On the road with Bruce Meyer's Ferrari 250 TRC Testa Rossa

Von Neumann's Hot Rod gets the Petrolicious treatment

Few men were more instrumental in Ferrari's history in America than John von Neumann -- importer, businessman, race-car driver, "the pillar of California sports-car racing," who swore by Ferrari as he raced and then sold them. He picked up the 250 TRC Testa Rossa, number #0672, in 1957 -- only three years after fellow racer Luigi Chinetti opened the first Ferrari dealership in New York City. Neumann, from his Competition Motors on Vine Street in Hollywood, pulled the Ferrari strings and had the four-cylinder engine enlarged from 2 to 2.5 liters. A year later, he got bored. In went a 3-liter vee-twelve, #0750TR, underneath that delicate Scaglietti bodywork, into the space where a four-banger had been forcibly booted. 300 hp from 12 individual stacks, standing like soldiers at attention! Richie Ginther helped install the engine, then promptly won the Grand Prix of Mexico.

From there, the Ferrari just kept winning, and winning, and winning.

 Petrolicious
The Von Neumann Hot Rod has a hood scoop to clear the V12. Don't worry, it was also designed by Scaglietti.

Petrolicious is helping to celebrate 60 years of Ferrari in America -- from Chinetti's shop on West 55th Street, to Von Neumann's hangout on Vine and then Culver City, complete with IBM mainframe! This is the second video Petrolicious has produced in conjunction with Ferrari; in the first, Phil Hill's son Derek drove a 1964 Ferrari 250 GTO, with a Series II body and also a 3.0-liter V12, a car so amazing it pissed off the FIA. Which, mind you, has always been a historically easy thing to do.

It hails from the garage of Bruce Meyer, who -- as we reported previously -- had liberated it from a part-time race car driver and full-time hash smuggler. "When I'm driving this car," he said, "what's going through my head is total disbelief." Meyer, perhaps like the rest of us, never expected to own a historic Ferrari, much less the other cars in his wonderful collection. But for now, and with a Canon EOS pointed at him, he's going to relish the moment.

Von Neumann, who died on Christmas Eve in 2003, ordered another TRC, in fact. That one sold two years ago at 5 million euros -- $6.8 million. As far as we know, that Testa Rossa has yet to be seized by INTERPOL.