Jon Shirley Collection – Interview and Profile

Interview by Dennis Gray | Photos by Gray unless noted

Jon Shirley makes good decisions whether finding and buying one-off Ferrari 375MMs or guiding Microsoft through its initial public offering.

The son of Navy man, Shirley was born in 1938 and moved with his family in 1941 to a little known place named Pearl Harbor. After the bombing, with his family thankfully well, they moved across the country according to the needs of the Navy. Jon attended a boarding school in Pennsylvania and later enrolled at MIT. Then he decided to leave college.

The company for which Shirley left MIT was a relatively small but growing electronics supply store called Radio Shack. There, Shirley’s uncanny knack for making wise decisions would carry him up corporate ladder and lead him to the Tandy corporation and then Microsoft, where he served as President from 1983-1990 as well as a member of Microsoft’s Board of Directors until 2008.

Sports Car Digest Publisher Jamie Doyle and Senior Photographer Dennis Gray sat down to interview Jon Shirley about his decisions of another sort. Namely, those that have led to his overwhelmingly impressive collection of vintage Ferraris, Alfa Romeos and significant sports racers from the ’50s and ’60s. An accomplished vintage racer and well regarded restorer of concours winning automobiles, Shirley knows as much about vintage cars as he does the computer business and his interview does not disappoint.

Sports Car Digest: Give us a short history of Jon Shirley.

Jon Shirley: I was born in San Diego. My dad was in the Navy. We were transferred from San Diego to Honolulu in mid-1941 and got bombed in December and sent home the day before Christmas. We lived all over the place; a lot on the east coast. I ended up going to a boys prep school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania called the Hill School and then to MIT. I didn’t graduate from MIT. I left and went to work for Radio Shack which got bought by Charles Tandy. We clicked. I told him I’d like to open a store for him someplace. So he sent me out to California and I opened the twenty-third RadioShack store in San Leandro, California and then became a district manager. I got sent to Europe to start opening stores and I was the vice president in the computer side of the business. I was hired by Bill Gates in 1983 as President of Microsoft. So I spent seven years in that job and decided there was a whole mess of other things that I wanted to do with my life and left the company full time but stayed on the board of directors which I only retired from a couple of years ago. I stayed on 25 years.

SCD: What was your first car?

JS: It was a Sunbeam Alpine that I bought used. I waited until I was 25 because in those days you could rent cars when you were in your early 20s at the same price. Even though the insurance for a male under the age of 25 in Boston was astronomical. Plus, finding a place to put the car was difficult. I drove the car the entire US to California when I went to open up the store. I liked the car a lot. I didn’t like the rear fins, but other than that it was a pretty nice little car.

SCD: When did you get serious about collecting cars?

JS: I started collecting in about the time that I left Microsoft. At that point I already had a three-car garage next to my house that one of the bays got turned into a workshop. For quite awhile I was pretty hands on and the collection gradually started to grow. I already had a couple of Ferraris and then when 1990 came and prices collapsed it was a really good time to buy cars and that’s when I really started. I rented space next door. It had a little office in it that might have been used for something else and we just took it the way it was. The rest of it was open. I don’t know what they’d been doing in there; screen doors or something like that. That was where the collection grew until it got just so jammed in there. You want to go drive something and you had to move four cars to get one out or more.

SCD: So you moved here?

JS: This was an empty lot. Then a sign came up one day—one of those land use signs—and I called the number on the sign. He was a developer. He was going to do either a spec warehouse or build to suit and I said show me your designs for your spec warehouse and we simply modified it. The roof wouldn’t have been this way with what he was doing. He would have had double sets of pillars. This is a fancier roof to get the span and cut down the number of pillars. But otherwise it’s got a loading door down there and it’s got knockouts in the concrete walls so someday it could have three loading doors. It could be two businesses or whatever in here.

SCD: What was the first car you bought for your collection?

JS: It’s kind of funny because you sort of have to say: “Was I buying for the collection or not?” I guess the first car would have been the Testa Rossa, which was the first older Ferrari that I bought. I do not own that anymore, but that was really the beginning of what’s here. And then I just started to see what was around and the [Ferrari 275 GTB/4] NART Spyder was part of a three-car deal. It included the Daytona Spyder which was a one-owner car, and a 400 Superamerica Pininfarina Cabriolet. I kind of just found things here and there like the [1954 Ferrari 375 MM] Rossellini car that was in parts in France. That was a great buy. It was difficult to get, but well worth the effort.

