Page 131 - Bespoke Issue

The rst thing I ask Mike is, who is behind the cars? The owner? Whose dream was this to recreate the Ferrari 156 Sharknose of 1961. “The rst Sharknose was commissioned by Belgian Jan Biekens through the Jim Stokes Workshop. Since then, the new American owner Jason Wright has engaged Setford, most of our team worked on the rst recreation at JWS, and over the last three years we have rebuilt the 65 degree V6 engined car and completed the second car which is based around a genuine Carlo Chiti period 120 degree V6 engine and gearbox”.
“Since Jason Wright has always liked the look of these particular racing Ferraris, after seeing the yellow car, he thought that now someone has done
that as a project there was probably no chance of following up on that and assumed Jan would keep the car for quite some considerable time”.
“When Jan decided to sell the car our customer Jason jumped at the chance to pick it up. Though there were certain aspects Jason had with the way the yellow car had been built- he wasn’t quite happy with the body shape and the fact the yellow car had been built for racing speci cally, all the welding on the chassis was made by tig welding which is not period correct, and the whole point of the exercise this time round was to make the cars as period correct as possible. The original bodywork on the yellow car was done with an English wheel, so when you open the panels where there is no paint
on the inside you could see all the marks from the wheeling and further more when you looked at the chassis you could see all the joints were clinically clean from the tig welding, so in his mind it looked like a one to one scaled model kit.
There was no feeling to it as such-so when he purchased the car it was always with a view of doing something different with it. So we took the mechanical parts we were happy with, which was the original engine and the original transmission and the various other mechanical parts that we had made from the original build and reconstructed those into a new gas welded chassis as they would have done in period. Then we had all the bodywork by Roach Coachworks who use more traditional
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