“I wanted to experience what they experienced, and I didn’t know any other way to do it except by trying to build a car like they had,” says Peter Giacobbi, builder and owner of this incredible 1959 Ferrari 250 TR recreation.
That’s right: recreation. A master fabricator, engineer, and builder, Giacobbi made this car in order to understand what his boyhood heroes like Juan Manuel Fangio and Graham Hill experienced when driving cars like the Ferrari 250 TR.
His favorite design on any car ever, the project swung into high gear after finding a handmade aluminum body for a ’59 TR that had been sitting for decades. From there, Giacobbi began to figure out what he needed in order to complete the car.
“I made everything look as close as possible…I copied the chassis, found the correct tail lights, had the instruments made…” “There are some things that are different from the original. It was impossible to find a good 3 litre motor, so I used a 4.4 and modified the aesthetics to look like the 250…” he says.
He says that the car is very exciting, especially considering that it weighs 2,300 lbs and has 400 horsepower. “These cars are very hard to drive…It’s pure seat of the pants,” Giacobbi says.
“I drive it as much as I can, I drive it down to the local coffee shop usually once or twice a week,” he says. But on any road—headed to any destination—his respect for racing greats is apparent, saying, “They’re not only heroes, they’re supermen to have driven at the high speeds for the distances they did is an absolute miracle.”
Drive Tastefully®
mercredi 30 septembre 2015
Expedition Overland: Central America Ep12
Honda CB750 – Charlie James Customs
Written by Marlon Slack.
Though primarily a bike wrecker, Jason Reihing has built his fair share of customs out of his small one man workshop, Charlie James Customs, in Williston, Ohio. ‘Every old car, ATV and motorcycle I’ve restored, rebuilt or modified, I’ve felt them wanting to come back to life,’ Jason explains. ‘But this bike was the opposite. I’ve named it ‘Micky’ after the boxing great Micky Ward as, like him, this bike is a fighter. Throughout the build I had a feeling it would have been happier sitting out the back of someone’s barn and rotting away.’ Thankfully Jason has the tenacity and skill to roll out something as pretty as this CB after just about everything went wrong during the build process.
As the CB came to Jason as a non-runner in boxes, one of the first things he did was remove the engine and place it on a stand for inspection. ‘The motor was strapped to this stand I made years back,’ Jason says. ‘I use it to power wash engines, pull apart top ends, side covers and that kind of thing. I get to the shop one morning, slide open the door and see the engine laying on the concrete floor.’ Jason was grateful for the lack of damage. ‘Everything was fine and it only left a chip in the floor but it was like the bike was telling me – Don’t Waste Your Time.’
And he might have been right. When the engine was strapped back in the stand Jason pulled the top end and inspected it for damage. One of the previous owners sheared a bolt that holds the camshaft retaining caps in place. ‘Now at first I thought I’d drill and use an Easyout to remove it, but it wouldn’t even drill. I grabbed a light, looked down the recessed hole and found a broken extractor in the core of the broken bolt.’ Jason worried it would have to be burnt out and re-tapped, or he’d have to scour the second-hand market for a used head. ‘But then I had an idea! Extractors are made of very hard steel. They’re almost impossible to drill but they’re fragile with impact. I sharpened a punch and struck the backside of the extractor which fractured it. I then removed the splinters one by one and then started the process again. Bam! Crisis overcome.
But more trials awaited. He had a CB650 tank hanging on the wall of his shop that he planned on mounting to the 750, and he’d lavished no small amount of attention on it, with knee dents in the side and a recessed pattern across the top. It hung, primed and was ready for paint when out of nowhere it fell hard on the shop floor. The damage to the front of the tank was extensive, so instead he mounted a ’78 GS550 gas tank. New frame mounts had to be fabbed up and the tunnel ‘massaged’ into place but it now sits perfectly on the frame.
And the frame? Well, that seems to have gone smoothly, but with Jason lacking a tube bender he cut and welded individual lengths of steel together to form the back-end, a time-consuming task. The rear wheel, swing arm and monoshock are all from a CBR F3 and helps push the bike into the beautifully blurred line between a café racer and a street fighter. It all works perfectly but I shudder to think of the amount of time spent getting the frame just right like that using nothing but hand tools.
Despite the frame going well, even the parts that you think would be simple managed to put up a fight. KTM bar mounts on the triple tree required reinforcement, a torx bit became stuck in the throttle linkage which required disassembly of the carburettors after the bike had already been assembled as well as a myriad of other little problems.
Hell, even the front suspension conspired against him. The forks were taken from another Honda, an early 90’s CBR F2. Jason put new seals and fluid in them, mounted them up to the bike but when he tested them they let go a metallic ‘clunk’ on the upstroke. ‘After they were drained, torn apart and inspected I finally had the nerve to disassemble the dampening rod inside. I couldn’t find any schematics on how to pull them apart or put them back together but I finally found the cause. A 40c wave washer.’
But with all that hard work, problem solving and trouble-shooting Jason has a bike he can be really proud of. Damn thing didn’t want to rot out the back of someone’s barn after all.
[Photos by Tim Whitaker] via PIPEBURN
Is it really okay to customise classic cars?
