Jeff O’Neill of Marin County, Calif., 63, owner of the Robert Hall Winery and founder of the Sonoma Speed Festival, on his 1960 Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage, as told to A.J. Baime.
When I was young, I created a list of dream cars, and most had one thing in common. I am fascinated by cars that exemplify game-changing technology during the era when they were built. Among these was the Maserati Birdcage, a car built purely for racing.
What made this car so revolutionary was its chassis. Normally a car would be built with a traditional frame that would hold the engine, the brakes, etc., and a body would be put on top. The Birdcage was different. The Maserati brothers—a team of brothers obsessed with speed and racing cars, who owned a factory in Modena, Italy—put together roughly 200 small tubes to construct a chassis, so without the body on top, the car looked kind of like a birdcage. Thus, the nickname Birdcage stuck.
The chassis weighed remarkably little. The brothers were able to mount a 2.9-liter, four-cylinder engine in the Tipo 61 version and keep the center of gravity very low to the ground, so the car handled better than anything in its class. This is kind of like what engineers of our era have done with carbon fiber. It was revolutionary for its era. At the time, all of Italy was enthralled by the rivalry between Maserati and Ferrari, whose factories were relatively near each other. The Birdcage made Maserati a winner.
Some years ago, I started keeping my eye on auctions all over the globe, and in 2013, the car you see here appeared for sale in England. It had an interesting history: It was originally owned by an American racing driver named Lloyd “Lucky” Casner, whose racing team name, Camoradi, stood for Casner Motor Racing Division. The car competed in its first race in 1960, at the Nürburgring in Germany, and Casner raced it at Le Mans that year. So few of these Birdcages were ever built, and it is rare to see one come up for auction. I bought the car sight unseen and had it shipped to California.
I am a huge fan of preserving important cars like the Birdcage. I also race my vintage cars because I love to and because I think owners of cars like these have an obligation to let others experience them. In this car’s class in vintage races today, you will see the same cars it raced against in the early 1960s: Ferrari Testa Rossas, Porsches and Aston Martins. These are some of the most beautiful cars ever built. It is one thing to share these cars in a static display. But to present them doing what they were built to do, so that people can see them, hear them and smell them—that is another thing.
I love this car because it was a winner in its time, because of its beauty, because it is so fun to drive, and also because of what it represents—human imagination and ingenuity.
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