The great imitation
Whatever the 1923 Italian term was for, ‘On your bike, son,’ 25-year-old Enzo Ferrari surely uttered it as the carabiniere walked away empty-handed. The officer had arrived at Alfa Romeo’s…
While the British teams gnashed their teeth over the regulation change, Ferrari made hay with Carlo Chiti’s V6 that had evolved out of Formula 2 since 1957. Its spaceframe chassis was conventional, but that striking twin-nostril nose, the neat mid-engine layout and Enzo Ferrari’s unfortunate insistence that all 156s should be broken up once they became obsolete has guaranteed the Sharknose a special place in the illustrious halls of Ferrari F1 history. That my father became America’s first F1 world champion in the car gives me a unique and personal connection to it.
In September 2019, I had a chance to drive Jason Wright’s wonderful replica at Reims and Zandvoort for a documentary I have been making about my father since 2009, a year after his death. The tests and film shoots amounted to the most momentum I’d ever had with the project. I even had a production company and a big distribution company in New York working with me, and I thought it was really going to happen now. Then the pandemic hit and I just put it aside because I had other things that I needed to do.
Phil Hill racing at the 1962 British GP, at Aintree; a poor season for Ferrari