Iconic Italian Failure

The Type 65 was the last purpose-built Maserati racing car—however it was anything but the pinnacle of the company's tradition

by Thor Thorson

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This remarkably imposing V8 rear-engined, sports-prototype is the last of the line of Maserati competition cars built during the Gruppo Orsi Empire's long ownership of the Italian marque. As such, it marks the high tide of their development right through the wide range of A6GCS, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, and 450S sports racing classics, through the famous "Birdcage" Tipo 60–64 models and the big V8-powered, 151 Berlinetta designs of 1962–65.

The SCM Analysis

This car sold for $764,188 at the Bonhams Gstaad auction December 17, 2006.

The Type 65 was the last purpose-built Maserati racing car. One might argue, as the catalog copy clearly does, that it was the pinnacle, the ultimate iteration of a grand tradition of dominant racing cars.

I will argue differently. I see it as the almost embarrassing, last guttering flame of a grand competitive tradition that had run out of money, customers, and options long before it ran out of passion or enthusiasm. This is not to say that it isn't a very cool car, or won't be competitive in vintage racing. Only that it was anything but the pinnacle of Maserati's tradition.

The brothers Maserati formed the company in the mid-1920s as a specialist manufacturer of strictly racing cars—the March or Lola of its day. As was appropriate to the era, they designed and built everything—chassis, engines, transmissions, etc. Though small, they were successful and developed a fierce Italian pride in the quality and competitiveness of their products.

Sports cars added in the '50s

Suffering from the tragic death of the lead brother, Alfieri, the worldwide depression, and the impending European war, the brothers sold the company to the Orsi industrial conglomerate in 1937. The Orsi management held the company together through the war, primarily by manufacturing machine tools. As soon as the smoke cleared, Maserati was back in the car business. The '50s saw a splitting of the focus, as high-performance road cars were added to the line, but racing remained the core of the tradition.

And Maserati remained at the forefront. The A6GCS series of early-postwar designs were replaced with the lighter, simpler 150/200S designs, which utilized twin-cam, 4-cylinder engines and then-standard large-diameter tubular ladder frames. This concept was expanded into the 6-cylinder 300S and V8-powered 450S models that many collectors consider to be the ultimate Maserati sports racers.

But by the late 1950s, Maserati engineers knew they were in trouble. The English and Germans were introducing small-diameter tubular "space frame" designs, and Jaguar had introduced the monocoque concept with its D-type. The old ladder frames were simply too heavy and too flexible.

What to do? They could build space frames, but that was just matching their rivals, not beating them, and they didn't have the technology to build monocoque (an aircraft industry development).

Small tubes good, tiny tubes better

Maserati's solution was almost a caricature of the Italian mind-set. If many small tubes were better than a few big ones, then tiny tubes must be better yet. Enter the Birdcage designs. Birdcage chassis are the most mind-numbingly complex structures in the history of the racing automobile.

They look like something Buckminster Fuller would have thought up on an acid trip. The biggest tube is the size of your thumb, most are like your little finger, and there are hundreds of them, all closely triangulated. It is an extremely light and stiff chassis structure, if you can ignore what it took to make it (or, God help you, repair it).

The Tipo 60 and 61 designs (front-engined, 4-cylinder cars—the classic Birdcages) were very quick but notoriously unreliable. If they finished, often as not they won. But by now, Maserati's competition department was having a tough time keeping up.

The march of technology had become a stampede, mid-engine designs were clearly the wave of the future, and management was spending what money the company had on developing road cars.