Having spent his life in and around classic vehicles, historic racing ace Nicky Pastorelli’s selection of a 1950s sportscar great as his favourite car comes as no surprise. And his choice of the Maserati 300S is a fitting one.
In the words of the late Stirling Moss, it was a “strong and dependable” machine that “defies Maserati’s long-standing reputation for grace, pace and unreliability”. Moss likened it to an Aston Martin DB3S in its responsiveness, but reckoned “it was even better balanced and, in my experience, almost unburstable”. He also praised its chassis for being “infinitely superior to any front-engined sports Ferrari”.
“There really was something about the 300S and me,” he said in the 1987 book My Cars, My Career he co-authored with Doug Nye. “We seemed to be made for each other.”
Pastorelli reached Formula 1 as a Jordan tester in 2005 and raced in Champ Car the following year before embarking on a career racing contemporary GT cars - winning races in the FIA GT1 series at the start of the last decade with Munnich Motorsport - and in historics.
The Dutchman today combines his racing exploits with running his Pastorelli Classics concern that specialises in the restoration, preparation and maintenance of classic road-going and racing cars. And, although Pastorelli hasn’t raced a 300S himself, he completed extensive set-up work on an example owned by gentleman driver David Hart that he personally restored during an intensive eight-month period in the build-up to last year’s Monaco Historic Grand Prix.
The car was first built in 1956 and raced by Moss to second in the 1957 1000km of Buenos Aires World Sports Car Championship curtain-raiser (in My Cars, My Career, he recalled the bumpy Costanera track as “unmarked and dangerous – at one point cars were passing in opposite directions on the dual carriageway, only feet apart at 160mph”), then by Juan Manuel Fangio to victory in that year's Cuban Grand Prix.
Pastorelli was also involved in sourcing the car, viewing it together with Hart and drawing up a checklist of what would be necessary to return it to its original specification “because it was a bit modified over the years”. The restoration was a labour of love that paid off when Hart won the Goodwood Revival's Freddie March Trophy race.
“We really worked on that car seven days a week from 8am until 10pm,” says Pastorelli, whose vocation is the realisation of a long-held dream, having grown up spending time in his father’s workshop that specialised in Italian supercars. “But on a car like that, it doesn’t feel like work. Every minute that you spend on a car like that is a pleasure.
“And given the history of the car, you want to make it as nice as possible, as quick as possible, but you also want to keep as many original parts on the car as possible. Which is not always possible, but we managed to do that quite well.”
"A Lola T70 or a Ferrari 512M are much more spectacular to drive. But a car like that, that you have prepared yourself, gives a very special feeling which is very difficult to explain" Nicky Pastorelli
Pastorelli says “you can’t compare” the 300S to a modern high-downforce single-seater but reckons relative to the 2005 Jordan “to drive them fast, in the end they’re as difficult as the other”.
“It’s just a completely different way of driving,” he says, citing the need to be sensitive to the machinery. “With a classic car you really have to take care of the mechanical side to keep everything in one piece, for example the gearbox. You really have to take care of how you do the downshifts because it can break easily.
“That kind of problem you don’t have nowadays with a modern car. I did a lot of 24-hour GT races where you don’t really need to take care of the car other than the tyre wear. But in a classic car for a one-hour race, you already need to take care of the gearbox and everything.
“A Lola T70 or a Ferrari 512M are much more spectacular to drive. But a car like that, that you have prepared yourself, gives a very special feeling which is very difficult to explain.”
