Photography by William Edgar
Collections: Every One’s a Winner
August 1, 2006
One of the fastest cars here is the single-purpose 1997 Ferrari F310B, the Formula One carbon fiber/honeycomb composite open-wheeler that Michael Schumacher drove to Grand Prix victories in Canada and France. "I haven’t a clue why I bought it," Shirley says, and chuckles. "It was one of those things. Once you figure out how to get heat in the tires, my F/1 car is extremely easy to drive. It’s like a go-kart, with left-foot braking."
Moving from clear-cut track performance to cosmopolitan élan, there’s the Ferrari 375MM coupé that in 1955 film director Roberto Rossellini had built to please his lady, actress Ingrid Bergman; it is the first Berlinetta body Sergio Scaglietti ever made. Shirley admits that buying the car 40 years later "was the easiest decision in the world." It came to him mostly in boxes, after moldering for years in a Palermo barn. Following Shirley’s total restoration of it by Pete Lovely Racing, the 78-year-old Scaglietti himself saw and declared it correct. "More people have asked me to sell it than any car I own," says Shirley. "It’s one I won’t sell. It’s the heart of what this collection is."
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One of the fastest cars in the Shirley
collection, this 1997 Ferrari F310B was driven by Michael Schumacher to Grand Prix victories in Canada and France. (Click image to enlarge)A sister car under its own Pinin Farina skin, Shirley’s 340/375MM "Mexico" Berlinetta is an altogether different machine—a Spa-24 winner and the first Ferrari to finish 1953’s Carrera Panamericana—a five-day chase along the length of Mexico—a feat that clinched a sports car world championship for Ferrari. The car once belonged to F/1 czar Bernie Ecclestone, but Shirley later bought it from fellow vintage racer John McCaw. This pricey coupé also won its concours class at Pebble Beach in 2004, and was Best in Show Race Car at Cavallino in 2005—just as the Ferrari parked next to it was in 2002.
Another jaw-dropper is the 1956 Monza 860/290MM Scaglietti Spyder, one of four such Ferraris produced. Of all Shirley’s racecars, this specimen is a beauty that carries the longest list of illustrious drivers, beginning with Peter Collins, followed by the Marquis de Portago, Olivier Gendebien, Hans Herrmann, maestros Maglioli and Fangio and Castellotti, then Phil Hill, Count Wolfgang Berghe von Trips, Stirling Moss, Ed Crawford, and Dan Gurney. While racing it as a factory car, Ferrari replaced its original, more torquey 3,431 cc 4-cylinder engine with a higher-revving 3,490 cc 290MM V-12. After winning the Monterey Cup for presentation and performance in 2001, Jon and his son, Peter, copiloted the Spyder the year after in Italy’s Mille Miglia Historica—and finished the race. Shirley does with his cars what they are meant for—he drives them. But Shirley is concerned about racing this jewel. "You’re risking an engine block that is irreplaceable," he says. Chassis and engine numbers here are as familiar to aficionados as arcane dates are to history buffs. For vintage-car scholars, "0628M" invokes this Ferrari’s entire past.
Aside from the 1957 Mille Miglia’s Maserati 300S that Shirley races at vintage events, and an Alfa Romeo P3 grand prix car in intricate makeover mode, plus a handful of other exotics being groomed, his collection includes hundreds of prized model cars in various scales—and a set of designer Gioachino Colombo’s original colored pencil renderings of the first Ferrari 125, the sports-bodied Spyder used for Ferrari’s initial race, at Piacenza, in May 1947.
Shirley’s Alfas exude majesty; his Ferraris are sinewy and gorgeous; and he has a Ford GT that performs admirably at jail-term speeds. But to haul his cars, if Shirley should choose to use it as such, is this collection’s largest, and slowest, vehicle. The 45 mph Fiat truck-based three-car Ferrari transporter might be the fantasy tow vehicle of every Ferrari owner. This one was abandoned on an Italian farm after what was thought to be its final chore of hauling hay.
The transporter appealed to Jon Shirley, the curator: "I don’t like to find cars that somebody else did."
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