My 4th Ferrari, the 275 GTB/4

The Ultimate Road Machine

When I went bankrupt in 1983, I had to give up my prized Ferrari 275GTB
(mentioned in this forum, at this post: http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showpost.php?p=137812782&postcount=1).

For the next 9 years my goal was to recapture this prize, to own another Ferrari 275 GTB.
I worked long, long hours in front of my computer screen, on top of which was a model of this great car.
It was to remind me of my bankruptcy, and that toys should not be bought on credit, and to keep me focused on my goals.

Over those 9 years, I invented a software product for the PC ("TeleMagic" http://www.michaelmccafferty.com/mmmtm.htm)
and slowly but surely built a company from scratch, with no invested capital whatsoever, to sell, support and continue to develop it.
In 1993, after I sold my software company, and I could finally get my Ferrari 275 GTB, but even better than I imagined.

I set out on a search to find the finest example of this model,
and hired an "expert" to help locate the perfect one, which he found in Canada.
I requested that a complete examination of the car be done by qualified mechanics
and word came back that it passed with flying colors, so I arranged to have it purchased and delivered to me in California.
On the way across the border into the USA, it was seized by U.S. Customs and held for many months.
There was some irregularity with the paperwork.
Customs used this excuse to do an exhaustive probe (including some disassembly) for drugs, which resulted in thoroughly messing up the car.
It took me a lot of time and trouble to finally get the car released, and delivered, and even more grief with
the "expert" I hired to help me find the car, and when it finally arrived, it was in such sad shape that
I wanted nothing to do with it anymore as I felt that it was jinxed, so I sold it without further involvement.
That car was my 3rd Ferrari. It was not a happy experience.

Having learned a lesson or two from the experience,
I resolved that this time there would be no long-distance deals,
and that my fantasy car would be already in the USA and that
I would personally inspect it, along with my trusted friend/mechanic Gary Bobileff
who had taken such good care of my 2nd Ferrari (the 275 GTB 2-cam long nose mentioned above).

As luck would have it, the car was only a few miles north of where I lived,
and it was, in a word, perfect, with only 2,900 miles on the clock when I bought it in 1993.
The story was (doesn't every car have a "story"?) that this car had been sitting, apart, in a garage in Augusta Georgia
for the past 20 years, and was just recently sold to a dealer in San Diego, cleaned up, and presented for sale,
and that's when I came along, with a fresh supply of cash, and a severe need for the car.

It came with the standard air cleaner, but I was smitten with the idea of dressing up the engine
with velocity stacks, which Gary B. arranged to supply and install.

The car cost $325,000 plus tax and license, 15 times what I had paid for my last one,
but, at the time, the price was irrelevant. It only mattered that I had finally recaptured
my dream machine.

I had it outfitted with "Historic" California license plates,
(which saves a TON of money at annual renewals)
and drove it only on the nicest of days, to special events,
such as the Ferrari Owners Club drives out in the mountains and deserts around San Diego.
I put a total of only 5,000 miles on the Ferrari in 6 years,
but they were among the most memorable miles of my life.
A precious few of those miles were put on during a hill-climb event, up Torrey Pines hill, (San Diego)
at the race associated with the Torrey Pines Concours d'Elegance in 1998(?).
That hill is just a mile south of where I live, and I have raced many cars, many times,
up that hill, day and night, and it is a most extraordinary stretch of road
for anyone with petrol in his veins. It is like having a racetrack in my back yard.

At about the same time, I was fulfilling another one of my long-standing desires: to fly.
Many times I would be racing up Torrey Pines hill, around those long sweeping turns,
and many times I would fantasize how great it would be if I could just keep climbing, and not have to turn,
to just keep going into the sky without end, to make my own roads in the sky,
to do things in the air which can never be done on any road...

So I bought an open-cockpit biplane and started learning how to fly it,
and got so much into adventure flying that I developed the fantasy that
I wanted to have my biplane in my bedroom, along with my Ferrari !!

Of course the difficulty was in finding a place where I could live
that would permit such an outrageous thing as to put an airplane in my bedroom.
Naturally, it required living on an airport, and I found a suitable private airport
50 miles east of San Diego, in the desert community of Borrego Springs, where I located a 3,000 s.f. hangar
and began a multi-year project to build it into a home, with the hangar area
serving as the bedroom, and parking space for the Ferrari (and one other, the Scaglietti Corvette, one of 3 built).
An additional 4-car garage was built to store a few other neat cars
(a Viper GTS, a Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 twin turbo, a '66 Mustang Hi-Perf convertible...).
See the photos for details. I called the place "Mikie's Fun House".

It occurs to me that I may have been one of the few human beings ever
to wake up in the morning with his open-cockpit biplane and his Ferrari in his bedroom.
Was I dreaming, or awake? It was, sometimes, difficult to tell the difference!

In the spring of 1997, when the home was finally finished, I threw a giant party
(attended by a few hundred of "my closest friends" and the San Diego Ferrari Owners' Club).
Click here for photos of the Ferraris at the party, including scantily clad women by the pool,
and a story written by one of the club members.
http://www.michaelmccafferty.com/mmmfoc.htm

A few weeks after the party, I had the biplane shipped over Europe to be displayed at the Paris Air Show,
after which I toured Europe flying this wonderful, beautiful work of art,
for 3 months, flying low and slow through 11 countries.
Needless to say, it was the adventure of a lifetime, which I documented with photos and stories
at this link: http://www.michaelmccafferty.com/adventures/index.htm

When I returned from Europe, I had some time to actually live in the fantasy home I had built,
and I realized that my first love is to live by the sea, not in the desert,
so I moved back to the coast, and sold the biplane after 7 years of adventure flying.
I also sold the Ferrari, because I no longer had unlimited garage space, and
because it was not suitable as a daily driver, especially in SoCal traffic,
and because I had thoroughly scratched that itch I had to regain my Ferrari 275 GTB,
and because I had a thought that, after owning 4 different versions of the 275 GTB over 20 years,
I would like to order from the factory a brand-new Ferrari, the 550 Maranello...

