Carroll Shelby and Phil Hill’s Ferrari 750 Monza may have taken chequered flags in America in the mid-1950s, but it never managed to race across the Atlantic in its heyday. Its first appearance at the Goodwood Revival in 2022 helped to make amends, with this 750 Monza’s participation in that year’s Freddie March Memorial Trophy. At the event, we spoke to its owner, Tazio Ottis, to learn more about this car’s transatlantic history.
“It really has some special early American racing history,” summarised Ottis about his car, which pipped the Jaguar D-type of Mike Hawthorn and Phil Walters to the line at the 1955 Sebring 12 Hour after the Jag had led all but one lap. Shelby and Hill’s celebrations were short-lived however, after an appeal the official handed over the win to the Jaguar crew, though the Ferrari still took Index of Performance honours. Outright victory would come for the duo in the Del Monte Trophy Pebble Beach Road Race, which they won one each of in 1955 and ’56.
The 750 Monza’s second owner was Jim Hall, who later went on to found Chaparral. He won his first road race, Fort Summer, in the car and kept it from 1956 for the next six decades. There had been an intention to race the car in Europe in period, but the aftermath of the tragic 1955 Le Mans led to the cancellation of numerous fixtures and the car sat unused in Italy for a period.
“It sat in Jim Hall’s garage after that for years until we got it,” said Ottis. “We’ve had it since 2016. It really hadn’t been used since it was last raced in 1957 or ’58. Jim Hall had his Chaparral team do a light restoration and they put it back in its original colours because it was painted red in the 1950s.”
It would be in for a much more thorough restoration with its new owners, though. “We wanted to do this car for Pebble Beach concours. That’s a very competitive, difficult class to do well in – all the guys who prepare the Ferraris are very good,” says Ottis.
They spent two years taking the car back to a bare chassis to rebuild it to the exacting specification of Phil Hill’s Del Monte Trophy entry. The two-year process entailed as much research as rebuilding, and there’s now a 500-photo archive of period photos of the car. “We put it together as it was in the day, so you see a lot of brush marks and wavy metal, just the way Scaglietti would have done it.” The painstaking work paid off and the car won its class in the 2019 Pebble Beach concours.
We spoke to Ottis after he had taken the 750 Monza out in the practice session ahead of the Freddie March Memorial Trophy, at which time this first appearance at the Goodwood Revival hadn’t been going quite to plan.
“We had a little bit of an issue in practice qualifying so I only had half a lap at any kind of speed, and that was an out lap, so we’re going into the race kind of unknown but I’m excited for it. It’s a fun track. We’re starting dead last because we didn’t set a time. It’ll be fun because maybe we can make our way through the field a little bit and have some battles.”
Opening the action on the Friday night, the 750 Monza was able to climb its way up through the Freddie March pack, to ninth, though it sadly wasn’t able to finish.
Ottis has raced a diverse array of cars and made an interesting comparison between the Monza and a wings-and-slicks prototype. “I was doing the IMSA Prototype Challenge when the Mazda DP02s were running. That might sound completely foreign but it’s the same power and weight as this car does, except it has sticky tyres and tunnels. So, the Monza is exactly the same weight and exactly the same horsepower but without the mechanical downforce and grip. The Monza is like driving one of those cars in a massive rainstorm and oil but in the dry.”
When we spoke to him in 2022, Ottis was hoping for some rain in the UK to test how the Monza coped with adverse conditions, but on that weekend the Goodwood Motor Circuit served nothing but blue skies. Flash-forward to this year’s Revival, and Ottis and the 750 Monza were back again, competing in a more slippery Freddie March Memorial Trophy, where it more happily finished tenth.
Photography by Toby Whales and Jack Beasley.
Report by Adam Wilkins for goodwood.com
