Word: alfieri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Oldtimers on the auto-racing circuit remember Alfieri Maserati as a querulous Latin who spent as much time crying the faults of cars as he did driving them. His dissatisfaction drove him and his brothers to building their own racers, and the cars were almost unbeatable. Maseratis have had their slow moments in the 30 years since; Alfieri is dead and his brothers have long since sold the factory. But the hand-tooled cars still carry the family name, and they are again almost unbeatable. Last week, as the racing season shifted noisily into high gear, the experts were already...
...continually critical as old Alfieri himself, Maserati's present owner, Adolfo Orsi, refuses to be satisfied, even with success. He got off to a fast start with one of last season's six-cylinder Grand Prix racers, which World Champion Juan Fangio drove to victory in the Argentine Grand Prix at Buenos Aires last month, setting a track record in the bargain. And Motorman Orsi is already tooling up a new twelve-cylinder racer...
Monster at Cremona. The new 300-h.p., 2.5-liter car develops 30 h.p. more than its smaller stablemate, ought to grind out an extra 6 m.p.h. on the fast tracks at Rheims and Monza. It is something of a throwback to the days when old Alfieri startled the road-racing fancy with his Sedici Cilindri a 16-cylinder job that set a 152.9 m.p.h. record at Cremona in 1929. But the Sedici Cilindri was a bastard car, with a power plant made of a pair of eight-cylinder engines, the two crankshafts coupled in a single gear...
Taste & Talent. A tour of duty tinkering with the great, slow-churning marine turbines of such ships as the Rex and the Conte di Savoia gave Alfieri a taste for hefty engines. At Maserati he is forever trying to balance his desire for a lot of cylinders with the racer's need for resistance to wear and tear. It took Giulio more than two years of arguing, pleading, cajoling, storming to convince Maserati's high brass that a twelve-cylinder engine was the logical evolution from their successful six-cylinder, 2.5-liter racer...
Keys to the Past. Cautious digging last fall in the soggy soil uncovered ancient wooden piles like those on which Venice is built. Among them were fragments of pottery that could have come only from the 5th century B.C. "All my doubts dissolved," said Dr. Alfieri. Other experts agreed, and last week Italian and foreign archaeologists were swarming to his diggings to see for themselves...