Equipment
RHD. 4,478/400hp 4-cam V-8, four Weber 45IDM carburetors, 5-speed transaxle, silver painted Borrani wire wheels, Dunlop Racing tires, covered Marchal headlights, full width Plexiglas wraparound windscreen, side exhaust, driver's head fairing.
Condition
#3 Good
Runs and drives well. Flaws not noticeable to passersby. Most common condition.
Sold new to Ebb Rose, delivered by Carroll Shelby and winner of its first insignificant races at Galveston, a 7-lap sprint and the 20-lap feature. Re-named the "Micro-Lube Special" and winning two SCCA regionals with Rose at the wheel. Lloyd Ruby, then Rose's mechanic but later an Indy legend, took the wheel for the 1959 USAC Road Racing Championship, finishing 2nd on the season. Then the 450S languished. By 1965 it was in England with engine 4508 but was restored and regained its original engine before being sold to Bob Sutherland and then to Yoshiyuki Hayashi in 1968 at the height of the Japan real estate bubble. Peter Groh in Germany, Myron Schuster and Scott Rosen ownership followed with historical documentation by Willem Oosthoek and Adolfo Orsi. Restored in the 1970's. Represented as the numbers-matching engine. Foggy gauge lenses. Good paint and interior. The chassis is aged and lightly oil misted, a reasonably well-preserved older restoration. Oscar Davis collection.
Market commentary
There are Testa Rossas, Mondials, a 410 Sport and 375MMs, all cluttering up the auction previews at Monterey in 2022. There is only one Maserati 450S, a lusty, nearly ridiculous combination of benign handling and excessive horsepower that never quite achieved its place at the top of the heierarchy of Fifties sports racers but concedes nothing to its Maranello counterparts in concept and execution. A look under the hood of this 450S is enough to reduce gearheads to tears with its camshafts, dual ignition, and quartet of Webers. By all accounts it drives like a real car, albeit one with too much power for its skimpy tires, leaving wheelspin and trashed gearboxes in its wake. If there was one, just one, car to lust after at Monterey it was this prize long tucked away in the collection of Oscar Davis. It was bid to this number on the block and closed later at an undisclosed price but anything close to $6.9 million is a bargain.