Scuderia Serenissima
The Scuderia Serenissima was an Italian racing team, which was founded in the late 1950s by Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata.
Nomenclature
Starting in 1962, the team went under the name Scuderia SSS Repubblica di Venezia at the start and is under this name in the Meldlisten of international sports car racing. The three SSS stand for the identically worded letters in the word Serenissima. The word means Serenissima in the Italian translation " The Most Serene ", and was in a historical context very often the description of the city of Venice.
Racing commitments with customers' cars
First, the Scuderia involved in sports car races, where she used mainly customers cars from Ferrari.
In addition, the team participated in the Formula 1 season 1961 at two Grand Prix events. Once the team appeared with a Cooper -Maserati, which was driven by Maurice Trintignant, and the Grand Prix of France 1961 was a De - Tomaso chassis that was powered by a OSCA engine, reported for Nino Vaccarella. These inserts were unsuccessful.
The development of own vehicles
The connection to Ferrari broke off when Volpi 1961 financially to the Automobili Turismo e Sport Project (ATS) involved, which was recently founded by a number of former Ferrari employees and aimed at the Scuderia Ferrari with its own developed sports and racing cars to compete. Volpi left the company after only a few months and instead tried to build a race car production with his own Scuderia Serenissima. The first was the legendary Ferrari Breadvan, an unusual, developed by Giotto Bizzarrini after Volpis ideas coupe based on the Ferrari 250 GTO, which had been dressed by Piero Drogo and completed by Neri e Bonacini. The Breadvan was sensational sometimes referred the works Ferraris on the courts.
In 1963, Giovanni Volpi, the company Automobili Serenissima, one's own race cars and engines produced until 1970 in single copies. Series production of the car did not come by today on the majority opinion. From each type, only one copy was made, some drivers have been successively provided with different bodies. The name of the vehicles is not uniform. Overall, the car of Automobili Serenissima still surrounds the aura of mystery because not all issues have been resolved automotive history.
McLaren - Serenissima
A wider public, the Scuderia Serenissima thus known that the Italian eight-cylinder engine was used in three Grand Prix in the Formula 1 season in 1966 by the young team McLaren. In the Grand Prix of Belgium and the Netherlands failed Bruce McLaren, who was driving his car himself, with the McLaren M2B respectively to motor defects, the Grand Prix of Great Britain but he was sixth, achieving a championship point for the Serenissima engine. Regardless, McLaren turned yet in the current season to Ford engines.