Ascari Ferrari – The Lost Years

One spring day in 1961, two boys gazed enraptured through a light post-and-rail fence at a fantastic motor race that was going on only yards from where they stood. The older one, 15-years old, had ridden his bicycle 15-miles to watch this race, and his younger friend well over 10-miles, but it was worth it for the spectacle they were enjoying. Two very different racing cars were duelling for the lead, a thoroughbred Ferrari Tipo 500/625/750 and the remarkable Eldred Norman-built Zephyr Special, an Australian special, based on production parts.

The Ferrari—formerly Alberto Ascari’s favored mount in his championship-winning years of 1952 and 1953 and now, with a three-liter engine—Western Australia’s fastest racing car, was hounding the special. The thunder of the Ferrari was drowned by the cacophony produced by the smaller car—the scream of its Wade supercharger, the staccato bark of its six stub exhausts and the shriek of its overworked brakes as it slowed at the end of the straight.Then the spell was broken as the special’s brakes cried enough, and it disappeared up the escape road in a huge cloud of dust, leaving the Ferrari to thunder home unconquered.