Fantasy Reprise

I much enjoyed your article on Brandon Wang’s 250LM Ferrari. This is correctly described on Massini’s Ferrari 250LM book as having “a long Drogo nose”, confirmed by the recent photos in your article, but is clearly not the case with No 140 in the 1965 Targa Florio illustration.

A similar Drogo nose was added to GTLM 6105, the ex-Ron Fry, ex-David Skailes car which I had enormous pleasure in racing and hillclimbing in 1969/70. Your otherwise excellent story does a little less than justice to the later (post-1968) racing history of the LM. An eighth place at Le Mans in ’69 and seventh at Daytona 24Hours in 1970 are surely noteworthy for a five or six-year old model in international racing, while at national UK level 6105 had a distinguished Indian summer, with 26 class wins, class records at eight courses, one FTD, Fastest Sportscar awards at Bouley Bay, Barbon and Shelsley, the 1969 Prescott Gold Cup and runner-up in the first Shell Leaders’ championship.

So far as behaviour was concerned she was a real lady, earning the title “Duchess”, and an amateur team’s dream: nothing broke in two hectic seasons. She did however receive a fair amount of TLC from John Brindley and myself, which included changing the clutch every dozen events or so, as a precaution. This was a fiendish job. because the chassis tubes allowed very little clearance for moving the engine around. It took us a full weekend, but was reputedly once completed in 45min in the course of a race!

Jack Maurice, Olney, Bucks.