Certainly, reading between the lines, the Maserati team frequently had to put up with the “best of the rest” driving their 250Fs at the front end of the starting grids. Undoubtedly the best driver to fall into this category was Jean Behra, who drove as Moss’ team mate in 1956 and Fangio’s number two the following year. In fact Moss and Fangio were the only drivers of true World class regularly to drive the 250F in the seven seasons it could be seen racing on the World Championship trail.
The 250F was the only model to last the entire formula, winning the first race in Argentina at the start of 1954 and being represented by American privateer Bob Drake in a 1957 works “lightweight” car on the back row of the 1960 United States Grand Prix at Riverside. They were nice cars made by nice people, in the main driven by nice people and owned in the 1950s by nice people. Perhaps that was the Maserati team’s problem. They were warmer and more pleasant personalities than those at the Ferrari factory in the mid-1950s, and they had an enormous number of hopeful privateers living in and around Modena, all trying to run their cars on shoestring budgets, and scrounging round the factory stores to make ends meet as best they could. Maserati really did (however unintentionally) take on an enormous commitment to supply cars as well as provide facilities to maintain them, and there was frequently a great deal of “juggling round” amongst different people’s chassis and engines in order to keep everybody running. It should of course be remembered that there wasn’t just the World Championship to be contested by the leading Maserati 250F exponents, but a whole host of minor non-title races scattered across France, Italy and Spain which gave drivers such as Bruce Halford, the late Horace Gould, Roberto Mieres and “Bira” plenty of opportunity to pick up decent placings and thus earn enough prize money to move their tiny racing teams along to the next race the following weekend. What Maserati were doing in F1 was a little like the task that March Engineering faced in Formula 2 during the early 1970s where Ronnie Peterson and Niki Lauda were running works cars in the European F2 Championship and a whole host of privateers were running similar cars, often run from the Bicester factory or by a small “factory affiliated” preparation companies. Like March, perhaps Maserati attempted to keep too many people happy!
People like Halford, Gould and the other amateurs didn’t buy their Maserati 250Fs for romantic reasons; they simply wanted to go Formula One racing and this was the only truly contemporary car which was available to a private owner with the factory’s blessing. True, you might have persuaded Ferrari to sell you an outdated chassis, but you wouldn’t have got much help from Maranello. Mercedes-Benz were hardly in the business of “flogging off’ their F1 cars to earn money, and the late Tony Vandervell would probably turn in his grave at the prospect of somebody suggesting that he should have made his highly specialised, costly and exclusive Vanwalls available to any privateer. The latter two teams were in the business of motor racing to win, and no compromise was made that would affect that ultimate ambition. Ferrari were perhaps less averse to doing deals, but Maserati needed the cash generated by the sale of their cars. And the people who bought them simply wanted to go motor racing.
Vivid recollections of one particular Maserati 250F “in its prime” come from a current Grand Prix driver who was only nine years old when he saw “2520” being unloaded from the S.S. Neptunia onto a Melbourne dockside on April 22nd, 1956. The wide-eyed youngster who frantically clawed at what he recalls as “wrapping paper and corrugated cardboard” on that far-away wharf was none other than Alan Jones, the 1980 World Champion driver and leader of the Frank Williams team. In that innocence of youth, Alan recalls being slightly disappointed when he was told that “Dad was having a Maserati and not a Ferrari. As far as I was concerned, an Italian racing car was called a Ferrari and I wasn’t really sure what a Maserati was. As I recall, Dad paid about £10,000 for the 250F . . .”