SCD: Why did you buy the particular cars in your collection?

JS: Well, the collection is almost two collections. One of them is Ferraris and Alfas. The other one is sports cars from the 50s and 60s that I either owned, got the chance to drive, or wanted to own. So that includes things like the two Jags, the Cobra, and the 300SLs. But the thought process on the Ferraris and the Alfas is the same sort of the process we do with the art collection. I wanted to buy things that were “museum standard.” I just wanted to get cars that had really good histories if they were racecars, or that were reasonably unique. So the long wheel based California Spider is a competition car. The NART Spider—even though they are very rare to begin with—was the second one made and it’s one of only two made out of alloy. The Maserati was a factory team racecar that ran in the Mille Miglia for the factory. The 166 had a famous race history, both in Europe in ‘49 and in the United States in ‘50 and ‘51. It was the first Ferrari to win a race in the State of California when it won the race at Palm Springs. The GTO is an English GTO. It’s spent all its life in England, but it was raced by Graham Hill, Richie Ginther, Roy Salvadori and Jack Sears, of course, who later bought the car after it stopped racing and made it his daily driver for 29 years. So it wasn’t a Le Mans car but it had a great race history in England. That’s kind of what I try to do. I like to get cars…significant I guess is one way to put it.

SCD: Does emotion influence your purchases?

JS: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I think so. I think that…some cars like the Rossellini car was the greatest no-brainer of all time. When I had the chance to buy the car I was going to get that car because I thought it was one of the most beautiful Ferraris ever made. It’s won best in show at the factory in the 60th anniversary of Maranello. It won best road car which I thought was really a great award for the car. It won best of show in at the Ferrari Nationals and a bunch of awards. But yeah I…why do I have a 289 Cobra and why do I have a Gullwing? The first time I saw them I just thought they were fantastic. The 289 is just a fantastic little car because the engine doesn’t weight enough to really upset the whole car. There isn’t that much lump up there compared to the old Bristol engine that they put in them. Shelby did a great job with the way they sorted that car out.

SCD: Any others?

JS: When the E-type was introduced in the United States I was living in Boston. I was in New York on business with a friend. We didn’t have anything to do that afternoon I guess so we said let’s go to the Coliseum and see the car show. We read something that there’d be a new Jaguar there. It took us an hour to get from the edge of the crowd into where you could actually see the car. I understand now why the crowd was in there. To me it was the most spectacular car. You have to think back to that year. That was what? 61? That was an amazing automobile in 1961 and I just fell in love with that too.

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SCD: What leads you to sell a car?

JS: I’ve sold three really great cars. I sold a 375MM that was one of the three 340s. It was the top finisher Ferrari in the Carrera Panamericana in 1953, and clinched the World Sports Car Championship on points and finished behind the three Lancias that were led by Fangio. It was driven by two amateur racecar drivers. They weren’t professionals, although one of them went on to become the head of the Italian version of the FIA. The 375MM was very heavy. It had three four-barrel carburetors. It starved whenever you went around a corner hard and the car wheezed and gasped but there’s no fix for those. They were the only really bad carburetors probably ever made. And I did do some good rallies with it. We had some fun with it and then I just decided it wasn’t going to get driven much. The second car was just not a track car. The 290MM had the best race history of any car that I’ve had, and probably one of the best race histories of any Ferrari because it spent a year and a half as a factory team car. I think I listed 15 or 16 drivers that included Wolfgang von Trips, Fangio Phil Hill, Jean Behra, and Castellotti. It took a second in the Mille Miglia. It was a very good car, but again, there are only four of them. It had an absolutely irreplaceable engine in it. If you ever blew it I don’t know what you’d do. I did do the Colorado Grand in it and I did vintage race it, and then I just… I had the opportunity to get the Blue Alfa and so basically I sort of reached a level of investment in this stuff that I said I don’t really think I want to put more money into it. So what I would do is I would sell something because there were things that I wanted to buy. The two Alfas and the Maserati all came from the sale of those two cars. So that to me felt really good. And to buy the Alfas when I did was really a very good move because Alfas lagged Ferraris in appreciation and those cars have appreciated a great deal.

