Ferrari 275 Resto
Andrew Seward began with a £30 BSA. Through canny trading and hard graft he now owns his dream car
After beginning with just £30 and cannily trading up, finally the dream of Ferarri ownership is a reality.
Most of our restoration tales in involve a car rescued from ruin and gradually built back up into an object of history-infused beauty. This one is a bit different. It’s about starting with a £30 BSA Bantam and ending up with a truly fabulous Ferrari. Here, it’s trading up rather than smartening up, all to the backdrop of simultaneously building up a successful business in fitting out high-end offices. Then, having got the dream car, the dream car turns out to be not quite so dreamy after all. That’s where the restoration part kicks in.
We can all wish to own a classic Ferrari and a mid-sixties 275 GTS has to be near the top of anyone’s desire tree. Andrew Seward certainly thought so, but he never expected the hands-on skills he’d learned over the years to be needed quite as much as they have been. What he has proved, though, is that a man in a wellequipped shed – two sheds, in Andrew’s case – can fettle a Ferrari as much as a Fiat or a Ford. Forget the mystique, the mythology; it’s still a car. All you need is confidence, an ability to find the right people to help your quest, and a refusal to be defeated.
Andrew has done hundreds of jobs on his 1965 Ferrari. He could have done more, but sometimes it’s more time and cost-effective to hand the task to an expert. You can make some good friends in the process,
and discover little workshops deep in Italy whose impressive skills gladden the heart. Let’s set the scene. Andrew bought the Ferrari in November 2006. It was cosmetically tired. A repaint and a re-trim both proved unsatisfactory, so were done a second time. The engine developed a smoking habit and was rebuilt. Suspension, brakes and myriad other bits and pieces have been attended to, mainly by Andrew. Is it finished? ‘It will never be finished,’ he declares. ‘There’ll always be something else to do.’ Those are the bare bones of the story. Now the flesh, and very meaty it proves. The GTS is one of just 14 right-hand drive examples made, and was sold new in June 1965 by the UK Ferrari importer, Maranello Concessionaires, for £5500. Back then its colour was Pino Verde, a dark metallic green, but it has always had a black interior. Between then and now it has had 12 owners, and it became red in 1971 in which year it also sold for its lowest price, just £1800. It’s rumoured to have been stored in a barn for a while, then dragged from there during a divorce. A later owner was one Alan Jones,
Formula One world champion. After two more owners it was then bought by a mysterious Japanese collector who took it to the US, where it was displayed in the Black Horse Collection in Las Vegas’ Imperial Palace casino before becoming part of a swap deal for the Alfa Romeo BAT concept cars through high-end specialist Cars International.
Having then failed to sell at auction in the US, GGJ 4C found its way back to Cars International’s UK arm. And that’s when Andrew bought it. How did he get to that happy position? Through the gradual ‘tradingup’ route that many a classic car enthusiast takes. ‘I bought that Bantam D7 at the age of 11, paying for it by bunching coriander in the market gardens at Audley End – 90 acres of Capability Brown,’ Andrew recalls proudly. ‘Then I learned to drive in a Masseyferguson tractor, and changed the tractor’s engine when I was 13.’
Trading-up… in the real world
The trade-up bug bit, the Bantam became a Suzuki TS125 and then a Montesa Cota 247 trials bike. That in turn led to a Matchless G3 and then a G9 500 in pieces, to the outrage of Andrew’s mother. ‘I restored that over two years, sold it for £1000 and put £800 into an Alfa Romeo Spider whose owner had given up with it. I bought a 1966 MGB for £100 with glassfibre wings and its sills in a state, but ended up scrapping that one. Then I found a GT, covered in mould but structurally OK. I polished it and flogged it on.’
That helped fund the Alfa’s restoration, in which Andrew made use of the metalworking and auto electrics skills he’d learnt to HND level. ‘I left college, got a job as a driver and spent my first pay cheque on a 15cfm air compressor. The second cheque went on an SIP Mig-welder and the girlfriend was unimpressed. She’d dumped me by the third cheque.’
Cars came and went over the years, but the next big project was a RAM Cobra. ‘I spent eight years trying to build that,’ Andrew recalls ruefully, ‘then I had to sell it when we moved here. There was no garage, so the Cobra paid for me to build one.’
A year working for someone else, paid enough of a bonus for Andrew to start thinking Ferrari. He’d intended to buy a 308 GTS when he walked into Ferrari specialist Talacrest, but a Berlinetta Boxer in the corner, once owned by Adrian Newey, caught his eye. And, finally, that Boxer funded the 275 GTS.
So, what had Andrew bought? ‘The front bumper’s centre section was missing, as were the glove compartment and the ashtray. There was a Mallory ignition system, the paint was abominable and it was badly trimmed. The sill trims and sunvisors were held on with self-tappers. But it ran OK.’
He ran it for a few months, then sent it to a wellknown restorer for paint, trim and sorting. It was not a happy experience, culminating in a list of defects to be put right. Some of the work, though neat enough, was simply incorrect. And on a Ferrari 275 GTS that matters, especially when the bill is £35,000. There followed three years of trying to fix, or live with, the snags until one increasingly smoky cylinder bank triggered action – it was time for an engine rebuild.
Andrew also decided it was the time to fix the body once and for all, too, so he took the Ferrari to Scott and Brett Brocklehurst at Custom Exotics
‘My girlfriend dumped me when my third pay cheque went on a project’
in Harlow. There, he extracted the engine leaving the engine bay clear for its refurbishment along with the external panels and paint.
Neil Cornes, who learnt his Ferrari skills at DK Engineering, tackled the Colombo V12’s £20,000 rebirth. The central problem was the disappearance of an exhaust cam lobe, but the engine got a rebuild anyway including Cosworth Teflon-coated pistons. Andrew refurbished and refitted all the ancillaries, including the three Weber 40 DCZ6 carburettors, but he left setting up the four pairs of points in their two distributors to an expert with a phasing machine.
With the body refinished and engine refitted, Andrew had the interior retrimmed by Matthew and Luke Turton of Strong & Turton. Now everything fitted and sealed as it should, the Ferrari looked fantastic, and from there on it was a case of refurbishing or scouring the world for elusive new ones. Andrew rebuilt the suspension and brakes, and fashioned various missing components on his lathe and milling machine when he couldn’t find originals.
Such as? ‘I made the quarter-light brackets, and I made a bonnet pull but have now found an original one. Or I might draw a part up, or make a cardboard template or a less good part as a pattern, then take it to a metalworker to make a better one.
‘One of the best bits has been getting parts made by small artisan workshops around Maranello, using parts books, hand gestures, rubbish Italian and laughter. Roberto Brandoli was one – his father Eduardo was the production manager at Scaglietti, one of Ferrari’s body-builders. He says the Pininfarina bodies, like mine, don’t rot like the Scaglietti ones and the chassis is much more integrated.’
Such artisans provided a replacement front bumper section and a complete glovebox assembly, which arrived packaged in a wooden box. Just a few details remain and Andrew and his wife have been been enjoying the Ferrari a lot – they have covered around 20,000 275 GTS miles. Now all Andrew needs is a bigger garage. The plans are drawn, the land is bought… the man, clearly, is unstoppable.