As the chairman of the Seattle
Art Museum’s board of trustees, Jon Shirley approaches automobile collecting
like a curator looking for artworks. I like to find cars that need restoration,"
Shirley says. The challenge, he explains, is in making them perfect again.
For Shirley, the hobby started when he and his family were
visiting the old Nivelles-Baulers Grand Prix circuit south of Brussels. Members
of the Ferrari Club of Great Britain began arriving with new and vintage cars.
Two giant transporters lumbered in from the factory in Maranello. "Boxer"
Ferraris, their enthusiast owners at the wheel, took to the track in a private
session beneath that Belgian sky. For Shirley, the spontaneous pageant brought
nothing less than an epiphany. "I wandered around and talked to everybody that
day at Nivelles," he says, "and then I said to myself, ‘I should be doing this.’
Now I am."
A 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder. (Click image to enlarge)
Shirley’s extensive private collection resides in the Pacific
Northwest, in Medina, Wash. As I enter the nirvana that he and his collection
manager, John Bennett, call the Warehouse, the stable’s scope and beauty strike
me as no less than staggering. There are 23 cars here on this day and more in
the shop, either for restoration or to prep for a vintage race and show.
In one dazzling row—returned to build-day precision by wizard
Butch Dennison—is the 2.0-liter Ferrari 166MM Touring Superleggera I first
photographed in April 1951 when it won the Palm Springs road race, thrilling
West Coasters with our very first sight of a Ferrari in track action. Today, the
vintage racecar is one of Shirley’s favorite rally rides. This V-12 "little
boat" is the same barchetta in which Luigi Chinetti Sr. and Jean Lucas
won the 24-hour endurance race at Spa-Franchorchamps in 1949—a triumph for
Ferrari, along with Chinetti’s same-year Le Mans victory in a similar 166MM. It
was Ferrari’s first production car and a Mille Miglia winner, and it made Enzo’s
upstart marque world famous.
This 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C2900 was the winner of the Watkins Glen Grand Prix in 1948. "Very responsive, very
quick," Shirley says of the car.
(Click image to enlarge)
Next to it is the 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900—imparting the
ultimate in grace and movement within design. An elegant boulevard automobile
that is also a competition champion, it won the first Watkins Glen Grand Prix in
1948 in the hands of Frank Griswold. "Very responsive, very quick," Shirley says
of the car. With 180 hp and rear hydraulic shocks adjustable from the cockpit,
the twin-supercharged London Show car was far ahead of its time.
Another prized Alfa is Shirley’s 8C 2300, its still-original
body also by Carrozzeria Touring of Milan. First owned by Andrea Piaggio of
Italian airplane and scooter fame, this durable roadster sat idle for years in a
museum in Germany, where Shirley found it. He has driven the Alfa Rally in it,
and, with his wife, Mary, has done the Copperstate 1,000-mile loop through
twisting Oak Creek Canyon and other Arizona back roads. "It was state of the art
for 1932," says Shirley. Its supercharged inline-8 makes 142 hp at 4,900 rpm.
Like all of Shirley’s cars, its cost is stratospheric, but the world speeding
past is priceless.
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."
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."
