Epic Restoration
This rare 1956 Ferrari 500TR had been raced, rolled, relieved of its four-cylinder engine then lost for a decade. Reviving it was a daunting prospect – and exacting Ferrari certification only made it harder
Resurrecting the knackered ex-shelby Ferrari 500 Testa Rossa while satisfying Ferrari Classiche’s pedantic certification demands
It was pretty sad,’ says Stuart Castle of Ferrari 500 Testa Rossa chassis O614 MDTR. ‘It was in bare metal; the front suspension and steering was on it but the driveline was removed and most components were in boxes.’
Stuart looked after this project during its long stays with Ferrari specialist DK Engineering in Hertfordshire, and built the car back up again as the different elements completed their refurbishment. He looks back in wonder to the starting point. ‘When it arrived, the only advantage was we didn’t have much to strip!’
This important and exceptionally rare fourcylinder Ferrari had been in the hands of American enthusiast Bruce Lavachek since the Nineties, though restoration took a long time to begin. But begin it finally did, because one of the Ferrari friends Bruce has made over the years is DK’S founder, David Cottingham.
‘Bruce and I were amongst just a few people who knew chassis O614 MDTR still existed,’ says David. ‘I wanted to see the car restored, and of course Bruce did too, but other commitments meant that it wasn’t straightforward for him. However, he’s been collecting old Ferrari parts for years, like me, and we came to an agreement that involved swapping some rare parts for a lot of the labour.’
‘David is justso knowledgeable, experienced and dependable that the decision to send 0614 MDTR to DK was quite natural,’ says Bruce. ‘When I trucked 0614 to Long Beach, California to be containerized for shipment to UK, I remember clearly the optimism I felt as the container was closed up for shipping. It was like a breath of fresh air!’
A great moment for the owner, but the scale of the task was daunting.
Fame before the fall
This Ferrari 500 Testa Rossa was sold new on the New York Motor Show stand in April 1956, but the happy customer, a keen amateur racer called William Helburn, had no idea it was already entered for a race. After winning at Brynfan Tyddyn with Carroll Shelby at the wheel, 0614 was finally delivered to Helburn in August that year – when he promptly turned it over in a race at Watkins Glen. It was repaired and sent to Nassau for the Bahamas Speed Week where he had a successful time, as he did at the Cuban Grand Prix in 1957, co-driving with Olivier Gendebien.
The car changed hands later in 1957 and again in 1958, and in 1959 the engine was sent to Ferrari’s New York agent Luigi Chinetti for a rebuild. On seeing the bill, the outraged owner told Chinetti to keep the twin-cam, four-cylinder 500 engine and defiantly installed a Chevrolet V8 in its place. A further season with this powerplant produced nothing but DNFS.
It’s a familiar hard-luck tale for American Ferraris in this period. The next owner bought it from a resting place in an alley behind an auto parts store and it passed through a couple more sets of hands, deteriorating because of poor storage. In 1978 Bruce Lavachek heard of the car’s existence ‘somewhere in Wisconsin’ and began making enquiries. It took until 1988 for Bruce to track down the owner and in 1989, an agreement was signed on a farmhouse napkin.
‘Over time we agreed on purchase details,’ says Bruce, ‘and over more time I proceeded to drag the TR home to the Arizona Desert.’
Many years on, the car’s arrival and assessment at DK meant it was time to call in another long-time friend and colleague of the Cottinghams, James Smith of RS Panels in Nuneaton. James and his father Bob have been working with DK for 35 or 40 years and have restored these rare
four-cylinder Ferrari racers before, actually creating a chassis repair jig for the 500 TR back in the late Eighties. Now, with a tired bodyshell and a chassis modified to take an American V8, they would need not only the jig but also some special techniques to save as much of the original aluminium as possible.
Squaring up
James Smith’s team at RS carefully unwrapped the aluminium that held the Testa Rossa’s body to the nest of steel tubes beneath. The car has a pair of large oval tubes as its main load-bearing chassis members but uses a supporting frame for the body panels, made of smaller diameter tubes that are built up and welded to the chassis. The aluminium skin in this case had been hand-formed by the craftsmen at Carrozzeria Scaglietti, across the road from Ferrari in Maranello.
James discovered that to keep the weight down – this 180bhp car weighs only 680kg dry – Scaglietti used aluminium just 1mm thick in many areas. No wonder those 65 year-old hammer marks are still visible on some of the inner panels. But this brings problems, of course, because it leaves the body less tolerant to corrosion and especially to repeated re-shaping after racing incidents.
‘The front of the car had suffered the most,’ says James. ‘But even there, the inner panels were largely intact. We put a lot of work into getting the shape of the nose just right.’
