Monaco Historic Grand Prix 2018

Story and color photos by Graham Gauld

The Monaco Historic Grand Prix meeting (May 11-13) has come and gone and, my, how time flies when you are having fun. As readers will know, I go to those events, never do reportage on the races, but keep looking for oddities and interesting sidelights that the others may not have noticed. Monaco this year was a rich source of items so let’s start off with an oddity, the Assegai Formula 1 car.

If you have never heard of the Assegai F1, join the club. But this interesting car was actually built and raced in South Africa, not the first place you think of when considering Formula 1 cars. Yet it is not the only South African Formula 1 car, for Doug Serrurier also built one called the LDS that looked like a Cooper, was well built and fairly successful.

The Assegai (The Zulu word for a spear) was the work of Tony Kotze from Cape Town, who came into racing in 1956 with a home-built special before buying the Cooper-Bristol once raced by Jack Brabham in his early days. He then bought a 1958 Lotus 16 Formula 1 car, that had actually raced at Monaco in the 1960 and was crashed by Bruce Halford, and kept it for a year before deciding to create his own Formula 1 car.

He used the more successful Lotus 18 as his guide but made his car lower and wider and built in the fuel tank as a stressed member, which was a new idea at the time. He was not a fabricator and so various people helped with welding and creating the body, and as the Ferrari shark-nose Dino was the flavour of the month at the time he sketched it out with a shark-nose. The real problem was finding a suitable engine. Importing a new engine from the UK was way too expensive so he began to look around and settled on a stock Alfa Romeo 1500cc road car engine that was later to be developed to give more horsepower.

By September 1962 the car was finished, painted bright red and ran for the first time at the Killarney circuit near Cape Town. In the handicap race it did not figure but in a scratch race he ran midfield and finished. He then made the 1000 mile trip north to Rhodesia and finished a remarkable 4th behind two Coopers and Sam Tingle in an LDS. The car, however, was dogged by problems. He briefly changed to a Ford engine but again the problem was reliability.

Eventually the car was set aside and forgotten.

It was traced many years later and went through various owners who steadily rebuilt it, again with an Alfa Romeo engine and it arrived in Europe with Dutchman Arnout Kok. Today the car is owned by John Carpenter and the driver is John Rowley. At Monaco it caused a bit of a sensation as it was up against two BRM’s, five Lotus 16s, various Lotus 18’s and the like and yet Rowley was running in a strong fifth place before he collided with another competitor and was out.

So the unique Assegai with its humble beginnings briefly and brightly shone at glitzy Monaco: I like stories like that.

A Rare Aston Martin

As anyone who was around will tell you, David Brown of Aston Martin’s first attempt at a proper sports racing car, the DB3, was not a great success. It was big, bulky and was quickly replaced by the DB3S which transformed Aston Martin’s fortunes in motor racing. One or two of the DB3’s were converted into coupes, but chassis DB3/7, which appeared at Monaco this year, was the only one actually built from new as a coupe for first owner Tom Mayer in 1954. The original body was not particularly attractive with a square air intake at the front and after a year it was sold by George Abecassis, who was a partner in the HWM racing team, to Angela Brown, daughter of Aston Martin owner David Brown.

When the DB3S came along Aston Martin decided to build two coupes to run at Le Mans in 1954. These are not to be confused with this DB3 Coupe. Indeed, the two Le Mans cars were a disaster. They were entered for Siamese driver Prince Bira and Jimmy Stewart whose younger brother Jackie was still to appear on the motor racing horizon.

Both the DB3S Coupes at Le Mans had disastrous accidents near the dreaded White House corner and ended up all rolled up in a ball about a hundred yards from each other in separate accidents. Jimmy Stewart told me what had happened. When adding roofs to the DB3S sports cars not much attention had been paid to the aerodynamics so that on the Mulsanne straight, for example, Stewart felt the steering go light but pressed on. As it turned out the air was getting underneath and literally lifting the front end off the road and the two accidents were inevitable. Both Bira and Stewart survived relatively unhurt but the memory of those Astons lived on.

But I digress. When Angela Brown bought the Monaco DB3 Coupe in 1955, she clearly felt the front end was ugly and had a new and much smoother body made with a shape not unlike the later Aston Martin DB3S but now with an oval air intake that much improved the looks.

Later, after Abecassis and Angela Brown were married, the car was sold and it passed through various hands before being bought by Swiss racing driver Urs Muller for his daughter Arlette to race. She seemed very much at home with the car at Monaco and drove a good race against much more competitive machinery.

Maserati V8 RI

You could have pushed me over with a feather when I came across a car I did not recognise; it looked like an Alfa Romeo 158 but then realised it was much more of a rarity. It was one of four Maserati V8RIs built in 1935 (note the car model was RI for “independente” and not R1 as is sometimes listed). The car, due to be driven at Monaco by journalist Mark Hales was delivered in September 1935 to Philippe Etancelin and was chassis 4501. However, he sold the car to the Sub-Alpina team and bought another V8RI, chassis 4503, which he later took to Indianapolis.

The V8RI was Maserati’s answer to the Mercedes Benz and Auto Union Grand Prix cars and was fitted with a supercharged 90 degree V8 of 4.7 litres that produced 320 bhp. As you will see in the photograph the engine was a work of art as can be seen from the photograph and was one of the first engines to be fitted with double choke Weber carburettors. It was not one of the most successful Maseratis but it is wonderful to have such a car racing in historic events.

Mark Hales had a terrible time in practice and explained that it was so highly geared that he was having to run around Monaco in first gear. At the hairpin the lock was so difficult he found he had to literally free wheel into the corner for if he left it in gear it was difficult to get round, so it was no surprise when the gearbox gave up on the warm up lap before the race. But what a thrill to see and hear such a car.

Ferrari 212 Touring berlinetta

I am always attracted to coachwork and detail and at Monaco I kept going back to and looking closely at Martin Halusa’s Ferrari 212E Berlinetta (chassis 0088E), not just because it was only one of three or four berlinetta 212Es built back around 1951 but because of the fact that when Californian Charles Betz bought this very rare car in 2008 he was determined to bring it back not only to its original state but even seek out the very rare Amarano color that it was painted in 1952 by the second owner and even the silver grey paint used originally on the engine, gearbox and diff.

Today the car looks better than new because back in 1951 when Ferrari produced a car the final finish was never all that wonderful. The coachwork is by Touring of Milan and in the programme it was stated the car was owned by the Marzotto’s, but the original owner in 1951 was Augusto Caraceni in Rome and the car still has the Rome registration number.

More details can be found on Barchetta