9 replies to this topic

[Victor]

I recently bought a Brumm scale 1:43 model of Jacques Swaters' Ferrari 500 F2. The model comes with a short description of the car's history.

According to the description, Jacques Swaters picked up the car in Maranello and since he did not have a transporter, he simply drove the car back home.

This was done during the night, with a car with no lights, no license, and passing under the border controls at high speed before the astonished border guards!

It is not clear from the booklet if Swaters drove the Ferrari 500 from Italy to France or (completely crazy) from Italy to Belgium.

Brumm is far from being a reliable source, but I would love this story to be true.

Has anybody heard about this? I have searched NF and could not find any reference to the story.

Cheers

 

[Michael Ferner]

You said it yourself, you "would love this story to be true", so it will become 'true'. That's how it works.

[ensign14]

DSJ suggested that Ernst Klodwig drove his special from his East German home to the Ring for the German GP, so it's not unprecedented.

 

Ferrari painted trade plates on the tails of their cars for occasional public road testing.

[Tim Murray]

This quote is taken from an 8W article by Racer.Demon and posted by Felix Muelas in the thread The story behind Equipe Nationale Belge:

Still, it was intended to take part in minor traditionals such as the Grand Prix de Frontières. In fact, the 500 was ordered so that it would be finished just days before that very race in June 1952. But then typical Italian planning got in the way. In Motor Sport magazine, Swaters vividly recalls how it all nearly went wrong. With the car not ready in time for Swaters to transport it back to Belgium on the trailer he brought with him to Modena, there was only one alternative: drive it home himself. "I had a girlfriend with me in a little Citroen and we set off in convoy. Then there was no autostrada and no ring road around Milan. I drove through the Piazza Duomo to the applause of pedestrians. Of course, the Ferrari had no lights so I had to follow my girlfriend pretty closely. And I had no mudguards, no licence plates, no insurance - nothing!" You could hardly overlook a yellow-painted F2 Ferrari, its open exhausts crying all the way to the border, but this is the kind of story of which you would say: "Imagine that happening today." Suffice it to say: it wouldn't. As it happened then, and not today, the Italian customs enthousiastically waved him through to Switzerland. Then to be sure, at the border with Belgium, he ducked down in the cockpit and plainly drove under the barrier. He was expecting to be hunted down by dozens of police vehicles but nothing happened. The adventure ended by arriving in time at Chimay, only for Roger Laurent to crash on the opening lap…

[DCapps]

You said it yourself, you "would love this story to be true", so it will become 'true'. That's how it works.

 

Given the way that the border checkpoints and customs arrangements worked back then, making certain aspects of the tale being somewhat improbable to highly unlikely, I think that Michael is casting some level of doubt upon the veracity of what Brumm claims to be the case.

 

RE: Tim's post.

 

I cast more than a tad of doubt on that story when it appeared.

Edited by DCapps, 30 June 2019 - 15:52.

[Victor]

Hi Tim

You are giving me a little hope that the story may be true. Let's see if someone else brings some light to the subject-

[Regazzoni]

Still, it was intended to take part in minor traditionals such as the Grand Prix de Frontières. In fact, the 500 was ordered so that it would be finished just days before that very race in June 1952. But then typical Italian planning got in the way. In Motor Sport magazine, Swaters vividly recalls how it all nearly went wrong. With the car not ready in time for Swaters to transport it back to Belgium on the trailer he brought with him to Modena, there was only one alternative: drive it home himself. "I had a girlfriend with me in a little Citroen and we set off in convoy. Then there was no autostrada and no ring road around Milan. I drove through the Piazza Duomo to the applause of pedestrians. Of course, the Ferrari had no lights so I had to follow my girlfriend pretty closely. And I had no mudguards, no licence plates, no insurance - nothing!" You could hardly overlook a yellow-painted F2 Ferrari, its open exhausts crying all the way to the border, but this is the kind of story of which you would say: "Imagine that happening today." Suffice it to say: it wouldn't. As it happened then, and not today, the Italian customs enthousiastically waved him through to Switzerland. Then to be sure, at the border with Belgium, he ducked down in the cockpit and plainly drove under the barrier. He was expecting to be hunted down by dozens of police vehicles but nothing happened. The adventure ended by arriving in time at Chimay, only for Roger Laurent to crash on the opening lap…

 

"Italian customs enthousiastically (sic) waved him through to Switzerland" "I drove through the Piazza Duomo to the applause of pedestrians."[/size][/size]
 
Looks more like a kid's fantasy. To report all that nonsense acritically and without any apparent sense of doubt, it is quite telling. One would be more benevolent, if they tried to sell it as a joke, to tell at the table after few rounds of wine (or beer).
 
That should have been around end 1951, beginning 1952. Winter. Mmm. End of May 1952.
 
Never mind the "Italian customs", good luck entering Switzerland - and, then, France too - unchecked in 1952 (or any other time until Schengen). It would have helped to have experienced that personally, the joke would have been called much earlier.

Edited by Regazzoni, 30 June 2019 - 18:30.

[Roger Clark]

The Motor Sport article referred to in Felix Muelas’ 8W article was an interview with Jacques Swaters, written by Chris Nixon, in the May 1998 issue. If the story is untrue, one of them must presumably be the guilty party.

Swaters says he made the journey to get the car to Chimay for the race there.

The history of the Grand Prix des Frontières by André Biaumet says that the car arrived during the night of Saturday/Sunday. A photograph shows Lauren leading away from the grid; perhaps a practice time he set in the HWM was allowed.

It is over 600 miles from Maranello to Chimay so Swaters would have had to stop for fuel at least three times! He drove a Veritas in the race. A week later another driver drove overnight (not in a single seater) from Paris to Monza and crashed, breaking his neck.

Edited by Roger Clark, 30 June 2019 - 18:04.

[RCH]

The distance traveled was long but why the surprise at this story? There are other reports of single seater racers being driven on the road. DSJ reports Jean Behra driving a Gordini on the road from Paris to Switzerland for example. Even in the UK there was DSJ's (again!) Christmas run in an F2 Lotus and didn't Raymond Mays drive a V16 BRM to Silverstone to get it there on time? I recall one summer evening in 1974 just as it was getting dark a pre-war GP Maserati coming towards me on back roads in the Potters Bar area. 

 

Somehow the idea of racing cars being driven on the road has always fascinated me. Perhaps something to do with the Austin Cambridge I was being driven in being overtaken by a D Type Jaguar. That would have been 1957 somewhere between Banbury and Bicester.

[DCapps]

I don't think that there is much (if any) surprise regarding a monoposto being driven on the road, this certainly not being all that unusual in some cases during this era. Rather it is the story as to why it was being driven on the open highway and the stories regarding the actions at the border/customs checkpoints. A monoposto Ferrari on the open road at night following a car, blasting through the customs barriers... To suggest that this might be improbable to extremely difficult at any time would be an understatement, but has anyone thought about the nature of things in Europe circa June 1952? Do so and it becomes a tale quite worthy of Don Alfredo.

 

As ever, to quote the good Earl Landgrebe: "Don't confuse me with the facts."