Friday's Ferrari

This is a car photographed in the pit garage at the Coys International Historic Festival meeting at Silverstone in July 1997.

It's a 1953 Ferrari 250MM Spyder Vignale SeriesIII, owned at the time by Mario Bernardi and driven by him in the Shell Ferrari Historical Challenge race at the meeting. It's serial number is 0390MM, and is a car I have featured before which was previously owned by Jeremy Agace, although it was then painted black.

Lotus 12

The photograph below is of Roger Friend in a 1957 Lotus 12 rounding Lodge Corner at Oulton Park in the Twelve Lap Scratch Race for Post War Racing Cars at the VSCC meeting in August 1996.

The Lotus 12 was the first single-seater racing car built by Colin Chapman and it was used as a Formula 2 and also a Formula 1 car. It was a largely unsuccessful car, although in the 1958 Belgian Grand Prix Cliff Allison, who finished in fourth place in a Lotus 12, might have won the race had it been one lap longer. The winner was Tony Brooks in a Vanwall, but his gearbox seized as he crossed the line. Mike Hawthorn was second in a Ferrari, but his engine failed as he came out of La Source corner and he coasted across the line. In third place was Stuart Lewis-Evans in another Vanwall, but his suspension collapsed on the way into La Source and he managed to crawl across the line, so Cliff Allison finished fourth, over 4 minutes behind the winner.

Fittipaldi

Here's another car which took part in the Thoroughbred Grand Prix Championship race at the SeeRed meeting at Donington Park in September 2006.

It's a Fittipaldi F5A, entered in the race by MEC Auto and driven by Steve Allen. Fittipaldi Automotive was formed in 1974 by Brazilian Wilson Fittipaldi and his younger brother Emerson, winner of the 1972 World Drivers' Championship. Emerson drove for the Fittipaldi team from 1976 to 1980; the F5A is a modification of the 1977 F5 and is the car which the team used in 1978 and part of 1979. This is what Wikipedia says about the F5A:

'While it was not a great success in 1977, in 1978 the F5A, modified to implement the principles of ground effect demonstrated to excellent effect by Lotus, allowed the former World Champion to score several good results. The best of these was a competitive second place, after fighting with Mario Andretti and Gilles Villeneuve, at the team's perennial happy hunting ground in Brazil. Fittipaldi finished the year with 17 points and the team, now known as Fittipaldi Automotive, came 7th in the Constructor's table – one place ahead of Emerson's old team McLaren.

The 1979 season saw the promise of the previous year fade away. Implementing ground effect successfully was becoming crucial to success on the track but understanding of the phenomenon was in its infancy and Ralph Bellamy's F6 was a failure on the track. Fittipaldi was again the team's only driver, although Alex Ribeiro was run in the non-championship race which inaugurated the Imola circuit that year, before attempting and failing to qualify a car for the end of season North American championship races.'

Friday's Ferrari

I showed photographs of the Ferrari 250GT TdF on 25 May 2012 and here's another photograph of one taken at the Coys International Historic Festival meeting at Silverstone in July 1993.

It doesn't appear to have taken part in any of the races at that meeting, but the registration number here appears to be TDF 266 which belongs to the car with serial number 0911GT and the owner was Reza Rashidian.

BRM P48

The first BRM was introduced to the public in December 1949, and to mark the 50th anniversary of this there was a special tribute to BRM at the Coys International Historic Festival at Silverstone in July 1999. It featured a display of various BRM models, one of which was the largely unsuccessful P48.

In 1959 it had become clear with the ascendancy of the rear-engined Cooper Climax in F1 that the days of front-engined GP cars was coming to a close and BRM tried to do a 'quick fix' with the P48 which was basically the existing P25 with the engine moved from the front to the rear. The car was a bit of a disaster, the three team drivers (Joakim Bonnier, Graham Hill and Dan Gurney) only managing eight World Championship points all season with a third place for Hill and two fifth places for Bonnier whilst Gurney's best was a single tenth place. Things weren't much better the next season with the P48/57, but in 1962 Graham Hill won the World Championship with the BRM P57.

One of the team's better races with this car was the 1960 Gold Cup at Oulton Park where the three P48s finished in third, fifth and sixth places. The photograph below is one I took of Graham Hill's third-place car in the paddock being driven by, I think, the BRM designer Tony Rudd.

Airbus A340 at 34,000 feet

This is a photograph I took on 11 August 2014 at 2.12pm of an Air France Airbus A340-313X flying over Hyde on its way from Paris to Montreal.

This is the original photograph with the zoom set at its maximum of 300mm and below I've cropped the picture so that the plane can be seen more clearly.

It was Air France flight AF344 travelling at 34,000 feet and the registration number of the plane was F-GLZO. There were no contrails, making the aircraft a bit more difficult to pick out at that height.

Friday's Ferrari

This car took part in the Royal Automobile Club Tourist Trophy for Historic Cars race at the Silverstone Classic meeting in July 2010 and is here seen in the pit garage.

It was shown in the programme of the meeting as a 1962 Ferrari 330 GTO and the owner Carlo Vögele shared the driving in the 1 hour race with Willie Green. The car's serial number is 4561SA and I've featured it before, with a photograph from a 2003 Donington Park event, on 9th May 2014. This car is classed by www.barchetta.cc as a Ferrari 330 LM and says that six cars were produced, two with GTO style bodywork and four with Pininfarina bodywork similar to the 250 Lusso. The information I gave previously was that it was a 330 GTO (or 330 LM) and that three cars were produced and that information came from a www.supercars.net website which only covered the cars with the GTO style bodywork and says that the first car built (3673SA) was badly damaged before the second car (3765LM) was built, and subsequently:

'At the request of Michel Paul-Cavalier, a third and final 330 GTO on chassis 4561SA was built to his own specification for road use. This included a lengthened wheel base, brake booster, fully covered front lights and a full interior trim in blue upholstery. Despite being made for the road the car featured a full Tipo 163/566 competition engine and Tipo 539/566 chassis but a unique transmission with synchromesh gears.'

So the car in this photograph is the third to be built, but the first car no longer exists as such. It was rebuilt, as www.barchetta.cc says, and is now classed as a 400 Scaglietti Berlinetta GT SWB.