Maserati Days
By G. Cancellieri
Maserati – the name brings to mind blood-red cars, high revving precision engines and fast moving pieces of art.
“Maserati Days” is a wonderfully produced book dedicated to the Maserati racing program. This book is filled with over 200 period photos of Maserati’s finest cars – Formula 1 and 2 sports and sports racing cars as they perform throughout the world. They are seen on tracks such as Monza, Silverstone and Nurburgring. Some of my favourite shots are of the A6GCS climbing through the Pyrenees on the Tour de France and the 300S or Type 61 Bird Cage blasting around tracks in Europe.
Cancellieri starts by giving a brief history of Maserati’s conception and racing debut. The book is then divided into chapters dedicated to the many milestone achievements that this great company has had. Maserati, like its great rival Ferrari, had nothing but the greatest drivers wanting to race for them – Nuvolari, Ascari, Fangio, Moss, Bira, Behra and many others.
The reader can start to understand this golden age of racing as they view the large black-and-white photos and see the outrageous conditions these great cars and drivers had to overcome. (Cancellieri’s captions and text are brief and well written in three languages – French, English and Italian).
The tracks, with their ever-changing road surfaces and banked turns, had only hay bales keeping the cars from the spectators. The road courses, with their tree-lined, rough dirt roads and mountainous single-lane passes, and nothing but small stone walls between them and a drop-off of over one hundred feet.
These photos tell the true story of the day and what the cars and people of the time really looked like. There were no safety regulations to speak of; no pampered drivers and no special treatment. The cars were driven hard and often punished by a driver to win, and win they did, surviving to run another day. That’s what made them Maserati’s. If you love Italian race cars (and who doesn’t), you’ll love this book. Sure to be a collectors item, I give it a four-star rating and highly recommend it.
