The year was 1962 and I found myself watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports on television. Wide World of Sports did not feature mainstream sports but usually things like the world arm wrestling championship from Petaluma California, cliff diving from Acapulco or surfing from Hawaii.
On this day they had the Grand Prix of Monaco. Now I was already a bit of a car guy but mostly I was into Hot Rods and Detroit iron. I read ‘Cartoons’ Magazine and was a fan of guys like Big Daddy Roth. I built 1:25 scale models from AMT, my favorite being the ‘Double Dragster’ kit.
Suddenly I’m watching these little cigar-shaped cars running around the streets of this old town. My eyes were drawn to a red car being driven by a driver identified as the world champion Phil Hill an American! The car was a type 156 Ferrari known as the ‘shark nose’ It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen!
The racing was so much more exciting than American oval track racing that I had seen before on TV and by the end of the race I was hooked. As I got deeper into it I discovered that Ferrari had actual sports cars that also had shark noses and I was now at the magazine racks looking for photographs and race results from European road races. That eventually led me to Cobras and Ford GT’s and the rest, but my first loves were the 1962 Ferrari racing cars.
This model, by WERK83, is of the Ferrari 250 TR61 raced by the North American Racing Team at Le Mans in 1962.


































I find it reasonably well executed for the money but the truth is it is the paint job that drew me to get the model.