Graham Gauld at Retromobile

The Bartoletti at Retro.

I compared the photo here taken at Retromobile with my original photo taken in 1956 and apart from a mis-alignment of a chrome RN2 badge on the front, it is the same one. Those Bartolettis were, to my mind, as iconic as the Mercedes Benz Formula 1 transporter of 1955 or even the Ecurie Ecosse Transporter which is close to my heart.

And this was the same transporter photographed at Silverstone in 1956 when it was new and doing its proper job.

What is not so well known is that Bartoletti provided and almost identical transporter to Maserati, which I saw in 1957. Sorry for the quality of the color shot of the Maserati Bartoletti but my original transparency was “stolen” by a magazine editor back in the 1960s whom I stupidly trusted to send back. [Thank goodness we don’t have to do that anymore! Ed.]

This is the identical Bartoletti transporter that was sold to Maserati and used in the 1956/57 seasons.

For those interested there is even a small color book on the Ferrari transporters of that period, and I gave my copy to my friend, the late David Cross when he was preparing his first book on transporters.

The Baird-Griffin Maserati

It was a nostalgic Retromobile for another reason. On one of the stands was a pretty bedraggled-looking Maserati-type vehicle. Then I realized it was a very rare and interesting car, the Baird-Griffin. This was something of a bitsa built for Irish driver Bobby Baird, who was the owner of Belfast’s leading newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph.
Though I never met him, when I was serving in the Airforce on my two year National Service, Baird lived in Newtownards and would come steaming past our center on his way home from the office in one of his various Ferraris.

The Baird-Griffin special was built in Ireland with a 4CL supercharged Maserati engine. The chassis was a ladder frame with a de Dion rear end and a Simca front suspension. According to Mike Lawrence, the engine head and block were re cast by someone in Dublin. Built too late for the 1500cc supercharged formula, it competed in the Formula Libre events of the era.

British driver Roy Salvadori crashed the ex-Prince Bira 4CL Maserati in an Irish race and Bobby Baird bought some of the bits, gave them to David Griffin and Griffin produced this Maserati-lookalike which Baird raced.

However in July 1953 Bobby Baird crashed his Ferrari sports car at Snetterton in England. He sustained internal injuries and the ambulance men told him to lie still until the ambulance arrived but the bespectacled Ulsterman, who could be a bit feisty, decided he was ok and would walk back to the pits. He got up, walked a few paces and collapsed when a broken rib punctured his lung, and I believe his heart, and he died on the spot.

Gauld rides again! Sitting high in the saddle of the Baird-Griffin. Note that the Maserati 4CL had four cylinder and eight manifold pipes; the 8CLT had sixteen!

A month or so later, with some time off, I went to the Craigantlet hill climb which counted for the British hill climb championship and here was the Baird-Griffin being driven by another Irishman, Sydney Durbidge. As you can see the driver sat fairly high in the seat, and I always thought he was sitting on a cushion. But at Retromobile the owner let me climb into the car, and in fact the seat was mounted very high to clear the transmission. I hope that the Baird-Griffin goes to a good home as it is one of those racing oddities that should be kept going.

Bertone’s MG

Hidden away in a corner and boxed in by a variety of other cars was another car rare to European eyes but probably more familiar in the USA – a late 1955 Arnolt-MG Bertone coupe fitted with the MG 1500cc engine from the MGTF.

On the stand, the Arnolt-MG with Bertone body. A lovely car...

The name Stanley “Wacky” Arnolt is perhaps best known as the British car importer in Chicago who was quick to twig that British sports cars would sell well in the States in the early 1950s and for his later Arnolt-Bristols. On a visit to the 1952 Turin Motor Show he flipped when he saw a beautiful little coupe with that typical Bertone style based on the 1250cc MG TD. He immediately put in a big order for identical Bertone bodies with the idea that he would strip the regular spidery MGTD body and replace it with the Bertone body offering it as his own Arnolt-MG. He even persuaded Bertone to produce a convertible version and he was on his way. I must say I was surprised to learn that he actually built over 100 of these Bertone cars two thirds of which were the coupes and the rest convertibles. I first came across the Bertone MG photographed in one of the 1954 Fawcett Publications soft cover books called Sports Car Album and now, sixty years later, here I was looking at the first one I had seen in the flesh. Life is full of surprises.

Shark Speedboat

There are always auctions taking place around Retromobile, and I was wandering through the huge stand of Artcurial, the French auction people, when I came across another old favorite I had not seen for about fifteen years, the Ferrari-powered hydroplane built by Guido Abate for a customer. (Guido’s son Carlo Mario Abate is probably better known to our readers as a racing driver with Ferraris.)

A race car on a speedboat hull...Ferrari connection is clear. Photo by Jonathan Sharp.

The boat was commissioned in 1954 by an Italian power boat enthusiast called Schapira. Guido Abate the boat builder had great rivals in the Timossi family who were better known for building the legendary hydroplane powered by a Ferrari 375 Grand Prix engine. The Abate boat was much smaller but it too was originally designed with a Ferrari V12 motor. In tests the V12 did not work, so Abate switched it for a four cylinder Super Squalo engine and thusly equipped, in 1954 it set a new class record at 127mph.

Graham relates a remarkable story of this speedboat, powered by a Ferrari Squalo (shark) engine. Graham Gauld photo.

Twenty odd years went by and Corrado Cuppellini, the specialist car dealer and race driver from Bergamo was on one of his trips to South America trying to dig up interesting old race cars. He found an old Ferrari Grand Prix car with no engine, bought it and brought it back to Italy. He then heard about Mr. Schapira and bought this boat with the Ferrari Squalo engine which he took out of the boat and put in his engineless race car.

He then sold the now-engineless boat to French collector Phillippe Renault. Later he sold the Grand Prix Ferrari with the Squalo engine to a Swiss collector.

A few more years go by and Corrado meets Renault at a race meeting and Renault offers to give Corrado the boat back if Corrado could find him a Maserati engine he wanted. A deal was done and Corrado now had the boat and was able to go back to the Swiss collector and buy back the Squalo engine. He now had the boat back in its original shape.

When I saw it 20 years it still had its original water based Prancing Horse stickers on it that had been varnished over to preserve them and now here it was in Paris sixty years after it was built with the same Squalo engine.

Tillack and Muntz

Steve Tillack at Retro.

Muntz is best known to car people for the Muntz Jet sports car but he was also a great inventor. “I was Mad Man Munz’s driver. It was Muntz who had produced the four track car tape deck system and was in competition with Bill Lear who sold the eight track system,” said Tillack.
“He was in his sixties and had a very young wife/girlfriend which was kind of scandalous at the time. One night driving him home I asked him about it and he said , ‘Kid, young women keep me young’ and it is advice I have followed most of my adult life. Muntz was the first person that entered my life that I intuitively believed was a genius.

Muntz Jet at the 1951 Chicago Auto show. Courtesy PhilAreGo.com

“My unofficial title at Muntz was ‘keeper of toys’. Now Muntz had a deal that if you were an employee of Muntz and bought either a Mustang a T-bird or a Lincoln, had it painted white, put Muntz stickers on the side and raced it, you were given $50 a month if it was a Mustang, $70 a month if it was a T-bird and $100 dollars a month if it was a Lincoln. So my room-mate and I bought a Lincoln that cost us $95 a month and we ran for nothing!” It was the start of Steve’s racing career.

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