeria. and he did not come close to showing the car’s potential. But Harvey drove it in the novice event, and as the smallest engine in the race, started dead last on the twisty, narrow, pine=lined track. In four laps he threaded his way through the field and caught the leading Jaguar Porsche, going on to win. Years later, Harvey would be the fastest West Coast Lotus driver.
Ken Miles won Randy’s event in the first outing of his R1 special. I always thought that if Harvey had driven the OSCA in the main instead of Randy, that the debut of Miles’ car would have resulted in a second place.
Update: Tony Adriaensens sent along a pair of photos of the OSCA in question taken at Torrey Pines. Leaving open the debate of when exactly #1122 changed her colors. Thanks Tony!
The crew over at Veloce Today scored some fantastic shots of the floor of Europe’s largest classic racing and sportscar sale.
There’s a tremendous example of the Alfa Romeo Stradale not too unlike the one we featured in an Art Appreciation segment a month or so back. Also among their shots is a lovely Ferrari 212 Export and curious little 1948 Giannini Fiat 1100 (I’m all about the late-40s Italians lately). And why not throw in an ex-Chris Amon Matra for good measure?
Head on over for the complete writeup and more photos. Great stuff!
Beautiful. Elegant. Purposeful. I’ve caught myself fantasizing about this particular variation on the Maser A6GCS since it got so much camera time in the BBC2 program, The Real Italian Job: James Martin’s Mille Miglia. While the program is a fairly poor trip through the contemporary Mille Miglia Rally, and the chef’s Maser gave out far too early to really see the beautiful sights of the Mille, there is a shining highpoint that made the program well worth watching: the absolutely captivating A6GCS. Although the dealer doesn’t mention it, this car appears to be the very example featured in the program—notice the Mille Miglia rally number featured on the car here, James Martin’s car bore the same number.
Maserati created a variety of different sportscars under the A6 model designation, from rather luxurious coupes to open-top enclosed-fender sportscars. This stripped-down, (mostly) open wheel variant though is, for me, the title holder. She’s absolutely marvelous, looking something like a machine that somehow successfully combines the Formula Car, Sportscar, and Hot Rod. There’s nothing here that doesn’t need to be, there are no dramatic design flourishes—it is the very essence of form following function.
This example, chassis #2006, is currently among the stock of London dealer Cars International Kensington. One of only 3 of this variant made, she was supplied new to Baron Nicola Musmeci in May, 1948. The Baron wasted no time preparing the car for the Targa Florio the following March, where it placed 4th. He repeated the trip around Sicily the following year, bringing this little machine home in 5th place. The car also raced as a Formula 2 car with the passenger seat blocked out and the road equipment stripped out, and even entered the Mille Miglia in 1951.
Musmeci apparently didn’t tire from the car after the string of successes because the car didn’t change hands until 1972. Sadly the next owner largely mothballed it after a body restoration, and we haven’t seen it on the track until Cars International, after acquiring the car (presumably for Martin) in 2007, entered her in the 2008 Mille Miglia. It has since been restored again, this time with a complete engine rebuild as well. Count ’em. That’s 3 owners since 1948. The James Martin program went into some detail about James buying this car, but was Cars International the “owner”? When Cars International says they “acquired” the car, they did so on Martin’s behalf? This is all assuming I’m right and that this is indeed the James Martin car, which seems more than likely.
I’ve been obsessing about this car for quite some time now, even pouring over this Gilco chassis construction diagram. Why should I let my non-existant welding skills get in the way of building my dream? After all, I’m going to assume it’s HIGHLY unlikely that one of these will come available in my price range any time soon. More photos and information on the dealer’s info page.
RM Auctions’ upcoming Sporting Classics at Monaco event has some stunningly beautiful machines crossing the block. Among them is this drop-dead gorgeous example of the mighty Tipo 61 “Birdcage” Maserati. Beautifully prepared and lovingly photographed, this Birdcage is ready for action.
This example, chassis #2470, was the third from last Birdcage to leave the factory, and boasts a string of wins Stateside and in Europe. Originally delivered to Texas oilman and SCCA president, Jack Hinkle. Despite his status of a wealthy collector that might ordinarily be relegated to the ranks of ‘gentleman racer’, Hinkle drove as hard as the professional racers that shared his grid. He won three of seven entered races with 2470. That’s an excellent season, especially considering that he was on the podium in all of the races the car finished (he had one DNF that season).
After the next owner (Can Am Series co-founder Tracy Bird) suffered a fire in the car, the car’s salvagable chassis was grafted with the chassis of the crashed ex-Roger Penske Birdcage. Ordinarily I don’t like these ‘half of one chassis, half of another’ jobs. But the fact that this repair was made in-period, well within the car’s original life, and is well documented, helps me overlook that. This isn’t one of those ‘started as a 330 America, now’s it’s a GTO’ hatchet jobs.
My favorite bit of history comes from the car’s third life at the hands of Lord Alexander Hesketh. He had Charles Lucas drive the car for a historic race that was the support event for the ’75 Austrian GP. Lucas piloted the Birdcage to a commanding lead. The lead was so strong that Lord Hasketh hung a sign over the pit wall reading “cocktails”. This was no mere celebratory “we’re going to win and celebrate with cocktails later”—it was an invitation. Lucas pulled into the pits for a quick nip, then repassed the field for a win. Mid-race cocktails doesn’t sound like such a good idea now, but the story is simply fantastic.
I’ve long adored these incredibly beautiful machines, both her masterfully designed bodywork and as the pinnacle of the space-frame chassis design. This is one of those machines where when you see her stripped of her panels, she looks even more sophisticated and impressive. The hundreds of thin gauge tubes welded together in an impossibly precise geometry looks part mathematics dissertation, part fighter jet, all mean.
Speaking of mean, the black livery on this example is intimidating. It’s so imposing that even though it hides the incredible lines of the bodywork, even though my heart wants it back in her original red-orange factory color, even though it somehow makes this outstanding machine recede into the background when one the grid with her fellow Italian machines—despite all of these very good reasons to repaint—I’d keep her as is.
She’s just so damn bad-ass looking. She could be none more black.
I hope this photo doesn’t get anyone in trouble but I can’t help but share this shot from the 2008 Elkhart Lake Vintage Festival. Where else in the world can you stumble out of the bar at 1am and see a pre-war biplane engine-powered Frazer-Nash monoposto double parked in a handicapped spot?
I just love it.
