That's the one, although I think it is spelled Maserari. 2 points for you as this one has been unsolved for 9 months.
The web site where I found it seems to be down but this is what Graham McRae wrote about the car.......
The Maserari I would have started when I was 17. The first car I built was when I was 15, in my father’s Miramar workshop. Two main rails and actually made of boiler tube. The only engine I could actually find to buy was an A70 in a wrecking yard and I probably paid £50 pounds for it. It had an old Jaguar gearbox out of an SS model, with a detachable bell housing, so I made a steel fabricated one. I did all that work myself. It didn’t matter how long it took, because I had so little money that I couldn’t get on to the next part of the project.
I never put a body on it. I drove it only as a chassis and started to hone my driving skills in it. I just drove it on the road. It was a real learning curve, because I souped up the A70 engine. The thing was reasonably quick, with a couple of inch and three quarter SUs on it. Although I had it muffled it wasn’t well liked by the local cops. No tickets though. I used to get up early in the morning and go round Shelley Bay, from the airport the other way, not towards town. The only thing you came across was the odd fisherman out early in the morning.
It had a Renault rear end, but I didn’t use it as a swing axle. Sure enough I twisted all the axles up and continued to have to weld them and put them back together until I decided I was taking the whole wrong approach and I should start from scratch and I got my Model A Ford and cut that up.
I decided to scrap it and build a tubular chassis, multi tube chassis and I made everything, the steering wheel, made all the little rivets and everything.
Aesthetics were everything to me. I drew the shape I wanted on some white paper and laid it out in the living room floor. So the Maserari was drawn and I started construction on the chassis and also on the body. I got conduit and welded up a frame of the shape of the body and then hung wire mesh over it, then plastered the whole thing with plaster of paris, then used a wood plane to get the shape I wanted. I painted it and I was going to use the mould for fibreglass. Id I got to make doors for this Maserari in fibreglass, but my fibreglass remained sticky - it was early years. I didn’t know too much about it. Finally I approached a man by the name of Jack Patterson to see if he would role me up an aluminium body - so the full size plaster of paris mould was loaded onto the truck and taken round to his factory where he used as a buck to make the body. It cost £400 pounds. That was a lot of money, because I was only getting 4 pounds a week.
I wanted to go out and win races, but it wasn’t a race car purely. It was obviously lighter than a production car, but not everything was the right weight on it. I mean the Austin A70 engine can’t have had a good power weight ratio. I found that pretty soon I got used to the power and decided the only way I could get horsepower was to supercharge the engine so I looked around for a supercharger. They were all too expensive and probably not very readily available, so I got an aircraft cabin blower. I made an oil bath on the front of it, encased the gears in oil and made the pulleys and everything. I calculated the capacity of the rotors and came up with 9lbs of boost and it went a lot better. An Austin A70 was 2.2 litres, it was probably about 70 horsepower and souped up it might have been 100. With the blower, it might have been 150 horsepower.
I still had narrow wheels on the thing. I realised the brakes I had were no good so I had to make my own brakes. I think in this picture it has still got the original cast wheels.
I cut the linings, I made them up in segments all round the shoe and made them two leading shoe. By the time I got all that done, disc brakes were out. so I scrapped all my hard work and put in Daimler Dart disc brakes along with Austin A95 wheels. They had the slots in the outside and looked good. I widened the wheels. I believe I was the first person to widen the wheels. Split them in the lathe and then wrapped up some steel and welded them in.
By the time I raced Maserari I had finished my apprenticeship, I started making a lot more money then, I would have been Twenty Two. The first time I took the A70 to Levin the oil lines were made of plastic. Big mistake for me and whilst they were adequate to drive around the streets, they sucked flat whilst racing and it threw a rod. The Maserari was a lot of fun. I was proud of it, but I wanted more power, and went for a Lycoming aircraft engine. It was purely racing with that kind of engine, but there were just too many problems. I ultimately sold it. One of the problems was it doesn’t rev up so you have a limited top speed. I then put a Humber 80 (Hillman Minx) engine in the Maserari and the starter motor worked all the time and I enjoyed it. As life went on, I didn’t have any transport to go to the movies or do anything so ultimately the Maserari was sold and I bought a Humber 80 because I already knew about the Humber engine.