David Cottingham is very pleased with the way it turned out and feels it’s about the best example of how a new 500 TR would have looked. ‘Most of them end up a bit flattened either side of the grille,’ he says, running a hand over the contours, ‘but this is how it’s meant to be. It’s a complex shape.’
To help perfect the shapes of both the repair sections and the original body, James Cottingham, David Cottingham, James Smith and a colleague with laser scanning experience visited the motor museum in Turin to carefully examine a highly rated and Ferrari Classiche-certified example of the model.
‘Once we’d made a scan it was turned into a CAD drawing and surfaced,’ says James Smith. ‘The CAD output allowed us to make box-section pieces of a body buck, while the details like door aperture shapes and side vents were machined from a resin board. It gave us a really accurate reference to keep the body shape spot-on as repairs progressed.’
Further back, electrolytic corrosion between steel tubes and aluminium skin had taken its toll and James had to weld in new aluminium edges, for instance in the rear wheel arches, to wrap to the tubes. Easier said than done with almost foil-thin original aluminium.
‘The mission was to keep as much as possible,’ says James Smith. ‘It’s about restoration, not replication. It would have been far easier to remake large sections but instead I was able to let in small repairs. I use gas welding where I can, but for the ultra-thin areas I have a special technique with a TIG welder. Using a steel backing-block behind the weld to stop the shielding gas from blowing the weld pool away, I could put tiny tack-welds in to build up strength using very low current, then slowly complete the weld.’
The key to this ticklish process was a foot pedal, says James. Think of the speed control pedal on an electric sewing machine and you’ll get the idea – with the current to the TIG torch infinitely variable, James had perfect control over the heat input to the panel.
The chassis was jigged and found to have survived without any major twisting or deformation. A few of the smaller tubes required replacement but one of the biggest worries – the modifications that had been made when the Chevrolet V8 was transplanted in – turned out to be a narrow escape.
‘All they’d done was welded angle iron across the two front mounts and cut the tops off the two rear mounts, but thankfully they’d left us just about enough to see how they should go,’ says James. ‘It meant there was never any doubt about the correct height of the engine.’
Four cylinders, not twelve. Easy then?
Ah yes, the engine. The large early-fifties Ferrari V12 created by Aurelio Lampredi and used in the 340 and 375 models, amongst others, gave rise to further designs. The 500’s engine had descended from a four-cylinder F2 engine by Lampredi and has many similar features to his V12s. David Cottingham rebuilt his first Lampredi engine some 40 years ago and describes the challenges with this car.
‘Together with Bruce, I set about locating and assembling enough parts to rebuild an original 500TR engine. The engine I located was originally used in chassis 0650.’
This is rather remarkable. Chassis 0650 suffered some engine trouble around 1960 when the owner asked Luigi Chinetti whether he had a spare engine for a 500TR. He did, of course, because he’d just rebuilt one for the owner of chassis 0614 and been told to keep it when he presented the bill. Chassis 0650 still bears that engine to this day, while the engine from 0650 moved around from one owner to another until David Cottingham managed to find it a few years ago. With only 20 Ferrari 500 TRS ever made, original engines are to be treasured.
‘With all these Lampredi designs, the cylinder head and block are cast in one piece and the liners screw in from underneath,’ says David. ‘Getting the old liners out can be very difficult, to the point where you sometimes have to machine them out. This one didn’t require that, but we had to be very careful to clean up the area in the cylinder block casting, up near the combustion chamber, where the new liner screws in and seats.’
David describes how they machined one degree of difference between the liner and the seat to give it some bite, ‘We did the seat at 45 degrees and the liner at 46 degrees, so the liner’s leading edge bites as it’s wound into position, creating a really good seal.’
The tool used to screw in a Lampredi cylinder liner is interesting. Picture the casing from a tank shell, cut off about five inches high and with six large tabs at its open end. These fit over the castellated base of each liner and you can then pass a long, strong bar through holes in the side of the tool and wind the liner home with great force.
Considering it’s ‘just’ a 2.0-litre inlinefour from the Fifties, there was an immense amount to do. ‘The valve train is gear-driven,’ says David. ‘So are the twin distributors and the dynamo. There’s no adjustment in the main gear train, so it all has to be machined just right to Ferrari’s specifications.’
The immense, hefty valves were lapped in with the cylinder block inverted and a tool reaching down the bores. The valves were then held in place with new hairpin valve springs, in which the coils lie at 90-degrees to the valve stem rather than curling around them. David hands a spare one over and it is incredibly stiff and strong, as is each of the two super-sized camshafts. Over-engineered, yes, but built with great precision and therefore vital to get right.