SCD: And the Testa Rossa you just sold?

JS: When I vintage race, that and the 300S are in the same class.

SCD: And?

JS: And I just liked the 300S better. It hasn’t been restored. In some ways it has, but it’s never been restored to show. It’s been restored to race. I just enjoy racing it more. It’s better on the track, especially the short tracks that we race on. It just seemed like we’ve done so much with the [Testa Rossa] because I vintage raced it for three and a half years before we did the restoration and I vintage raced it a little bit after the restoration. But it was still just so nice. If someone wanted to show it—like it take it to Villa d’Este or something like that—they’d probably do very well. It’s probably a class winner over there or it’s an automatic entry into almost any event that calls for cars of no older than 1957.

SCD: Speaking of racing, how did you start?

JS: I started racing at about 1995. I’d been introduced to Pete Lovely and Butch Dennison who at that time were jointly Pete Lovely Motorsports. Butch had a Lotus 18 that had been wrecked. He put it all back together and said “you should vintage race this thing.” So that’s how I started vintage racing; in that car.

SCD: Any training along the way?

JS: Oh yeah. First I went to Bondurant and then I did Russell when he was still at Laguna Seca. Then I took his advanced course after he’d moved to Sears Point. So I had three pretty extensive racecourse trainings and I got a lot of help from Pete Lovely just hanging around. Sometimes his Lotus would be in the same class with me, like down at Coronado and he’d follow me around for a couple of laps. He made me so damn nervous that I realized what he was doing. Then I just pointed by him and he’d take off like a rocket ship. But the more you do it the better you get at it. The seat time just makes all the difference in the world. Now I mostly just race the P3 which which I really love to race, and the Maserati.

SCD: Oooh. The Alfa P3. What’s the story?

JS: The car is probably the most famous Alfa P3 in the world. We don’t know any of the race history of the car in 1934. It was one of the Ferrari team cars and there’s no way to tie which car to which race. In 1935 they took three of the P3s and they put on the Dubonnet front suspension. They changed them to hydraulic brakes from mechanical brakes and were trying to keep up with the Germans. By that time, Hitler was pouring money into Auto Union and Mercedes and they were producing really fantastic cars with exotic fuels. Ferrari was just a little guy who put a team together with four investors. The car went to Nurburgring in 1935 being driven by Tazio Nuvolari and he beat all the German cars in the German Gran Prix. It was such a shock that they didn’t even have the Italian National Anthem to play and his mechanic had a 78 in his case someplace and they played the Italian National Anthem. The official German guys who were there were very glum about the whole thing, but the crowd thought it was the most amazing thing they’d ever seen. Nuvolari said the applause was deafening. So he made it a very, very famous car and the reason we know is that there were photographs taken when the hood was up and the serial number could be seen so it absolutely tied down which car it was. After that the car ended up in the hands of Salvadori. It was scooted out of the country and got to England and then it ended up down in New Zealand and was raced a lot in New Zealand and some in Australia after the war. This car raced forever and it won. It was winning races in New Zealand right into the ’50s as long as you could figure out how to keep this thing running—which is no small trick because it runs on alcohol and you have to start it with one set of plugs and run it with a different set of plugs. God knows, up to very recently we only started it…it was made to start on gasoline. There’s a little gas tank and then you switched over to the ethanol and changed the plugs.

It went through a variety of owners and ended up in the hands of a man who at one point owed almost all the P3s that there were. He was putting quite a collection together. Then I don’t know, I think he decided to buy real estate in Tokyo and he sold off most of the cars. A lot of his cars came back to the United States. So I was very lucky to get this car when it showed up. It’s an amazingly fun car to drive. I mean, you’ll never ever see me at the level it could be driven. Peter Giddings probably comes as close to doing that as anybody does; Peter Greenfield sometimes. But they have just huge torque; just incredible torque. You drive around…this is still a three speed transmission and the first gear is unusable on the track. So it’s a two speed gearbox. I think Peter Giddings has a four speed gearbox.

SCD: Yeah, he does.

JS: With that extra gear going around turn 11 at Laguna Seca it would be really helpful because I came out of that and it coughs a couple of times before I even really get the power onto it and get it to go up the hill. But I have a good time.

SCD: Tell us more about running the P3.

