Maserati Tipo 60/61 “Birdcage”

It tells you something about Maserati that the company assembled what is, possibly, its best racing car — the Tipo 60/61 — after it pulled out of motor racing. Maserati Tipo 60/61 "Birdcage"It tells you more about Maserati when you learn that one of the seven sons of Rodolfo and Carolina Maserati was named Alfieri, but when he passed away just months after his birth in 1885, his name was passed on to the next-born son, who came into this world in 1887. (With seven sons to his credit, Rodolfo Maserati was  apparently a devotee of the song “Carolina in the Morning.”)

Maserati brotherhood

Five of those seven Maserati Tipo 60/61 “Birdcage”  became sort of the Marx brothers of motor racing, while Mario, who became a painter, kept his hand in the family business by designing the company’s legendary trident logo. Carlo, the oldest of the Maserati Read more . . .

Austin-Healey Sprite

You could say that the car was as cute as a bug’s ear, but its bug-eyes gave it the indelible icon that has stayed with us for nearly 50 years. Austin-Healey SpriteThe Austin-Healey Sprite wasn’t the first car that Donald Mitchell Healey built, nor was it the best, but, due to its appealingly affordable price and its so-cute-you-want-to-cuddle-it visage, the Sprite is the Healey car that has the most universal charm.

Indifferent spirit

Healey’s saga was already moving into its third act when the Sprite was presented in 1958. DMH, as he liked to be called, was born in 1898 in Perranporth, Cornwall, the son of a shopkeeper who finally became a land developer. Like Herbert Austin and Henry Royce  before him, the young Healey became enamored of tools, machinery and the most infant industry of the day, aviation. He left school to join Sopwith and within months, the outbreak of World War I encouraged Healey to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps.  Immediately, he shifted from mechanic to aviator, but his short flying career ended when he crashed in 1916. Mustered out of the service soon after, he returned home to Cornwall where he involved himself in two other fledgling industries: automobiles and radios. Read more . . .

Packard Twin Six

Its memory is a bit dusty now and clouded by time, but there was a time when the name Packard had all the authority of the vaunted British marque Rolls-Royce. Packard Twin SixWhile Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds set out to make cars for the “common man,” the Packard brothers, James Ward and William Doud, decided they would sell cars to men of uncommon richness. Their plan made sense because, before they had even built their first motorcar, the Packards themselves were gentlemen of substance.

Richer well-to-do’s

By the time the last decade of the 19th century rolled around, the Packard family had reached a comfortable, well-to-do standing  in the town of Warren, Ohio. Moving to what was then a small village in the 1850s, the Packard clan established a lumber mill, hardware store, hotel and an iron rolling mill over the course of the next 40 years or so, providing them with a decidedly upper middle class lifestyle. Read more . . .

Dodge Viper RT/10

A lot of water passed through the mill from the time the Dodge brothers assembled engines for Henry Ford until the Dodge Viper peeked out from under its wraps at the 1989 Detroit auto show. Dodge Viper RT/10Over the course of that era, the Dodge brothers split with Ford to begin building cars of their own under the imaginative Dodge Brothers name; Dodge Brothers was bought by Walter P. Chrysler as he built Chrysler Corporation in the image of his previous employer, General Motors; and Dodge (sans Brothers) went from an icon of performance during the halcyon years of the Sixties to becoming largely irrelevant by the late Eighties. Omnis and K-cars  will do that, no matter how proud one’s history.

Bringing Dodge model back to life

A quickly fading brand with a dreary image were what faced Chrysler Corporation planners as they considered what they should do for the ’89 Detroit show, and their response — a huge, brutal two-seat sports car — Read more . . .

Oldsmobile Curved Dash Runabout

Henry Ford is the man commonly given credit for transforming the automobile from a rich man’s toy to every man’s transportation.It was another Michigan resident, however, who set the stage for Ford’s revolution. Before Ransom E. Olds, the few cars that were being assembled were fabricated individually in machine shops and sold on a catch-as-catch-can basis to those few rich enough to afford the high asking prices. Olds was the man who orchestrated the innovation from the shop to the assembly line, making the automobile reasonably priced to a far larger audience, thus setting the stage for Henry’s Model T.

Oldsmobile Curved Dash

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Inveterate tinkerer

The son of a machinist, Olds studied accounting at a Lansing, Michigan, business college, but he always considers more at home in his father’s shop. With his schooling over, he joined the business, which operated in the thrilling world of repairing farm machinery. An inveterate tinkerer, Olds had dreams far beyond fixing plows.

In the late 1880s, several men from around the world were coming to the same assumption: Read more . . .