It’s not what you know that gets ya, it’s what you don’t know.
I thought I’d done a nice piece on Ferrari’s 156 variants, that is, the cars which bridged the gap between the 1961 World Championship winning 156 Sharknose and 1964 158, victorious in the hands of Phil Hill and John Surtees respectively.
Then Doug Nye posted the photograph above on an internet forum. It’s Lorenzo Bandini at the Nurburgring during the 1962 German GP weekend in a Ferrari 156/62P. The prototype was designed by Mauro Forghieri in 1962 as the young engineer explored smaller, lighter-tubed spaceframes of the type built by the British manufacturers.
He sought to bridge the performance gap which had widened even more after Jim Clark debuted the first modern monocoque Lotus 25 Climax at Zandvoort that May.
Oopsie, missed that car, hmmm, back to the drawing board I thought. Sure enough, there are a few photographs of the 156/62P, which raced only at the Nurburgring and Monza 1962 if you look closely.
Forghieri’s learnings with this model were then applied to his 1963 spaceframe 156/63, a GP winner on the Nurburgring in Surtees’ hands that year. The shot above shows Il Grande John hard at it through the Dutch dunes at Zandvoort in June 1963.
So, do check out this article, Ferrari 156/62P, 156/63 and 156 Aero… | primotipo… I’ve re-written it and doubled the number of photographs. Hopefully it’s now a decent record of the 1.5-litre V6 engined 1962-1964 Ferrari 156/62P, 156/63 and 156 Aero…
The final variant of the 156 was the 156 Aero, here Lorenzo Bandini is on the way to his – and the 156 Aero’s only championship GP victory – at Zeltweg, Austria in August 1964.
This model was created to contest the 1963 Italian GP. When the Tipo 158’s engine was running late the venerable V6 was skilfully adapted to fit the new Aero chassis. The car was still competitive in 1964 too, Bandini raced them for a while as Surtees and Forghieri got the 158 up to snuff.
Credits…
MotorSport Images
Tailpiece…
“We could have a party in here Colin! It’s so roomy and comfy.”
Jim Clark trying Bandini’s new Ferrari 156/62P for size at the Nurburgring in 1962. “Our car may be a bit snug Jimmy but it’s 48 seconds a lap quicker than that little clunker”, may well have been Chapman’s retort.
Ferrari were way off the pace in 1962 but won a nip-and-tuck world title in 1964. As much as anything else it was text book stuff about having depth in the team when the 1961-62 Winter of Ferrari Discontent resulted in eight senior employees leaving the Scuderia. In the overall scheme of things they barely missed a beat, ahem, 1962 aside…
Finito…
primotipo... 