JS: The P3 we don’t run just on straight methanol. We put in…there’s some lubricant in it. There is a little bit of gasoline in it. There is a little bit of, I think, nitro or something. They try to get it to lubricate better and to get the plugs to fire clean. You’ve got to get some lubricating in there if you can because there’s absolutely nothing in just the pure alcohol. We have no idea what they ran. I think it wasn’t very sophisticated. The Germans were highly sophisticated in what they did. We see pictures of them and they were wearing biohazard suits or the equivalent of that in those days. So that must have been some pretty evil stuff.

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SCD: What races stand out?

JS: You know, the first time I took the car to Laguna Seca for the Historics I had a really good race. I won the class. I did really well and I was challenged. There were a couple of pretty fast Bugattis of that same era. The bigger engine Bugattis were something to deal with, with good drivers, but I managed to get around everybody and that’s probably the one that I remember the most. I’ve had a lot in it. I had two seconds this year in it. I even drove it here in Seattle at the July 4th Historics that they have every year. I beat an injected solid axle Corvette. The guy had a lot of excuses afterwards, but I still beat him.

SCD: Tell us more about your blue Alfa Romeo 8C 2900.

JS: Well, the car was made for an engineer at an Italian company. I don’t know why the company bought him a supercar because that’s what it was in those days. It was about as expensive and as fast and as technical as anything you could buy in the world. It’s one of 42 made or something like that. It was very carefully taken care of. Just before the war they put it in Switzerland. It stayed in Switzerland and it was there when Griswold came over he was the Weber distributor for the United States and was trying to do some stuff with Alfas. He found this car. He bought the car, brought it to the states, took it to the 1948 first Watkins Glen street race and won. Then the car passed through a variety of owners until it got to David Cohen who at the time was at in South Africa. David kept the car for a long time. He sent it up to England to get it worked on a couple of times. I believe Terry Hoyle worked on the car. Then he moved to Canada, Vancouver, and brought the car with him and drove the car a lot. The car was really driven a lot. It was shown some, but just as it was. I had seen the car when we transported it along with one of my racecars way back in the 90s to Watkins Glen. I didn’t race there, but I did race at Road America. So I caught up with the trailer at Road America and my car was on it. They unloaded the Alfa just to put it out there and let people look at it. So I got kind of interested in it and Butch Dennison told me all about it. When I got back I asked David are you ever going to sell it and he, of course, said no. So I said, “if you do, and I’m still alive, then I’d like to be the first person that hears about it” and he said “okay.” When he decided to sell it he contacted Stephen Bayne who was Pete Lovely’s partner in a lot of things including the Seattle dealership for Ferrari called Grand Prix Motors. Stephen said, “You do remember that you told Jon that he had first right.” David said, “Oh yeah you’re right. Call Jon for me.” We did a deal on the phone. He said he had three days. I said I don’t need three days. We decided to drive E-type on a run and so my wife and I drove up to Vancouver and signed the paperwork and that was that. Then we owned the car.

Again, we did a little driving in it before we restored it. We took it on the Mille Miglia, which was great fun, and then did the restoration on the car. Since then it went on the Alfa 8C tour between winning best in show at Pebble Beach and then going to Villa d’Este where it won; the first car ever to win all three awards that are given there which are: Best in Show by the judges, Participants Choice which are the people that go there on Saturday, including the press, and then People’s Choice which is the Sunday public. And it rained all day that day. It just poured that Sunday and I was amazed. The place was full of Italians. They all just came out. That’s where you could go buy a ticket to go in. We knew that we had already been given the other two awards and you could just tell the way people were milling around the car. They just kept coming to look at the car and you’d see them come back to look at the car. They all had their ballot and the car won, which had never happened before. It was always the people never agreed with the participants, or even the judges sometimes. You would get three different cars would win the award. So that was great fun.

SCD: What’s your favorite Pre-War Car?

JS: The best single car you could own? I mean, I’d probably stick with my blue Alfa although it’s not a racecar. I think it’s as good a pre-war car as you can own. If I’m going to drive a pre-war racecar I’ve got the [Alfa Romeo P3]. If I couldn’t drive this [Alfa P3] for some reason I’ll drive the 8C2300. I had a lot of fun with that. I can go back in the pack and I can mix it up with all kinds of different cars because it’s not [as powerful]. Tom’s engine is really very good in his cars. It’s got more grunt than I do for sure, but I don’t want to mess with it. It works just fine. We rally it a lot.

