Greetings and (Maserati) photos from Thierry Dehaeck's museum in Ypres..

Hi Art, we visited Thierry's collection this morning and had a wonderful dinner with him last night! Always special to see the unique selection he assembled through the years.

I supplied him the Bertone QPII and the Ligier Maserati JS2.

 

Hello Art...

Thank you for sharing this with us !!! What a wonderful collection !!!! I love them all...

Mike

 

What treat for those of us who can't get over to visit the museum to have these pictures shared. Thanks for posting them.

 

Hello Art,

also a Thank you from me for those pictures.
Really wonderful collection and very nice Building inside

Zdenek

 

Neat stuff ty!

 

WOW! What great presentation of a stunning collection! Thanks for sharing!

 

Wow! Never heard of it.

 

To complete Art's post as per his request the Ligier JS2 is as much of a gem as it is unknown.

Another car that was prematurely killed by the energy crisis.

Guy Ligier wanted to do a very lightweight die hard sports car with great handling and he gave the mission to future F1 engineer Michel Tetu.
The chassis is polyurethane foam sandwiched between sheets of steel. Tetu would point out that is not exactly the right way to put it but close enough.
The engine is the 2.7 Maserati V6 as used in SM's in the early JS2's. later cars had the 3 litre.

The treasure is the suspension and here Tetu could take to school all the current "Zuperkar" manufacturers with their ridiculously restricted suspension movement.

The JS2 was made for flat out driving on twisty back roads as we have in France and Europe. So he chose very extensive suspension movement with very precise bound rebound control.

The benefit; stability even over bumps, dips potholes, camber changes, brows, hollows etc. I drove two of them and absolutely love it. Modern supercars of the last 30 years will easily bottom out, lose grip, spin and crash on such roads, happens all the time. the JS2 just flies with regal ease!

Then there is the weight. While an SM weights more of less 1500kilos and a Merak (with the same engine) 1400, there was always a great mystery about the weight of the JS2 with all kinds of numbers online and in books.

So when I inspected the car in these photos at Ligier in Magny Cours, where it had been owned by the CEO of Ligier Jacques Nicolet, I had it weighted in the new sports prototype factory.
This took place with corner weight gauges as used on racing cars: one electronic gauge under each wheel. 1069 kilos only! It had about a third of a tank of fuel.
60%/40% rear front weight bias.
It has a very neat way to check the oil level, an item Tetu saw at the London racing car show: a button you pull in the cockpit and depending on how much lenght of it you can pull it tells you your oil level (photo).

Only 82 were made, about half remain; many were trashed and crashed by zero maintenance wrong type of owners in the 80's. Of the 40 about 20 are running the rest are restoration projects.

I sold three from France; this one to Thierry in Ieper/Ypres Belgium, a series 2 covered headlight car to a friend in Silicon valley (the only one in the US apart of perhaps a racing JS2) who was traveling with me last week and very interested to see this one and a blue one we saw the day before. I also sold a race car to Italy.

They very rarely come to market, I know an elderly man an hour from me who would sell his.

Alas when the energy crisis happened Guy Ligier abruptly turned his back on JS2 production and his clients. He was a hard bastard who never let me interview him for my main book a dozen years ago even when F1 drivers Laffite and Jabouille asked him for me. He then started his F1 team when he had a golden opportunity. It all happened very quickly. As an aside he assembled the last few hundred Citroen SM's in a deal with Citroen.

For those who want to know more on JS2's, apart of my book I wrote the most comprehensive article (of very few) in the English speaking press in Octane magazine a few years ago, in the issue shown below, #220, October 2021, which can be found by digging online.

Gerard Larousse won the Tour Auto outright in a Group 4 one beating factory supported Porsches, Panteras, Daytonas etc etc (he would have won another year too but for a tiny part failure).

That speaks volumes about how good a car is it right there.



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Great post Marc. In a perfect world, Guy would have produced 500 examples so it could compete in the category as intended, 3L (GT3.0 I believe) production cars, directly against the 911. Competing in the prototype category made no sense.

I believe Guy Ligier was involved in highway construction in France as well, and a large number of the JS2s he completed went to his buddies, other highway constructors themselves.

 

Thanks John.

He was buddy with a certain Francois Miterrand, "la grosse mitte" future socialist president of France, destroyer of this country, and there was a lot of under the table money, much of it for preferential deals for road construction companies contracts. The Magny Cours circuit is a prime example, in the early 1990's it got entirely rebuilt from being a small provincial track to an international GP track...the day of the inauguration Rene Arnoux demonstrated a Ligier F1 in front of Ligier and Miterrand...who then showed up for each F1 GP...his successors, Chirac, Sarkozy never set foot there because it was corrupt ground...

