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THE TANGLED TALE OF THE FOURTH 250F MASERATI
by Eoin S. Young
It all started twenty years ago when the diminutive Siamese Prince "B. Bira" (or Birabongse Bhanuban as his royal parents had christened him) decided to place an order for a new Maserati Grand Prix car that was to be built for the 1954 season.
Bira's order was fourth to be received and he was allotted chassis and engine number 2504. To pacify the impatient prince who discovered that his 250F would not in fact be ready until the June of 1954 after the factory cars had been built and sorted, Maserati decided to fit the new 6-cylinder 2½-litre engine into a formula 2 chassis raced the previous year and this interim model was known as A6GCM. When the customer 250F space frames finally started coming through, Bira's engine was matched up with chassis 2504 for the first time.
This 250F was to be Bira's last racing car. He had started racing at Brooklands in 1935 and after a career that spanned twenty years he would retire in 1955. His final fling was a successful one that included a win in the New Zealand Grand Prix on the Ardmore airfield circuit in 1955. With the interim A6GCM Bira had won the Frontieres GP at Chimay.
After finishing third to Peter Collins and Roy Salvadori in a 250F 1-2-3 at Silverstone in May of 1955, Bira announced his retirement from racing and sold his car to British privateer Horace Gould. The burly Horace enjoyed minor placings with 2504 and in April of 1956 he sold it to Bruce Halford who crashed it almost immediately at Aintree and the car went back to Modena for a rebuild that included a new frame under the old chassis plate No. 2504.
In the meantime Stirling Moss had won the 1956 New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore in his own 250F and this smooth Moss performance so intrigued top New Zealand driver Ross Jensen that he arranged to buy the car and race it in 1958. After protracted wranglings the car finally arrived with only days to spare before the Grand Prix, a race Jensen feels he would have won but for being run off the road while lapping a back marker. He finished second to Brabham trailing some 17 seconds astern. In Jensen's hands the car was painted an attractive shade of blue-gray and was known as "The Gray Lady". Jensen went on to win the N.Z. Gold Star that season with two wins and two second places after a series of drives that added to Jensen's reputation and cemented his affection for the 250F. He sold his car to another New Zealender (Johnny Mansel) and went to England at the invitation of Brian Lister to drive a Lister-Jaguar in place of Archie Scott-Brown who had been killed at Spa early in 1958. While in Europe he put together a deal to buy Bruce Hatford's well-used 250F and to re-style the old 2504 along the lines of the latest "Piccolo" models that were being prepared for Roy Salvadori and Carroll Shelby to drive with the backing of Temple Buell in the 1959 New Zealand Grand Prix.
Ross Jensen, top New Zealand driver of the 250F era, at the
wheel of the ex-Moss "Gray Lady" Maserati. Jensen was
the central figure in the tale of chassis No. 2504.
As part of the promotion for the race, "Buzz" Perkins, a colonial P.T. Barnum who excelled in putting on a show, decided that this Piccolo copycar of Jensen's should be entered from El Salvador, although to this day Jensen isn't exactly sure where El Salvador really is! The car appeared in New Zealand with the special long-nosed body that had been built by Fantuzzi, one of the legendary artists in aluminium who worked by rule of thumb, later built Ferrari bodies, and now prepares cars for the private Ferrari collection of Pierre Bardinon in France. Jensen had the engine uprated but it retained the 4-speed gearbox and drum brakes while the genuine Piccolos had 5-speed gearboxes and discs.
Jensen was obviously aware that the chassis plate on his car had the same number as Bira's 250F which had won the G.P. at Ardmore in 1955. "My 'Piccolo' really was the ex-Bira car, but it certainly wasn't the Bira specification, because it wouldn't have been nearly as competitive as it was, and it was certainly a better 250F than the Moss car I'd driven two years earlier," recalls Jensen. "Oddly enough, it could have been the original 1954 chassis although upgraded considerably because it was an old-looking spaceframe with a fair measure of welding evidence where the chassis had been mended in the past."
The new-look for 2504 was light blue with a central yellow stripe, but the handsome lines flattered to deceive Jensen on the 1959 series with most of his retirements stemming from the transmission. As if to atone for its poor form in New Zealand Jensen won a race at Bathurst in Australia and almost immediately went down with pneumonia which hospitalised him for weeks and the car was sent back to Modena. Because Maserati was now officially out of racing, Jensen arranged for the car to be consigned to Hans Tanner, a colourful figure on the Modenaise scene who had accompanied the Buell 250F's to New Zealand.
At this point Jensen began to lose contact with his car and it was not until late in the year when he was on a business trip to Europe that he went to Italy to try and trace the 250F with the aid of Gianfranco Comotti, a pre-war Italian driver of some note who had been suggested to Jensen as a worthy aide by Dennis Druitt, then head of the BP international racing programme.
"This fine man Comotti came to Modena with me to sort out the situation and we found what was left of my original chassis in the throes of having a big American V8 installed in it. It had been decided by Tanner and the gearbox designer Colotti that they would build a Maserati-engined car of their own called a TecMec and this Corvette-engined version was tending to materialise round my car." Jensen winces even today in the air-conditioned comfort of his thriving BMW and Jensen dealership in Auckland as he remembers the sight of his butchered 250F.
A complicated situation became even more tangled when it was realised that there was a government lien hanging over the car through expenses incurred and it was not until work had been completed on a "new" 250F replacement built up in the workshops of Stanguellini and a large wad of lira had changed hands, that Jensen again became the owner of a 250F.
