Year of the Maserati

Oldtimers on the auto-racing circuit remember Alfieri Maserati as a querulous Latin who spent as much time crying the faults of cars as he did driving them. His dissatisfaction drove him and his brothers to building their own racers, and the cars were almost unbeatable. Maseratis have had their slow moments in the 30 years since; Alfieri is dead and his brothers have long since sold the factory. But the hand-tooled cars still carry the family name, and they are again almost unbeatable. Last week, as the racing season shifted noisily into high gear, the experts were already predicting that 1957 will be the Year of the Maserati.

As continually critical as old Alfieri himself, Maserati's present owner, Adolfo Orsi, refuses to be satisfied, even with success. He got off to a fast start with one of last season's six-cylinder Grand Prix racers, which World Champion Juan Fangio drove to victory in the Argentine Grand Prix at Buenos Aires last month, setting a track record in the bargain. And Motorman Orsi is already tooling up a new twelve-cylinder racer.

Monster at Cremona. The new 300-h.p., 2.5-liter car develops 30 h.p. more than its smaller stablemate, ought to grind out an extra 6 m.p.h. on the fast tracks at Rheims and Monza. It is something of a throwback to the days when old Alfieri startled the road-racing fancy with his Sedici Cilindri a 16-cylinder job that set a 152.9 m.p.h. record at Cremona in 1929. But the Sedici Cilindri was a bastard car, with a power plant made of a pair of eight-cylinder engines, the two crankshafts coupled in a single gear box. The new twelve-cylinder Maserati is the precocious, all-in-one brainchild of Engineer Guilio Alfieri. Every part was specifically designed for the new racing car.

Taste & Talent. A tour of duty tinkering with the great, slow-churning marine turbines of such ships as the Rex and the Conte di Savoia gave Alfieri a taste for hefty engines. At Maserati he is forever trying to balance his desire for a lot of cylinders with the racer's need for resistance to wear and tear. It took Giulio more than two years of arguing, pleading, cajoling, storming to convince Maserati's high brass that a twelve-cylinder engine was the logical evolution from their successful six-cylinder, 2.5-liter racer.

Since the Mercedes-Benz manufacturers decided to break up their factory racing team and coast on their winning reputation, only Ferrari seems to be in a position to challenge the new Maserati. But even the finest racing machine in the world would be nothing without the finest drivers. Maserati, fortunately, has the two best men in the business: Argentina's Juan Manuel Fangio and England's Stirling Moss. At 46, Fangio, who got his start as a Buenos Aires bus driver, is a four-time world champion. Under the benevolent sponsorship of Dictator Juan Peron he parlayed his home-town popularity into a wealthy G.M. distributorship in Buenos Aires. He has continued to do well as a driver abroad. At the wheel of a racing car he is an artist. His fine mechanic's ear is attuned to the engine's telltale throb; his feet and hands are sensitive to every vibration. He rarely strains his car, rarely pushes it past the limits of mechanical endurance. His technique is ideal for the grinding demands of closed-course racing.

On the wild twists and bends of the open road, the devil-may-care tactics of young (27) Stirling Moss make a flashy counterpart to Fangio's calm control. Fangio belongs to a school that believes any spectacular burst of speed is useless unless the driver finishes a race. To Moss, on the other hand, the trick is to floorboard the throttle and hope the car holds together. The exhilaration of acceleration more than makes up for worry about mechanical failure. For the last few years, that exhilaration has kept the nervy Briton nudging at Fangio's rear bumper in Grand Prix competition.

Talents of Two Schools. With the skill of its two other drivers, France's Jean Behra and Argentina's Carlos Menditeguy, to back up Fangio and Moss, the Maserati team will be the favorite in almost every race on the fat Grand Prix calendar ahead. They will be trying for the Cuban Grand Prix at Havana later this month. They will be at Sebring, Fla. in March.

If there is anything at all needed to round out the Maserati racing stable, it is a young Italian driver. "It is a matter of pride to us," says Omar Orsi, Adolfo's son and manager of the racers, "that all the great racing drivers, whatever cars they may win in now, all started first at the wheel of a Maserati. Fangio in 1947, Moss in 1954, the great Ascari who was twice world champion, Villoresi, Collins, they all started with us. There is practically no victory anywhere in the world to which Maserati hasn't contributed a little."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.