SCD: How about your favorite Post-War car?

JS: Oh, you know it’s sort of like if there was a fire and I could only get one car out of here what would I take out? My favorite car is whatever I’m driving at the time, frankly. It’s really hard to say. I mean, do you grab the Rossellini car when you’ve got a GTO sitting over there? I don’t know.

SCD: Correct us if we’re wrong, but didn’t the Rossellini do better at Pebble Beach than any other Post-War car?

JS: That’s correct. When the Rossellini was at Pebble it got more votes for first in class than any car had ever gotten. I believe at some time in the next five or ten years a postwar car is going to win. So if somebody really wanted to win they should buy that car from me, freshen it up, take it back. It’s been long enough that in another five years or so that you could bring it back. It might win. If you’re going win with a postwar car it better be something that they made a very tiny number of and that’s really good because it’s one. It’s got a lot going for it, but I think there’s definitely some other postwar cars. There’s an absolutely beautiful Bertone-made 250 GT that’s owned by Lorenzo Zambrano. It’s a coupe. It’s got a split front grill. It’s split into two halves.

SCD: Like the Sharknose 156 F1 car.

JS: Yeah, and it’s a one of a kind, and it’s absolutely dead drop gorgeous. I mean, he showed up with that car against me at a Ferrari National event and I knew I was not going to win the class. That was back when they had the one, two, three in class. He won the class and I got second, but to me that’s a very special, interesting, early enough car, and there’s others like that and they’re not all Ferraris for that matter.

SCD: Do you tune your own cars?

JS: I am not someone who is going to come in and tell you that you ought to change the front springs. I don’t have that kind of a feel for the car. I can come in and complain and Butch will try to talk me through it: “Okay, you go through a corner, tell me everything that goes on. If you spun out, what happened?” I found Pete Lovely was the guy to get to do things like that, but I’ve worked on the cars. I’ve done just about everything that you can do. I wasn’t involved in running a milling machine or a lathe or something like that, but I have totally stripped and put engines back together again and I’ve done brake jobs on some of the old Ferraris. I don’t do much of that anymore. I guess it’s partly just physical. You know. Your back starts to really hurt when you’re underneath a car for too long.

SCD: Which restorations stand out?

JS: We did that [NART Spider] ourselves. That was the only one I ever did myself. We took it down to Pebble Beach and got third in class. We’d never shown before but we won six firsts after that. That third was still better than any of the firsts. It’s only amateur hour and you’re there in a class of ten Ferrari’s. We didn’t win anything at the Ferrari Nationals over at the Hyatt and the next day we took the car over there [to Pebble Beach] and won third in class.

SCD: Favorite tracks?

JS: I’d have to say that my favorite track is Mont Tremblant; Lawrence Stroll’s track. It’s a very challenging track and it’s got a little bit of everything because it’s really high speed, and has blind corners. It’s got a couple of very slow corners, especially that one that loops you back onto the little straight. It’s got a very fast back straight. It’s got fast corners, very slow corners. You go underneath that bridge. It’s just a beautiful place. I like Road America a lot also. I’d say those are probably my two favorite tracks.

SCD: Have you driven both the 300S and the Testa Rossa at Mont Tremblant?

JS: Yes I have. I’ve driven them both at Mont Tremblant.

SCD: Thoughts?

JS: I think the 300S is an easier car to drive. It likes to go around corners a bit more than the Testa Rossa does. If you got a situation where all out top speed is going to be important, the fact that you’re a six cylinder car versus a 12 cylinder car, even though they’re both three liters I think top speed will make a difference, but you’ve got more torque coming out of corners with the 300S which makes it a bit easier to get on it sooner and control the way it drifts. I just think if Maserati had more money they would have really been a tough fight for Ferrari in those particular years because the 200 is the same thing. I mean, as a two-liter car they’re just a fantastic little cars and they really, really are quick.

SCD: Any other favorite car and track combinations?

