Maserati 450S book review: Modena’s heavy hitter

“When she didn’t break, she won.” That’s the frustrating summary of the career of Maserati’s big, booming 450S, the Modena firm’s contender in the 1957 World Sportscar Championship. Scarily fast, and scarily wayward, it veered unpredictably between beating the pants off everyone else and breaking, or crashing, or breaking and crashing as even Stirling Moss had cause to discover.

Equipped with a monster 4.5-litre engine, the 450 in its swoopy Fantuzzi bodywork was built to take the fight to Ferrari but only had one erratic European season filled with frustrations before being sidelined by a rules change. But the USA had its own rules, and after Fangio and Behra proved its potential by beating everyone at Sebring, the States finally provided a happy hunting ground for this 400hp well-bred brute. Some famous US drivers captured wins with a 450 including Dan Gurney, Jim Hall and Carroll Shelby, so perhaps with more development and finance, and an earlier gestation, Enzo might have had some real competition.

While this massive V8 was in gestation Jenks wrote “the sound of its thundering exhaust note on the test bed causes most of Modena to give knowing smiles…” After driving their Mille Miglia car with Moss he commented “…the real surge of acceleration is in the 80 to 170mph range”. Sadly irrelevant, as this was the car whose brake pedal snapped a few miles into the ’57 Mille Miglia, one of many a malady that beset the machines.

Now Maserati historian Walter Bäumer has collected the stories of the 10 cars together in a large-format book lush with photos which make you wish you had witnessed the ’50s American sports car racing scene. These were heavily raced there by well-off owners whose funds for a while assuaged the marque’s financial anguish, and they drew every camera lens round the circuit.

Short chapters outline the development and the racing picture before separate sections on the career of every chassis up until today, each lovingly recorded with some fine tales – one car was attacked with a hammer by a disgruntled wife. Bäumer strikes a good balance between the generous race facts and the anecdotes, but it’s those big photos, plenty in colour, that make the book zing. There’s a remarkable shot of a wheel actually flying off Moss’s 450S, captioned “Maserati made a great car but maintenance was often very bad”. QED, I think. GC

Maserati 450S
Walter Bäumer & Jean-François Blachette
Dalton Watson, £150 ISBN 9781956309126