RECALLING WILLIE’S DINO DAYS
It was great to read Simon Hucknall’s article about Willie Green in the December 2023 issue. Willie was indeed a hero to anyone who watched historic motorsport in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, and his exploits in various Maserati 250Fs was legendary.
However, it would be untrue to say that he ‘hunted down 246 Dinos’ while driving a 250F in 1976. The first 246 Dino to enter historic racing was chassis number 0003 in 1979. This was the car brought to the UK by Anthony Bamford from the USA, where it had resided in Luigi Chinetti’s New York showroom since the early 1960s. When it was entered into historic racing by Bamford it was driven by Willie himself, and with huge success. It was, in reality, a 250F-beater, a more sophisticated and advanced front-engined Formula One car – indeed, the last to win a Grand Prix, though this was the sister car, chassis 0007, at Monza in 1960.
It is the 246 Dino, not a 250F, in which Willie is photographed sitting on the Silverstone grid in the full-page portrait in the article.
Incidentally, the freewheeling Ferrari pictured elsewhere in the piece is not a Ferrari Dino 246S, as captioned, but a V12 Testa Rossa – another Bamford-owned car that Willie drove with his usual aplomb back in the early 1980s.
As an aside, I came across the enclosed photograph (left) in my late father’s archive the other day and thought it made an interesting postscript. It is of Willie receiving the winner’s spoils – as he so often did – at Silverstone or possibly Crystal Palace. At a guess it is the early 1970s, and he was driving the JCB-entered Maserati Tipo 60 ‘Birdcage’.
I don’t know who took the photo or who the man pouring the Champagne is, but the women wearing the unnecessarily skimpy leopard-print outfits were representing my father’s cigar business at the time, which had probably sponsored the race.
Charles Holland
Via email
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