Mr. Gagarin did you also own a Maserati Mistral 3.7 Spyder during the same period?
Sunday New York Times, April 11, 1971. Mr. Gagarin is this your ad? Sunroof? Image Unavailable, Please Login
No sunroof and ask is quite high to have settled at 5k selling price so I think we can rule this one out.
Great picture!! Looking at that picture shows exactly why I thought it was 3 four barrel carbs. Any normal American person who would think that. Four barrel Webers were the hot item at the time and I had never heard of a car having 6 2 barrel carbs. It never would have occurred to me that it was 6 two barrels. Also I count holes for 17 studs which all had acorn nuts. That matches my memory of a mass of acorn nuts. In addition, the acorn nuts are right next to the throats of the carbs which makes it easy to see why I dropped one down one the throats. At that point I put it back together and never looked further. I'm now 99% sure that it had six carbs.
Not my ad although I advertised in the Sundays Times. I thought the car had 3 4 barrel Webers so that is what the ad would have said if it mentioned carbs. I asked $5000 in the ad. The ad ran for about two months. I only had two inquiries and the second one bought it.
The phone number in the ad would have been 203-259-7332. The car sold when the weather was still nice out. Andrew Gagarin
When I went to have the muffler installed there was really no one in the dealership. Maybe one salesman and the two mechanics that worked on the car. I looked to see if Mr Chinetti was there because I had met him around 1955 when I was at the Geneva Auto Show with my parents. He took us out for a hair raising drive around Geneva in a Ferrari of some sort but I was too young to know what.
Correct. I identified the owner who ran this ad, he was a really interesting man. He lived in the same area as Mr. Gagarin contemporaneously. Two alloy 275 6c cars in the same neighborhood at the same time, you would think that their paths must have crossed at some point?
I might have known him but not that he had 275 GTB. When I saw the number, Briggs Cunningham came to mind. He lived in the area and would have had a 203-259- number. I knew his daughter, but never met him. If you still know the name, if it doesn't violate privacy concerns could you PM me? To add a little context to the time period and the state of knowledge. When I was purchasing the car, Viviano Corradini had very little knowledge about the car. I asked some basic questions and he didn't know the answers. I asked if I could speak with a mechanic who would know about the car. He arranged for a mechanic to meet me at his garage but the mechanic only spoke Italian so he found a technical translator to come too. I remember paying the translator $50. The translator was a woman who didn't know cars which made it more difficult. I don't remember what questions I asked, but I really knew very little so they wouldn't have been too complicated. Probably things like were do you add oil? I didn't know what a torque tube was so I wouldn't have asked. Very little information about anything was available. The only knowledge I had about cars came from Car and Driver and Road and Track. That was all that was available. I don't think I had ever heard of a 275 GTB before I saw one at Corradin's shop. To make matters worse, I was in the Navy from 1966 to 1969 and at sea for a good part of the time. No information was available. I arrived at Corradinis wanting a Ferrari, but that was about it. Hard to believe in this age of information.
Unrestored 275 GTB seats with cloth in the center. A very early car, owned by same man since more than 45 years. Marcel Massini Image Unavailable, Please Login
^ fantastic original condition. very sharp design. love that style of steering wheel. possibly owned by a doctor based on the insignia on the glove box door?
It turns out the owner was a best friend of my father. Unfortunately owning Ferraris long ago never came up.