1955 Maserati 300S

This was one of the competitors in the Coys Race for Pre-1959 Drum Brake Sports Cars at the Gold Cup meeting at Oulton Park in August 2002.

It's the 1955 Maserati 300S of Rodney Smith, chassis #3060, and was driven in the race by Mark Gillies. The Maserati 300S has a 6-cylinder engine based on the 2½ litre unit of the 250F Grand Prix car with a lengthened stroke to bring the capacity up to 2,991cc. The car's first major race was the 1956 Sebring 12 Hour race where it was driven by Cesare Perdisa and Carlos Menditéguy, but Menditéguy crashed and overturned the car during the race. The car was then badly damaged when the trailer retrieving it was hit by a truck. The rebuild wasn't completed till 1957, but on its return to Sebring in 1959 the car was once again badly damaged in Edwin Lawrence's fatal accident during practice. It was rebuilt yet again with a fibreglass body, and later a 3.9 litre Chevrolet V8 engine was installed.  The car was fully restored to its current form in the early 1990s. The car number 18 in the background is the 1958 Cooper T45 of Anthony Ditheridge which took part in the HGPCA Pre-1966 Grand Prix Cars race.

1959 BRM P25

This car competed in the Flockhart Trophy Race for pre-1961 Front-Engined Racing Cars at the Vintage Sports Car Club's SeeRed meeting at Donington Park in May 2011.

It's Anthony Ditheridge's 1959 BRM P25, although the programme of the event shows it as number 140. BRM’s in-period Project 25 classification covered the engine design alone, the spaceframe chassis structure comprising Project 27. This car is he ninth of the team’s 2½-litre 4-cylinder Type 25s to be built and was the fourth to use the `1958 spaceframe Project 27 chassis in place of an original semi-monocoque design which had been used for the preceding five cars. Those semi-monocoque BRM Type 25s built from 1955 to 1957 are recorded within the team archive as cars ‘251’ to ‘255’. The subsequent six pure spaceframe cars built 1958-1959 were then referred to as ‘256’ to ‘2511’, even though their Project 27 chassis frames were numbered in sequence ‘27/1’ to ‘27/6’. Hence, this car was referred to in contemporary BRM team records – which survive today – as ‘259’, while its specific chassis frame stamping reads – again perfectly correctly – ‘27/4’. The P25 was said to be the fastest of the 1954-1960 Formula 1 era, partly due to the oversquare (102.87 mm bore x 74.93 mm stroke) engine allowing for larger valves to be fitted. The car was plagued with reliability problems, however, and the only Grand Prix win was Jo Bonnier's victory in the 1959 Dutch Grand Prix in chassis 258.

The car behind the BRM is the 1956 Willment Climax of Barry Cannell which took part in the 1950s Sports Racing Cars race, and has a 4-cylinder inline 1,963cc Climax FPF engine.

Cooper Monaco

I took this photograph at the Historic Grand Prix Cars Association's Donington International Grand Prix meeting in May 2004.

Both cars belong to Anthony Ditheridge, and number 20 is a 1959 Cooper Monaco T49 which the programme of the event says has a 1960cc engine. The car was named the 'Monaco' by Charles and John Cooper after Jack Brabham's victory in the 1959 Monaco Grand Prix. Car number 8 is a 1958 Cooper T45, also with a 1960cc engine according to the programme. The T45 was developed for Formula 2 racing and  it would have originally had a 1½ litre engine.