1960 Maserati Birdcage At RM Monaco Auction

Here's a car that doesn't pop up for sale all that often: A 1960 Maserati Birdcage. This one here will be offered for sale at the upcoming RM Auction in Monaco, and it offers a look back at when sportscar racing really changed.

A lot of people know about, or are fascinated with Maserati's Bridcage. Officially called the Maserati Tipo 61, it is more popularly called the Birdcage, due to its spaceframe chassis that seemed to be made up of thousands of pencil thin tubes. It was, in that, and a number of other respects, a fairly conservative and antiquated design.

Built by Maserati as a privateer racecar, the Birdcage tipped the scales at just over 1300 pounds. Mounted up front was a 250 horsepower 2.9-liter inline four, which good enough to power the little Maserati to victories at the 1960 and 1961 at the Nurburgring 1000km race.

Maser built only 17 copies of the Tipo 61 Birdcage, making it a very rare and desirable. RM Auctions will be offering one at their upcoming Monaco auction next month. Tipo 61, listed as chassis #2470, was raced in the United States originally during the 1960s. After success here, it was sold to a European owner in the 1970s. The current owner purchased the car in 2004 and has competed in several vintage racing events.

RM says that this particular Birdcage is one of the most original in existence, and also includes a spare racing engine as well as the original motor. Price? €2,400,000 to €2,600,000. Or at least that's what RM estimates it will bring. And I'm not going to argue with them.

For all of the fascination the Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage holds for a lot of people, I always looked at it as being sort of a glorious failure. It was a last gasp attempt at the old styles of designing and building race cars. By the time the Tipo 61 Birdcage rolled out of the Maserati factory, a car of this layout was largely obsolete.

Mid engines and monocoque chassis were the way to go over front engine rear drivers and spaceframes – even if you could work the balance and concoct a space frame at light as possible (which Maserati surely did), a mid engine and a monocoque chassis were just a superior way to go.

And by the time the Maserati Tipo 61 Birdcage hit the track, that was they way everyone of their competitors was going. Sure is a pretty little thing though, ain't it?

Source: AutoBlog