"I eventually received what was ostensibly my car with all my bits and pieces on it, but it wasn't the same physical chassis because the original chassis now had the V8 installed. I finally had to tell them 'Look - I don't care what chassis it is, I just want my car back.'"
Journalist Denis Jenkinson was in Modena at the time and his crammed notebooks of the day helped to sort out some of the 2504 tangles during my research for this feature.
At this point 2504 was evolving from a 250F Maserati Grand Prix Car into a hybrid Formula Libre machine fitted with a 4.9 litre fuel-injected Chevrolet V8. The 250F chassis for the counterfeit Piccolo was actually No. 2523, a car that Jo Bonnier had been using as a "rent-a-racer" hired out to local drivers for their "home" events. The engine from 2523 had already been used in TecMec 2 for its short-lived formula 1 career, and this car - still with engine No. 2523 installed - now reposes in Tom Wheatcroft's collection at Donington Park in England.
Coincidence brought 2504 - in its third costume change and now on stage as the TecMec 1 - together with its half-brother, the so-called Piccolo, out in New Zealand during the 1961 series of races. Jensen had sold the car to Brian Prescott when it arrived back in New Zealand, and Johnny Mansel waited impatiently for his new V8 TecMec. It finally arrived too late for Mansel to race it at Ardmore or Levin in 1961 and his first race in the car that he was to refer to as "The Animnal" was on the Wigram airfield circuit in pouring rain. Mansel had become an accomplished performer in the ex-Moss/Jensen 250F, but the insertion of the Chevrolet engine had made the car practically unmanageable. Three laps into his first practice with the TecMec, Mansel swept through a fast corner leading out onto the back straight to find cars spinning all over the track in front of him. He lost control and slid for 50 yards or more on the wet grass fighting the wheel before the big car fell backwards into a deep drainage ditch and overturned. Mansel was a strong man and he struggled clear of the upturned car unhurt, but a sixth sense made him pause, alerted probably by the eerie swish-swish-swish of another car spinning on the wet grass. In that split second a 4CLT Maserati driven by Brian Blackburn skated clear over the TecMec to land further down the ditch. He raised his head in disbelief only to be clubbed down by a third visitor to the ditch - a Super Squalo Ferrari which bounced squarely on the upturned TecMec driving it down into the water, while an amazed Mansel escaped dazed with bruises and grazes down his back from the Squalo's tyres.
TecMec 1 - the Corvette-engined 250F Maserati - being raced
by Johnny Mansel on the Dunedin street circuit in New Zealand in 1961.
A week later he was practising the TecMec on the Dunedin street circuit but trouble with the fuel injection meant he started the race 13 laps late. A year later on this track Mansel was killed when his Cooper-Maserati crashed. At Teretonga a water pump pulley collapsed in practice and in the race he retired with an ignition problem. On the Waimate track a week later he finished fourth in pouring rain.
Mansel was relieved to sell the TeeMec to Rod Coppins, a youth who had worked on his team in the 250F days when another Mansel mechanic had been Bob Wallace, now in charge of development at the Lamborghini factory. Coppins could see no future in trying to tame the wild TecMec to race against the rear-engined Coopers in single-seater racing so he converted it to a sportsracing car by the simple expedient of buying the central-seat Ferrari sports car body which had been imported in 1956 by Ron Roycroft, on the 4½-litre V12 Ferrari bought from Louis Rosier. Roycroft had raced the car in this form a few times before converting the Ferrari back to its original singleseater form.
This was to be the fourth new role for 2504 which had started life as an A6GCM and had metamorphosised from a 250F to a TecMec Formula Libre car, and now it had altered yet again with the Ferrari sports car bodywork. Coppins raced the TecMec with some success against similar hybrid sports cars like a Corvette-engined Ferrari Monza, but he eventually converted it back to a single-seater and in this form he was involved in a bad crash on the Pukekohe track and the wreck of the car was sold.
But don't go away. The tale is still being told. The battered chassis was bought by two enthusiasts living near Christchurch in New Zealand, Bill Clark (who also owns the P3 Alfa Romeo driven by Nuvolari to win the 1935 German Grand Prix) and Leon Witte. Both collectors were aware of the mother lode in historic racing cars that had been suddenly uncovered in New Zealand where the cars had gravitated like elephants to a final resting place, and Witte had snapped up the "Piccolo" when Prescott finally offered it for sale. Witte was aware that underneath its El Salvador paintwork and nostrilled nose, the so-called Piccolo really had royal parentage having started out as the Bira car. He was unaware of the backstreet orgy that had taken place in Modena when the pedigreed 2504 chassis was defiled and the bastardised Piccolo and the TecMec had emerged. He knew only that his car carried chassis plate 2504 and he advertised it as being the car originally owned and raced by Bira. Cameron Millar, self-confessed Maserati "Fiend" and owner of several 250Fs plus mountains of spares and original factory chassis jigs in England, bought the car "mail order - only to find after some judicious probings that the welded-on chassis plate covered the original Maserati stamp with a rosette either end of the number, and the number - in the flowing Italian style that could only denote an original - was 2523, not 2504. Millar was outraged and Witte perplexed. Fate decreed that the TecMec chassis eventually found its way to Witte's workshop and it soon became obvious that here, indeed, was the original 2504. Witte advertised the "ex-Bira 250F" again and Millar is negotiating to buy it from him again, so in a strange sort of way honour has been satisfied.
The 20-year tale of 2504 has all the intrigue of a Clifford Irving plot wrapped around in a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan cloak of noisy unreality with situations so bizarre that they couldn't possibly happen. The fact that they kept happening only makes them more unbelievable....
This article first appeared in the November 1973 issue of Trident
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