JS: Well, I’d say the GTO at Road America was absolutely fantastic. That was…and I was in a learning phase with that car at the time because I hadn’t really run the track much and just learning things like how fast you can go through the carousel there was just like another world to me. Geeze, I burned up a whole gear and discovered that I still adhesion because it’d come flying out and go down and scare yourself to death at the kink. That was a great combination. And, actually, of the tracks on the west coast Infineon is my favorite by far. I don’t know why. Most people would pick Laguna Seca over Infineon, but I just always feel tuned in there. I love to drive the P3 there. I love to drive the Maserati there. They’re both really good. At Mont Tremblant it can be anything. It just doesn’t matter. Old car, new car, the challenges are the same no matter what kind of a car you have.

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SCD: What about rallies?

JS: My wife and I do rallies. My wife right now is in Tuscany doing a rally that is only ladies with some very famous people including Alma Hill; Phil Hill’s wife. Mary is driving a 1957 Eldorado Biarritz convertible. It’s candy apple red, red and white leather seats. The Italians have fallen in love with the car. She sent me a photograph. I have it on my iPhone of the parking lot and the car is parked next to a brand new Bugatti Veyron—however you say that word—Veyron. And I thought that was pretty cute. And then over on the side is Netty Mason’s GTO, and some pre-war cars, and there’s just a couple of little Alfas and stuff like that. Anyway, that’s what we do. We show them and I vintage race them. I just did the Colorado Grand with my son and they invited GTOs this year and we will do the Mille Miglia, probably with the 8C2300, which is my oldest car; 82 next May.

SCD: Sounds like the Colorado Grand was a good time.

JS: Well, I just think the fact that you’re allowed to go out at various places and really go fast is just a great deal of fun. It’s very different than being on the track and you have to be a lot more aware of what’s going on and there are deer up there, but you’re driving through this this incredible scenery. Then you cool it down and you drive up through mountain passes. It’s a beautiful state to drive in. This was, I think, the seventh time I’ve done the event. I’ve done it in relatively slow cars. The 166 and the 212—which is not here; it’s in restoration—are both top speed limited cars for sure, but I’ve also done it in a 375MM. Both of them, the 290MM which my son and I did which is a very fast car, and the GTO which is actually not as fast at top end as the 290 simply because we have set it up for vintage racing on short tracks. We’d change the rear end gears if we were going to go Road America with the car where I’ve also run it. It’s just being with all those cars. The people are really neat and a lot of them are people that we’ve known for many, many years. In fact, the curator of Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum was a man named Michael Darling who moved to Chicago, but his father, Richard Darling, and he and his other brothers have done the Grand and the Mille Miglia many times. So it’s a small world, running into somebody I knew from racing or from rallying before I knew what his business was. I just knew he was a curator of contemporary art in Los Angeles when I first met them. They were just a couple of guys; father and son driving in a car like I was doing. But I would say doing it in the GTO was very special. Just being able to get that car out and really drive it like that on the street. It’s perfect.

SCD: Is it hard to behave on those long open roads?

JS: The Highway Patrol knows where those stretches are and they have a very simple rule and that is: you cannot pass one of them unless they wave you by. You’ve got to get behind them. We followed one in the 375MM that I sold, my wife and I followed one. It was a southern route and we were way out in the middle of nowhere and he never went below 90 miles an hour for about 20 minutes and we kind of passed cars, but we were right behind him, but there was no wave by. And then he slowed way down and there was this little place where they had coffee and things. Some of the cars were over there and he turned around and he smiled like this and he turned off and we went in there and we just took off…. Then it was my wife. The speed governor in my car is her fingernails going into my thigh. It’s like ‘okay, that’s fast enough.’ There’s no speedometer, just the tack so she didn’t know how fast we were going. We were actually going faster than I really knew. After that day, which was the third day, we had to cool it because the tires were so worn that we weren’t going to get another day out of them if we ran them at those speeds so she said, “can we slow down tomorrow” and I said “okay.” Luckily it was in absolutely beautiful mountain passes and there weren’t really a lot of spaces where you could really open it up anyway. The way they operate it and the way they run it it’s just a wonderful event.

SCD: How about the Mille Miglia?

