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

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

Discussion in 'Maserati' started by 71Satisfaction, Sep 17, 2024.

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  1. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

    Jul 15, 2012
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    I feel fortunate and grateful for the time and energy Thierry shared with us when we visited his museum in Ypres last week. Truly a gentleman.
    Here are some pictures of his Maseratis.. some of the details escape me, Thierry spend three hours with us discussing each car as we went through the collection..

    Here is the 1971 Citroen SM Espace, one of two built, by coachbuilder Heuliez, probably the most unique car of his collection. It has a patented "lamella" retractable T-top style roof system.. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
     
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  2. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

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    Here are his two Quattroportes IIs

    The dark teal QPII Frua Quattroporte II with Maserati V8 and drivetrain that didn't go into production because Citroen ordered it off the Maserati lineup.
    .. I don't recall further specific details on this car.

    The silver Bertone QPII was built on a stretched Citroen SM platform with a 3.0L Merak SS engine. It did go into limited production of 13 cars. This particular car is the first pre-production car, the Press Pack photo car, was displayed at Paris, Turin, Brussels, Amsterdam and Barcelona motor shows and sold to a private owner in Spain. Thierry is the third owner.


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  3. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

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    Other Maseratis..

    1962 3500GT Vignale Spyder.. Thierry had it completely restored by Automobile Tricolore from barn-find condition.
    1969 Ghibli Spyder.. Thierry is its third owner, very original and unmolested, with its hardtop.
    1972 Ghibli SS.. Thierry is its third private owner, thoroughly restored.
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  4. Nembo1777

    Nembo1777 F1 World Champ

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    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.
     
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  5. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

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    My Norwegian Maserati Club friends were there today too, on their way home from MIR Austria.

    .. here are a couple more coachbuilt Maserati-V6-powered Citroen SMs were prominently displayed..
    1973 or 1972 depending on what you read, Citroen SM 'Opera' four-door by Chapron.. 7 were built.
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  6. Mexico074

    Mexico074 Formula 3

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    Hello Art...

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

    Mike
     
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  7. emsiegel13

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    What treat for those of us who can't get over to visit the museum to have these pictures shared. Thanks for posting them.
     
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  8. Astonish78

    Astonish78 Karting

    Sep 11, 2014
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    Hello Art,

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

    Zdenek
     
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  9. Ferraripilot

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    John!
    Neat stuff ty!
     
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  10. redfred84

    redfred84 Formula Junior

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    WOW! What great presentation of a stunning collection! Thanks for sharing!
     
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  11. 67bmer

    67bmer F1 Rookie
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    Wow! Never heard of it.
     
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  12. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

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    #14 71Satisfaction, Sep 19, 2024
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2024
    Thierry's collection is in Ypres, Belgium - I think they spell it differently there - and can be viewed by appointment.. and for a fee.

    Thierry is passionate about cars in general, having nurtured his many business trips to the US and casual purchases of Cadillacs into an import business called 'Cady Cars' importing Cadillacs and other cars from the US to Belgium. In recent time, he merged his Cady Cars business with Mistral Classics, a maintenance and restoration and sales shop for classic cars, all in the same complex.

    The cars in his collection have an emphasis on being originally bought in Belgium, plus the most pristine unrestored or low-mileage examples he can find.
    Always an entrepreneur, he publishes and sells a high-quality catalog covering the collection. It is available on Amazon, very nicely laid out, very detailed, but missing some recent purchases such as the Frua QPII.

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  13. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

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    The very pretty 1972 Ligier JS2 is also worth showing you..
    Powered by a 3.0L Maserati V6, rear-engined, with the Citroen SM transaxle. Comfortable to sit in, it had reasonable racing success in its class, but only 82 made, of which 21 are known to remain. Marc wrote the chapter on this in Thierry's catalog, he can probably give more detail than I could recall.
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  14. Nembo1777

    Nembo1777 F1 World Champ

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    #16 Nembo1777, Sep 19, 2024
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2024
    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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  15. Ferraripilot

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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.
     
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  16. Nembo1777

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    #18 Nembo1777, Sep 20, 2024
    Last edited: Sep 20, 2024
    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...
     
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  17. SMarc

    SMarc Karting

    Mar 21, 2016
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    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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  18. Nembo1777

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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:D.

    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...
     
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  19. SMarc

    SMarc Karting

    Mar 21, 2016
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    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...
     
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  20. Sunshine1

    Sunshine1 Two Time F1 World Champ
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    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!
     
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  21. Nembo1777

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    #23 Nembo1777, Sep 22, 2024
    Last edited: Sep 22, 2024
    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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  22. Sunshine1

    Sunshine1 Two Time F1 World Champ
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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, …)
     
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  23. 71Satisfaction

    71Satisfaction Formula 3

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    The two collections - Thierry and Philippe's - are within an hour drive of each other.. which we found absolutely astounding when you think about the odds of that. The two collections make a fantastic comparison too, the cars are so individual.
    Both gentlemen were very gracious with their time and knowledge,
    - Art
     
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