It’s a debate that’s been gaining momentum in recent years – but is there a general consensus on which we can collectively agree? Simon de Burton gives us his viewpoint, before the Classic Driver team rallies round to evaluate the most recent examples of the growing phenomenon of ‘resto-modding’…
Exactly how it happened I can't recall, but back in 1983 I somehow became the owner of a 1972 Jaguar XJ6 which, as a 19-year-old, I couldn't afford to run. It was a lovely car, in Regency Red with a nicely worn interior trimmed in biscuit leather – but a complete white elephant nonetheless. So I reluctantly swapped it for a 250cc Kawasaki with racy Ian Dyson bodywork.
A few weeks later the car's new owner called me up and excitedly invited me to drop by to take a look at what he'd done to it. As he slowly raised the garage door for maximum drama, I was prepared to feel envious at the sight of sparkling chrome and bodywork polished to perfection. But the reality was different.
A car that had been entirely original the last time I had seen it was now wearing a badly applied coat of Racing Green paint and sported vast, Broadspeed racer-style wheelarches enshrining a set of inappropriate alloy rims.
"Recognise it? It's John Steed's car from the New Avengers!" said the owner, gleefully. It was an abomination. A travesty. Sacrilege. I was saddened.
So when is it justified?
But is there ever a case where 'customising' a classic design is justified? A peek at the accompanying images tells us that there certainly is. Singer 911s not only look great, but go brilliantly, too; Jaguar design boss Ian Callum's personal take on the MKII both enhances the car's appearance and makes it more practical for modern life; the wild Equus Bass Mustang, meanwhile, brings the character of the original '60s pony car into the 21st Century and provides it with the sort of performance that even Carroll Shelby might have admired.
Likewise, the proposal for the BMW E30 M3 ‘Leichtbau’ by UK-based Redux promises to make a great car greater. “For us, it’s all about the attention to detail,” says founder Simon Lord, “and complementing what BMW achieved in period by making sure our design is cohesive, while striving to surpass OEM levels of craftsmanship and performance in each area of modification.”
However – a Ferrari 412 which has been chopped about to make a builder's wagon? Or a Pantera that's been pimped in a bid to to make it look modern? Not for me, I'm afraid. But, as the man who relieved me of my XJ6 so ably demonstrated, there's no accounting for automotive taste. Or as John Steed once said: "I never did believe in rules."
Now for the Classic Driver resto-mod run-down...
Type 1 - Better than the original?
Alongside established names such as Singer, Emory, Eagle, Twisted and Icon, there’s another set of burgeoning companies that rate overall design coherence and attention to detail just as highly. The aforementioned Redux Leichtbau aims to build the E30 M3 that might have been, had BMW continued its evolution, while Pure Vision Design’s ‘Martini Mustang’ was faithful to the self-concocted story of a fantasy meeting between Ford and Martini execs in 1965.
You could always play it safe, leaving the all-important aesthetics just the way they are, and only changing the running gear. Mechatronik has done just that to a number of classic Mercedes – hiding modern AMG V8s beneath unmolested bodywork, while ensuring it’s all fully reversible should the novelty wear off.
Type 2 - It's a thin line...
There’s a thin line between a nail-on-the-head resto-mod, and a customised classic that fails at the final hurdle – the De Tomaso Pantera transformed by the Ringbrothers certainly had promise, but was let down by a poorly executed interior. Don’t assume the professionals always get it right, either: Ian Callum’s Jag suffered from the same affliction (just look at that DVD player!), and AMG’s decision to impart modern wheels – both inside and out – to a gaggle of original Gullwings was nothing short of a travesty. Still, one sold at auction last year for €812,000, proving just how subjective the topic of customisation can be.
Type 3: Icons, re-imagined
Rather than merely updating a classic, some companies instead choose to go with a clean-sheet design inspired by the past. As well as the Equus Bass, there’s the Willys AW380 Berlineta – a neo-Alpine A108 said to use Porsche power – as well as the David Brown Automotive Speedback and the long-proposed but yet to materialise Lyonheart K. Both the latter are inspired by well-known designs (a little too closely, perhaps…), and their Jaguar XKR underpinnings could be considered a little humble, considering the required outlay.
Type 4 - Electrified elderlies
If you’re going to update a classic, why not go all the way and make it future-proof? A few years back, we were promised a run of fully electric DeLoreans. Shockingly, they never materialised. However, Renovo’s take on the concept appears to be a little more promising, not least for the use of a genuine CSX9000 chassis.
Type 5 - To pimp a butterfly
There have also been some unorthodox modifications to current (or future) classics that re-assign them a new primary purpose: as well as the Ferrari 412 pickup Simon mentioned earlier, there was aRolls-Royce Phantom genuinely converted into a hearse. Or, for those looking for practicality with more personal reasons in mind, how about a Jaguar E-type with a stretched wheelbase and a matching trailer?
At a level beyond that, there was the ‘Lady of Luxury’ Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow converted into a luxurious champagne-bar-cum-DJ booth that appeared for sale on Classic Driver last year. And, if you’ve completely lost any sense of financial prosperity (or your marbles), why not take an angle-grinder and create a ‘Mad Max’ Maybach?
Photos: Manfacturers, Classic Driver, GF Williams, Drew Phillips
You can find thousands of blank canvases ripe for customisation in the Classic Driver Market.
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