JS: Oh, over there, depending on what car you’re in, you might have trouble following one of their motorcycle policemen. I’ve driven through Florence behind those guys and they’re just driving like maniacs and they got the sirens on. You go through Florence so fast you don’t see anything. They do have a nice drive through Rome at night, which is really quite beautiful when you come into Rome. They put you into relatively small groups and you follow patrolmen around, but those Italian motorcycle policemen are the most amazing guys I’ve ever seen. I mean, I literally saw one standing. He wanted to see what was at the corners coming up. He stands on the seat on his bike and he’s just balancing and the bike is cruising down the street. It’s like ‘oh my God this guy is insane.’ And then he hops back down on the seat.

SCD: Speaking of your son, Erickson, any on-track rivalry there?

JS: If we are in the same class he’s got a Lister Chevy and I don’t have to cut him any slack. He out-qualifies me by a mile compared to the 300S.

SCD: And his Ferrari?

JS: Oh, his Ferrari is a two-liter. It’s a Mondial. He’s putting a three-liter engine in it and then it’s going to get really interesting. Look, he’s a really good driver. He does a lot of events with Skip Barber. He goes to the Skip Barber events and drives in those lapping events that are really races. I think he’s getting very good very quickly. There’s no way I’m going to keep up with him in similar cars. When he puts a three-liter engine in the Mondial I think that thing will really go well. I drove the two-liter Mondial here before I sold it to him. The last race I drove was here in Seattle and it was the year of the Allard and they had 20 some odd Allards. I was in the same class with the Allards and I beat them all. I beat every single one of them. It was one of the best races I’ve ever had in my life. Actually, I’ve won more races in the Mondial than any other. I took it to Lime Rock and won the under two-liter group at Lime Rock when Steve Earl was running it there.

SCD: Rumor has it your son is quick and consistent.

JS: Oh, thanks. That’s interesting because I don’t really get to watch him. So people have just told me, and I look at his times. I know he’s doing well and people have told me that he looks like he’s really doing well. He’s got one car that’s really hard to come to grips with though. He’s got a 26R Lotus and that’s a really tough car to drive because that car is square. Gil Nickel used to win races in that thing all the time and then Gil sold it to John Delane who painted it blue. Beating John Delane in anything is a real hard thing to do. I watched him out there and he’d always win in that car. That car, in that group, is a car that ought to be right up at the very front of the group, but they’re a very tough car to learn to drive fast.

SCD: What’s on the schedule for 2012?

JS: There’s a Louis Vuitton rally that’s going to be in April. It’s going to go from Monaco to Venice going up through the hills in France and then across. They asked that we enter the Rossellini car. We’ve asked to enter the GTO reunion which is going to be in France in July, which is a terrible month, and my son and I are planning to do the Mille Miglia—and of depending on how things go—probably do the [Colorado] Grand. So it will be a very unusual year for…to do that many events, but I look back at the older days. My wife and I used to do two or three every year.

SCD: Any races?

JS: You know, since the Ferrari historic challenge went away I’ve been doing a lot less than I used to do, which is probably good at my age. I do go to Steve Earl’s [Sonoma Historics] and I certainly will do the reunion events at Laguna Seca both weekends. Beyond that I have to sort of see what’s going on because it’s changed so much that there’s a lot of events that don’t really have any good pre-war grid. So I think I’ll talk to Peter Giddings some and say, “where are there other places that have decent pre-war grids.” I think that series, was it Bobby Rahal?

SCD: Legends of Motorsports.

JS: Yeah. They’re not doing much with pre-war cars and it’s unfortunate because if they did they’d probably get them. It’s a well-organized event; they’re just not doing them.

SCD: Well now he’s been taken over by Vandagriff, that series, and maybe Cris will be interested.

JS: Yeah, that might be and I should talk to Cris about that and see what they’re going to do. I had forgotten that they had done that because Murray Smith was always involved in that too I think and Murray is an old car guy. Yet for some reason…man, I’ve seen Murray driving pre-war cars. He’s really good. He’s in everything. The guy is a really good driver.

SCD: Any chance you’ll be racing the Ferrari F310B F1 car?

JS: I ran that car for ten years. If nothing else, when we ran a track for testing like down in Phoenix. I take it down there. I drove it in Mont Tremblant in a Ferrari event where I had five 20 minute sessions on the track. They came in and they plugged the computer in and showed me what I was doing. You got to hit the brake harder. It’s left leg. I had my knee operated on and it’s not the easiest thing for me to do. We’ve been watching the oil pressure at idle which is 4000 RPM or something, but it’s down at the lowest point that the factory says it should be. In the ten years we had the car, except when I loaned it to Brit Skidmore and he hit the wall, we never really had to do much to it and the engine has never been worked on or the clutch. So it’s amazing.

