TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

Today’s image, a Cisitalia D46 in front of an Alfa TZ2, with tons of talent all around.

This image features a large chunk of the top talent that was in place on Paradise Drive in 2009, and strikes me as appropriate timing, because I’m currently finishing up some work on an Abarth… a car from the company that acquired Cisitalia’s assets when it went bankrupt.

From left to right, Tom Smith (RIP), an ace fabricator that spent ages working for Indy car teams when he wasn’t a roadie for the Grateful Dead. The stories that guy had to tell were really something. Also, he liked cats and took good care of strays that he encountered. And vintage go-karts, for some reason.

Rolly Boorman came to work at Reilly’s after I’d been there for a bit, and he worked next to me on the north facing bench, taking orders from Ivan the Terrible. Rolly’s good nature meant he never seemed to cross horns with Ivan, where as I had a time or two where we almost came to blows… two guys that liked to argue and didn’t like to concede a point! Rolly managed to put his two kids through private school in Marin County, CA, which means he had remarkable skills beyond being a reliable mechanic. He reminded me a little of Mr. Rogers. So damn nice, all the time!

Chuck Mathewson, one of the longest term employees of Phil Reilly and Co, and one of the last of the old guard associated with Paradise Drive. I once rode to the Monterey Historics with Chuck in his Toyota Prius, and let me tell you, he knows how to get every last inch out of a drop of gasoline! I also watched him make a radiator top tank from flat sheets of brass to copy the Ferrari factory-stamped item for a 250 LM that we restored after it was wrecked at Le Mans. Mad skills. His hands were responsible for solving over 35 years of difficult fabrication challenges. The Cisitalia in this study had a broken suspension mount on the frame, which got expertly replaced with new metal.

The clockwise rotation comes to Zeke Prince, on the floor under the back of the Cisitalia. Zeke was an especially talented mechanic. Around this time, he was also working on a Sunbeam Tiger V12 from a car that was pretty important to British motoring history, a Seagraves land speed record car, I think? He also took one of the Bugatti T57 engines that I had assembled to the dyno, and got it to almost touch 300 hp on alcohol.

Around the loop to the back, behind the Alfa, Brian Madden bought the business from the old partners prior to 2014 and continues the pursuit of keeping the old cars alive and cultivating the passion for them, at a new location in Penngrove, CA about 25 minutes north of the old stomping grounds.

Here are a few shots of this rare old Italian racer.