Gauld at Maranello and Monaco

By Graham Gauld

In some ways I always dread the month of May as I usually have something going on, not only every weekend but in four different countries! As a result this is written in haste before heading off for Scotland and the Ecurie Ecosse Tour.

Ten days ago it all started with the Annual General Meeting of the Grand Prix Drivers Club which this year was held in Maranello on the invitation of Ferrari, and resulted in a good turnout of members including not only what we would call normal Ferrari drivers but including one World Champion, John Surtees. Piero Ferrari, vice-President of Ferrari was made an Honorary Member of the Club by Club President Howden Ganley and was seated beside John Surtees.

I returned back home for around 24 hours it was then time to drive through to Monaco for the Monaco Historic Races. I leave the race photography to our specialists but it was fun to look round the paddock and find some interesting little stories.

In preparation for my book on the history of Modena I had visited Marco Colotti at his home in Modena. Marco’s father, Valerio Colotti was not only famous for his designs of racing gearboxes but as the man who built what perhaps should have been the 1959 Maserati Grand Prix Car. Maserati withdrew from racing at the end of 1958 but Colotti was working on a new front-engined car which he called the Tec-Mec. The car only raced once, in the 1959 US Grand Prix when it was entered by Camoradi USA for the Argentine driver Fritz d’Orey to drive. Sorely under tested and under developed it qualified on the back row of the grid but managed to get up to 10th place before being sidelined by an oil leak.

When talking about this, Marco remarked that he had been too young and had never actually seen the Tec-Mec on the flesh. When he said he was coming to the Monaco Historic meeting I told him I would introduce him to my friend Barry Wood, who owns the car and whose son Tony was due to race it. In the past two years the Tec-Mec has now shown its potential and not only did Marco get to sit in the car in the paddock but Tony went out and won the race for Grand Prix cars of that era. Marco went back to Modena with very happy memories.

I know the Editor likes stories about French and Italian cars but my eye was caught by a little-known German car in the Monaco Paddock. This was the Honore-Wagner BMW Spezial. To appreciate this car, built in 1951, you must understand the situation in Germany immediately after the war when cars were scarce and racing cars even scarcer. This car was built, however, not in Germany but in Luxembourg by Wagner who used a BMW 328 six cylinder engine built up in his uncle’s garage and then fashioned the bodywork out of beaten up aluminum wing tanks from WWII U.S. planes. The car ran at the Nurburgring in June 1951 and was then raced all over the place. It was later bought by Dr Terry Bennett of Rollinsford New Hampshire who put it up for auction in 2012 and it was bought by Goy Feltes who entered it for Monaco. It practice but sadly did not run in the sports car race but, a great new find for historic racing sports cars.

There was a bunch of five intrepid drivers all the way from New Zealand whom NZ Grand Prix driver Howden Ganley, called the “Maori Mafia”. All of them ran in the Formula Junior races where there was a huge entry of over 40 cars. One of them was particularly interesting and, like the BMW, was a one-off built in the USA in 1959 by Jocko Maggiacomo called the Jocko Special. As owner/driver Neil Tolich explained “..one of the early drivers to race this car was Sam Posey” and it was originally built by Maggiacomo – a sprint car driver – to look like a sprint car. In the races Neil took 11th place in his heat which was pretty good considering the waves of Stanguellinis, OSCAs and Taraschis taking part not to mention the Lolas, Elvas and Geminis.

At Monaco you can see Grand Prix cars racing in different groups and it was interesting to see two engineers, one famous and one not so famous, at Monaco to see the cars they had personally developed running in the races. The most important was Mauro Forghieri who was keeping an eye on all the Formula 1 Ferraris that he had designed. As Franco Meiners was having trouble with the unique 312B3 “Spazzaneve” with its snow-plough nose Mauro got his jacket off and helped out. He was also seen having a look at the earlier 312B driven by former sports car driver Paolo Barilla.