Over one-hundred enthusiasts answered the call of the Maserati Club to take part in the '1st Trofeo Maserati Club' a week-end of festivities and track action, held on 1st and 2nd April.

The Trofeo Maserati Club attracted forty Trident cars of all ages, ranging from Corrado Cuppellini’s early Tipo 26 racing model to the very latest GranSport and Spyder CambioCorsa. The star entry of the weekend was an ex-Le Mans Birdcage Tipo 63, a thundering machine which vowed the crowd in Modena’s Parco Novi Sad, stage of the first day regularity trials. The Club had in fact joined forces with the organisers of the Modena Historic Challenge, which has formed part of the Modena Terra di Motori celebrations every year since 2002.

On the informal oval racecourse made more challenging by the addition of various chicanes, it was the Coupé of Antonello Mele which obtained the best result of the Maserati entrants, in front of two classics, both 3500 GT Vignale Spiders.
 

The races ended late in the afternoon, and the day was wrapped up with a gala dinner at the famous Montana restaurant in Maranello, where the walls are adorned with countless racing artefacts. Where else could you eat surrounded by the helmets and autographed pictures or racing suits from virtually all the most important Formula 1 drivers since the 1970s?

Sunday was entirely spent at the Fiorano race track in splendid sunshine, where participants had the rare opportunity to accomplish full laps from 9:30 in the morning till after 6pm. Divided in groups of five, each team took to the track several times and with two timed sessions establishing the regularity classification. Daniele Bossi won in the classics category with his resplendent Merak, whereas the moderns were led by Giuseppe Benanti in his Spyder. His best time would have put him only in fourth place among the classics, but then classic car owners are understandably more familiar with the regularity formula.

The colourful display was highlighted by the presence of a racing 200 S and a pair of silver Quattroportes both from 1968, but Igor Zanasi impressed the most by bringing two cars to the event: a magnificent A6G 2000 Frua Spider of which only a handful were built, and a recreation of the mighty sixteen-cylinder V5 Grand Prix Maserati of 1932. The car was built with painstaking care around a 5-litre engine originally mounted in a powerboat for record attempts. As it was used then in parallel with an identical unit, its rotation is inverted, a particularity which caused a few headaches during the reconstruction process. Running superbly throughout the day, this impressive machine delighted all present, from the legendary lady driver Maria Teresa De Filippis to Maserati’s one and only Ermanno Cozza.