1/23/11
Art Taxman’s Ferraris

A fellow Ferrari owner lives in Miami, and I’ve been wanting to see his collection of cars for years. With an evening flight out on Sunday, I made plans to drive down to Miami for a day of Ferrari talk!

My friendship began with Art Taxman years ago when he contacted me through my website with questions about his GTE. He has owned SN2663 for 30 years, and it began the love affair with Vintage Ferraris. From my count, Art owns four Ferraris in various states of completion with 2663 at the top of the list. The blue Series I 330 parked next to the GTE in the picture is often spotted bombing around the streets of South Florida.

In Art’s house was a treasure trove of parts all dedicated to restoring, maintaining, and collecting Vintage Italian machinery. When Art isn’t at work, he’s trolling the pages of e-bay, looking and bidding.

He’s been trying to put together a complete Ferrari V-12 engine from parts he bought from all over the place. Occasionally he’ll find something pretty unique, like these castings of distributor angle drives.

We spent hours looking over his parts, and talking about all things mechanical. Here were were discussing the  Dunlop disc brake retractor mechanism. Art had a piston that was beyond repair and dissected the piston assembly to see the inside of the retractor. Here’s a picture of its inner workings.

I invited Zac Dugger of DGR Performance to join us, along with David Hodge, the owner of the GTC I’ve been working on for the last several months. We all agreed spending the afternoon crawling around old dusty cars was way more fun than going to the shows for the last few days!

Art had more cars stored in a warehouse which included this PF Coupe. He was driving it recently and broke some suspension pieces when he participated in an autocross! When was the last time you heard “PF Coupe” and “autocross” used in the same sentence?

This car has the original factory head rests. David Eichenbaum’s PF coupe that I’m currently working on does not have head rests, but I can feel the slots under the leather where these headrests would have gone.

One interesting conversation we had was on the subject of Replica Ferraris. Many 2+2 Ferraris were sacrificed in the past to make replicas of more desirable models. Pontoon fendered Testarossas, or California Spyders were created from the chassis, engine, and mechanicals of GTEs and 330GT 2+2s. Art purchased a wrecked GTE with the intention of making one of these replicas, but recently changed his mind. We’re not condemning the practice (I have good friends that own or have built replicas), but would love to see more people saving these 2+2s than chopping them up. Here’s a video of our conversation.

I have some more videos that I taped and will post in the future. Please let me know what you think!

Reminder: If you have a Ferrari related project, car, or idea you’d like to explore, I’d love to talk to you. I can also help if you’re thinking of buying or selling. This website represents what I love to do, share, and how I make a living, so if you’d like to do something together, let me know. It all begins with an e-mail!

Save the Date! Fourth Annual Radcliffe/Tomyang.net Spring Car Show on Saturday May 7th 2011. Richard Garre and I are looking forward to planning this show and more details will follow here and the Radcliffe Motorcar Company Website, but if you want to mark you calendar, the date to remember is May 7th, 2011!

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