Page 132 - Bespoke Issue

The gearboxes aren’t as easy to identify but the engine is. The second car by, total coincidence, when we were building the yellow car and the 1500, the original engine, the 65 degree one turned up and we were just happy to have an original engine, we never really bothered to research the engines numbers, the customer just wanted to build the yellow Spa car and we wanted an original engine so the two got put together and we built the car and that is as it went.
Then when we were researching the engine for the Hill car we thought we should do the research on the engine number on the other (yellow) car and do it properly. It then actually turns out that it was from the Rodriguez car from Monza 1961 as well ! So we had built two Monza 1961 speci cation cars, with both their original engines, in which this really is a uke as it wasn’t engineered like that, it’s just how it turned out.
The 1961 Hill car is an important piece of history with various minor aspects of the bodywork being Monza speci c, the cars have extra intakes on the noses, they are two little scoops, the earlier cars had a pop up panel to give the driver some air into the cockpit, but they (Ferrari) had taken that off and put a scoop on there instead, and then to get a little more air into the radiator they put another scoop further down on the nose, and these are Monza characteristics.
Other features faithfully recreated are the nely detailed hand painted Scuderia Ferrari shields and the race numbers to the PROVA inscription so they could be driven on the local roads.”
“For mine and a technical point of view the carburetors were a bit of a challenge” says Mike. ‘Mainly because they ae a triple choke Weber, which the same designation that was used on some later Lamborghinis and Porches, but although its the same designation, the con guration is slightly different, its a modern take on the same thing but using the same number. We didn’t have any carburetors which was a problem, but we wanted to be totally correct. Luckily we were able to borrow a car, a 1963 fuel injected F1 racing car from the Schlumpf collection.
They were happy for us to take the car, take off the carbs, measure everything, take the components of that and measure inside, then we replicated brand new carbs, having the originals digitally scanned, produced moulds, cast them and then machined them. Then we tracked down what parts are common to modern Weber parts still available..... after that was exhausted, everything else needed we had to make.”
“Derek Hill knew the customer who the cars were built for, Jason Wright. They started talking about the project, keeping in touch along the build. As the cars got closer to running for the rst time who else would you want to sit in the drivers seat but the great Phil Hill’s son!”
So during a special party celebrating the completion of these iconic Italion stallions of the early sixties F1 scene, guests were privileged to hear these cars roar reverberate around the hills surrounding Daniel Setfords workshop were these to iconic racers have been born again.
Guests included Derek Hill and Chris Rea whose fascination all things Ferrari and especially as mentioned earlier Wolfgang von Trips started this rebirth of a long lost legend as far back as 1996.
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