More Old Photos

Wayne Sparling was an incredibly talented mechanic and fabricator who worked with NART during that time period. We became firends in the early 1990s while he and Chinetti Jr. were litigating over the ownership of several cars.

 

Here are two Wayne Sparling photos. First is with the NART 312P at Daytona. Wayne is fiddling with the Drivers door. My teacher and Mentor, Nereo Iori standing nereby.
The second is Wayne's 275 LM at Sebring SVRA races in 1985. Wayne built the car from the ground up. I was able to help him locate several parts for the project. His Screen name on FCHAT was "Ditchdigger"
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I stand corrected, yes you are right. I believe it’s the Dan Gurney drove. Notice the elevated roof panel.
I have a collection of Wayne and Iori working on the 312P and somehow this photo was misfiled, good catch

 

It's almost unfathomable to state but when Luigi Chinetti Motors was served with eviction papers for the premises at 600 W Putman there was a literally a pile of parts, chassis and bodies next to the trash dumpster. Many of these items were shipped to Wayne's shop in Florida. They were in various states of disrepair and of little value in 1978.
The Bardhal Special was hauled off to the recycling center where Iori and I recovered it. Wayne started from a chassis and reconstructed the 275 to the state shown in the photo. Ten years after receiving everything with the values high Chinetti Jr., who inherited everything when his mother passed, went to reclaim everything shipped to Florida. A lengthy legal battle ensued and Wayne lost most of, if not all of, the cars. He became a recluse.
His son Ron was a mechanic at Shelton Sports cars at one point and may know where certain cars went. Wayne visisted my shop in the late 1990s where I had a Comp Daytona in for work and crawled underneath it to look for a chassis repair he had done trackside many years before and found it. He was happy to see the car again.