About 15 years ago Bob and Marianne Anderson of Barrington, IL had the good fortune of obtaining a dream car from an estate of some friends. For over 30 years the car had been sitting in a garage, literally in pieces. “It was sitting underneath a leaky toilet,” said Bob. Being in pieces and being rained on by a leaky toilet would be bad but the car in question just happened to be a 1955 Ferrari 250 GT Europa.
Introduced at the 1954 Paris Auto Show, the Europa was the first of Ferrari’s string of race winning 250 GTs (GT standing for Gran Turismo or grand touring) which were two door cars capable of going long distanced at high speed. The car, complete with a V-12 engine, had a body designed by Italian coach building legend Battista “Pina” Farina. Farina later took the name Pinafarina which is the name usually associated with his Ferrari classics.
The mid 1990s, though, was not the first time Bob had come across this particular Ferrari. In fact, it was the second time he’d owned it.
“I bought it the first time in 1959 when I was in Los Angeles,” he said. When he was getting ready to move to Europe the following year he sold it to his friends who, in 1961, took the car apart with the intention of putting it back together. Unfortunately, or fortunately for Bob, they never did.
“Everything was there,” Bob said of when he went to collect the pieces. With the exception of having to make a new grill and differential, the car is still all original. Except for the paint.
“The original color was an ugly bluish green,” Bob said. “Imagine a government issued desk and that’s the color it was.
Since Pinafarina used a number of fine metallic paints on his bodies during his time as a Ferrari designer, just about any metallic color is acceptable today as an original. Bob and Marianne chose two shades of a fine silver gray metallic. “It isn’t red,” he added with a smile, referring to the vast number of red Ferraris that were lined up at this year’s 34th Annual Concourse d’Elegance in Ault Park.
When it came time to choose a color for a new interior, Bob was quite lost. He obviously wanted something that would match the exterior paint but beyond that he was unsure.
As Bob explained it, he was sitting in a rental car with the man who was doing the leather work for the seats. “He said that I needed to decide now or the car wouldn’t be done on time,” Bob said. “I looked down at the interior of this rental car and it had these two shades of leather and I said let’s do this. We went in and bought the leather and that’s that.”
It took nearly three years to get the car back into show quality, according to Bob. “It was a lot of time eating Hamburger Helper,” he joked. But it has worked out quite well as is evident by Bob and Marianne taking first in class at the Concourse.
According to Bob, showing the car is fun but even more fun comes from driving it. “We drive it a lot. It’s designed to be a comfortable ride over long distances and it is,” he said. “It’s a fun car and we love it.”
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