SCD: Really? Is that last bit because that clutch is the size of a tea saucer?

JS: Exactly. Yeah, it’s tiny. There’s another engine down there and you can see exactly how big the clutch is. Of course, the clutch is only used when you get away so you just never ever want to ‘I’m going to be a Formula One driver and do one of those starts’ because you do a couple of those and you’ve got to replace the clutch. So the car is at the point where it would need to go back to Ferrari and I just decided that I had a lot of fun for ten years. It’s a great car. It was a Schumacher car. It had two firsts and a second and I just let it sit down there. It absolutely could be gone through and run again. We keep it. We take care of it. We’ve done everything you’re supposed to do. The valves are air pressured. We pressure the valves on a regular schedule to make sure the valves don’t fall, but I just decided I didn’t want to spend that money, see it gone for a year and then just not run it very much because they’re not doing those things much anymore.

SCD: Tell us more.

JS: It’s 1997. It’s the last year of the slicks. It was the last year of the big cars. When I got the car it was delivered to me at Willow Springs. The Ferrari engineers that came over, one of them spoke some English and he was telling me…he said, “This is the best Formula One car for an amateur ever made.” He said, “The new cars…Schumacher can’t drive the new cars he’s gone off the track on them.” I remember the first year of those cars in 98, but they were terrible and they were much slower. It took until the 2000 car that they were turning faster times then they had been doing in these. But he said it’s got the big tires. They’re very well setup. They’ve been making the same essential kind of car for a number of years with the same sized engine. They really dialed in. He said you will find you can really drive this car and have a lot of fun in it, and I did. Most impressive thing about a Formula One car—I will digress slightly—is not the acceleration, but the braking. The first time you go down into turn 3A in Seattle and you say oh my God I’m going to go right through that straight down there and you hit the brakes and the car stops before you get to the corner, you realize that this is a very different animal. You don’t start breaking at the one. You start braking at the half. Literally. I mean at Mont Tremblant at the back straight you can go past the one marker before you touch the brakes on that car… going a 180 or something.

SCD: Are the paddle shifters as amazing as we’re told?

JS: Yeah, they are but even in this car…I mean, it still paddle shifts and you can set it up and do them in sort of in advance. The only thing you need to know is what gear do I want to be in when I get down there. It won’t let you go into a gear too high. So you can say I’m going to go down four gears and click four times and as you do the braking it will come down. Yeah. And nowhere near as fast as they are now of course in the shifting, but still faster than…

SCD: A 250 GTO for example…

JS: Faster than anything mechanical. I still love to drive stick shift cars, but I don’t like contemporary paddle shift cars. Ferrari doesn’t even make a stick shift car anymore. I drove Greg Whitten’s 599. I will have to say that they are so much better than they were when they first came out with them on the 355s. They were terrible and clunky. Now they’re actually quite nice. I guess if I want to own a contemporary Ferrari I’d have to have that.

SCD: Any final words for the Sports Car Digest readers?

JS: Well, you don’t have to have 28 cars. You can have a hell of a lot of fun with one or two. Even throughout the period of time when I was working I always owned a sports car. I had Porsches. I had the Jaguar. When I lived in Europe I had a Mercedes, but it was a fairly hot one but we could still pull my son’s motocross bike on the little trailer on the back and I took him to races with it all over Belgium. He was racing motocross in Belgium for two years. I just think that whatever you do you should have fun doing it. You should enjoy it. Pick whatever part of it is interesting to you and try and have fun in that part of it. The people go to the Colorado Grand with relatively inexpensive, but the right period car. Like a Siata, which is what Darling drives, and there are cars that are even less valuable than that get in and have a great time. I’ve loved cars all my life and worked very hard for 30 some odd years and had no chance to really get out and do things with them the way I wanted to and then once I started doing them—especially vintage racing—I really got hooked on that. I never had any idea that I would do that or that it would be as much fun as it is or that I could be reasonably good at it. It all kind of came together.

Jon Shirley Automobile Collection – Photo Gallery (click image for larger picture and description)

 

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