This car, shown at the rainy March 23,
1958 SCCA race event at Stockton airport in Northern California Stockton,
has earned full-scale "Mystery Car" status.
Stu "Dr. Etceterini" Schaller, an expert
on small-bore Italian sports/racers, identified the car as a Cisitalia.
A look at the Cisitalia website (Entrar-Galeria-Pasado-2-6)
shows the "Cisitalia 202 SMM Spyder Nuvolari". The details of that
car and this one match up, except for one thing -- that pesky Maserati
trident in this car's grille!
Here's Stu "Dr. Etceterini" Schaller
on this car:
"I think the car might even be one particular
car, called the Razzo, rather than a "standard" Nuvolari spider.
If you look close, you can see kind of wings at the top of the front wheel
arches, and as far as I am aware, the Razzo was the only Cisitalia spider
that had them. The Razzo
also had cut down doors, but it is impossible to see if the car has
them in the photo shown. Regardless, I am 100% certain that
it is a Cisitalia; you can even see the Cisitalia badge between on the
top of the nose of the car, in front of the hood. The standard
motor would have been 1100cc, but it is certainly possible a 1500 or 2
liter Maserati A6 motor could have been put in the car."
Earlier your webmaster mistakenly identified
this car as perhaps a special-bodied Maserati A6GCS. This error came
about because the Stockton results (From Bob Norton's MotoRacing scans
Vol. 1 "Results") show Chuck Tannlund finishing 6th o.a. and lst in class
E Modified in his Maserati A6GCS.
There's no mention of a Cisitalia anywhere in the March 23, 1958 Stockton
results.
Did someone actually transplant a rare,
fragile, expensive and exotic Maserati A6GCS engine into a super-exotic
one-off Cisitalia Spyder?
Stu and I started a discussion of this
car on the Atlas
F1 "Nostalgia Forum". |