 

It is often written like that but the truth is that he was in financial agony. His public works company was in disarray because of the change in the procedure for calls for tenders for public contracts.

Citroën (Michelin) which stopped the assembly of the SM in Javel to move and sell the site therefore "bought Ligier Automobiles" (taking a majority stake) and entrusted its governance to Maserati as for the technical responsibility of the SM. Guy Ligier was no longer the boss.



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Hahah the new tender procedure was probably implemented specifically to prevent brown envelopes discreetly changing hands with the likes of him;-)!

It was very messy at the end...Ligier was briefly a Maserati dealer, for about 3 months! He did sell a Khamsin, AM120-124, I have a scan of the order. It is is now with a friend of mine near Paris.

Ligier also assembled the last Monicas, the French four door luxury car with a US V8 and...electric door handles (wait till your battery dies;-))

Funny to see socialist Mitterrand in a "luxury car" in your photo but after all a lot of his acolytes were called la gauche caviar (the caviar left), hypocrits such as Laurent Fabius a prime minister in the mid eighties who had a...Ferrari 400!
Of course the right wing media had a lot of fun making him feel uncomfortable so he was asked to get rid of the car and organized a counter publicity stunt where he arrived
at work in front of assembled media in a...Citroen 2CV
Ferrari France said that due to the controversy they would never sell a car to a leftist politician again.

I once about 15 years ago visited a collector in an eastern suburb of Paris to inspect a Quattroporte II, chassis 032 that had sat in a middle east desert. His chauffeur picked me up at the metro in a Citroen C6, The man was dressed like an English country squire, he had numerous classics there...it turned out he was Ivan Ginioux...the printer of Mitterrand...

Small world I sold that same car last year...

 

He rode a lot in SM, notably in that of his friend ? and advisor François de Grossouvre with whom he traveled all across France on the occasion of the 1974 election...

 

Thank you for the pictures and descriptions! My wife and I go to Europe every year and I definitely want to see the Museum.

I loooove the SM, used to ride in one when I was a teenager. What an automobile!

 

Poor Grossouvre...I read a book about him just because my father had it and I was short of reading material. I saw him once in 1998 at the next table at a restaurant near the Plaza Athenee, dressed in a very elegant suit, he had this 19th century style beard, was with one of the most beautiful glamorous brunettes I ever saw...He had devoted much of his career to supporting Mitterrand even hosting his mistress and secret daughter at his chateau numerous times...only for Mitterrand to progressively ostracize him to the point that Grossouvre shot himself in the Elysee Presidential palace in 1994...to embarrass Mitterrand...who then imposed his unwelcome presence at the funeral. "Only" one of three suicides under Mitterrand's rule.

Anyway back to SM's: President Georges Pompidou gave one in 1971 as a gift to Russian President Leonid Brejnev....who then took it for a drive in the middle of Paris and had a mild collision. The other driver did understandably not initially believe who he was...!

Even more on topic Thierry Dehaeck very kindly lent me and a California collector friend an SM for the Chantily touring rally saturday a week ago, in bright sunshine.

We were four people in the car, joined a Pebble Beach judge & author as well as a friends girlfriend, a hilarious girl, a fun atmosphere! Her boyfriend drove a Bugatti 35 with its owner, they tagged along, it was fun to see it run. I drove all day and it was a pleasure to experience an SM again on beautiful back roads, I was amazed at how little traffic there was barely an hour north of Paris. We all did a lap of the Mortefontaine UTAC (homologation) test track which curves and winds up and downhill through a forest. There is a banked oval there but we did not go on that. All along I was following Thierry in his one of two built Quattroporte II by Frua.
The SM was incredibly comfortable and at ease in all road conditions. The only thing is that it does not have a lot of torque and Thierry had a big very torquey Maser V8 at hand so I was struggling to keep up not in curves but on straights as he drives quite fast so I was tapping the steering wheel as if egging on a horse which caused the girl to laugh every time! The organizers had planned lunch at a polo filed so we could watch some of that beautiful game while enjoying a feast, then after washing the cars it was back to Chantilly. A wonderful day. The next day this SM won best in class in post war preservation and the Frua QPII got the top award the "Haute Couture" Maserati – Special Coachwork models, a good day for Thierry!

Below some photos including two by a friend who caught us as we arrived at Chantily at the end of the day.



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Wow, what a nice gesture from Mr. Dehaeck and what a special day for you! Thank you for sharing and for the pictures.

The SM (European version) is on my bucket list, this car makes me happy and feeling special, remembering my youth too… (design, many great innovations, the dashboard, comfort, …)