And so, in the fullness of time, another chapter of my life had come to an end,
a chapter highlighted by owning and driving one of the great road machines of all time,
the achingly beautiful, incredible sounding, Ferrari 275 GTB/4.

As Alexander Graham Bell said: "When one door closes, another one opens..."


(to be continued...)
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

 

The 1959 Scaglietti Corvette
Way back in 1959 Carroll Shelby, Jim Hall, and Gary Laughlin decided to build a special car that would challenge the world domination of Ferrari in the racing game. As any car nut knows, Shelby finally did it in 1963 with his Ford powered Cobra. However, his first attempt was with the Chevrolet Corvette based prototype shown here. Shelby never took delivery, never drove the car. By the time it was delivered, he had moved on to other projects.

The body was hand built by Sergio Scaglietti, the same builder of many of Ferrari's most beautiful shapes, including the 275GTBs mentioned herein.

There were only three of these cars made, all are still in existence. It has been featured in several magazines, books and car shows. I exhibited this rare and important automobile at Pebble Beach and Torrey Pines in '98 and the Rodeo Drive Concours in '99.

I bought it in '93, through a broker, from Barry Watkins, who was into building a new Bizzarrini
(http://personal1.iddeo.es/superfuzz/bizzarrini/ubws_bizz_bz2001.htm) at the time. For me the car was as an investment, and I was also thinking I would campaign it as a vintage racer, but the car handled like a truck so I never really drove it except once on the Pebble Beach Tour in 1998. I sold it at the Barrett Jackson auction in January 2000 to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles (http://www.petersen.org/). As an investment, it wasn't that great, but I got out of it without a loss of capital. Cars generally were not good investments for me.

For more information about this car, including complete history and more photos, click here (http://www.michaelmccafferty.com/mmmvette.htm) and read the article "Cobra Concept" that was published in Vette Magazine in 1997.

The photos in this post were taken at Pebble Beach Concours in '98, where I drove the car on the first "Tour" ever held at that event. The green ribbon on the windshield is for participating in the Tour. The car was fitted with straight pipes and made some fierce sounds as it blasted through the winding roads of Monterey. The "Waco Kid" license plate was just a lark. The car was never registered for the road, and the rear deck looked like it could use a plate, so I took it from another car of mine. WacoKid refers to my open-cockpit biplane flying adventures. Waco was the manufacturer, in 1935, of the biplane.

The black and white photo is of one of the other 2 cars built. They were all different. It is quite plain compared to the one I had.

While at Pebble Beach, I met Sergio Scaglietti, who spoke no English, as well as Carroll Shelby and Gary Laughlin, and they were kind enough to add their autographs to the underside of the hood, which I felt was a nice touch for posterity. It was Sergio's first trip abroad. I found him to be a completely natural human being, without the huge ego you might imagine, very pleasant, almost self-effacing. I asked him (through his interpreter) if it was true that he built his early cars without the help of engineering drawings, that he simply formed the metal by hand, with hammer over sandbags, according to his intuition and skill, much in the manner of Michelangelo and his David. He confessed that it was true. That year, Pebble Beach paid him a great honor for his achievements by featuring his beautiful bodies, and that is why my car, among many others (including TRs and GTOs, etc) was invited to be shown. It was there for display only, not to be judged.

I remember reading some of the documentation that came with the car, especially the Italian paperwork such as Scaglietti's invoice for building the body, which, as I remember was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 bucks. Fantastic!

It has been called, in some circles, and in good humor, the Spaghetti Corvette. Mike Vietro (aka "Corvette Mike") in SoCal was very helpful in getting the car prepared for Pebble Beach, and with the ultimate sale at auction. Ten years later he is still a good friend.

More nice photos and story from Vette Magazine at http://www.michaelmccafferty.com/mmmvette.htm

Enjoy!
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I hear that! Especially if her perfume had a nice new-car & petrol aroma, maybe with a hint of surf air, Guinness, and freshly printed cash. Am I missing anything? ;o)

Never had a problem with nasty fumes. I guess the primary reason is because the hangar/bedroom area of the home had a giant 50-foot wide, 16-foot high bifold door, and when I wanted to take the biplane or a car for a ride, the entire door opened and aired the place out completely. Also, there were 4 huge windows in that giant door for ventilation. Another reason is the 20-foot ceiling in the place. There was a ton of airspace in there. (What is that... 60'wide, 20' high, 50' deep = 60,000 cubic feet of air?) Any little bit of fumes gets lost.

Attached are photos of that amazing giant door. The Jaguar in the door photo was my daily driver for 5 years after the 275 GTB/4. Now the driver is a 2006 Corvette convertible, 400hp version. I like the head-up display and the paddle-shift and On-Star, but I'd like to have another Ferrari, one I could drive every day. I think I would spend more time driving if I had a Ferrari.
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I'm unfamiliar with early history for this car. Contact Barry Watkins for more info.
However I do remember something about one of the cars being owned for a long time and driven a lot by an east coast photographer.
Maybe...