The Morrari Recreation has been one of my Dad Mark Stokes’ dream projects for at least 10 years. It is a recreation of the late Garth Souness Morrari which ran in the sixties in the All Comers class. It was a Morris Minor body draped over an unwanted and outdated 1955 Ferrari Super Squalo Grand Prix chassis. It ran a 327 Corvette engine. It was called The Monster but media of the day coined the name Morrari and it stuck. Are play on the words, Morris and Ferrari.
The original car no longer exists as the Morrari but has been restored to the original Ferrari Grand Prix car. My Dad has always helped me with all my projects and it was my time to pay it back. Thank you for entrusting me to recreate this historic NZ motor racing vehicle. The research was fun, the recreating of the Ferrari chassis was challenging at times but it is rewarding to get to this point.
We rode the fine line to building it as faithful to the original car while being as tidy as possible. Things like the short pipe on the header had to be recreated and so on as that’s how the original car was. From late December through to late March. It’s been a blur of a time period with long days and even longer nights. The reason being is that we wanted to display the car at the last ever motorsport meeting at Pukekohe Park Raceway. By the time you read this, hopefully we have met that goal.
There are so many people to thank but for now thank you to my parents and also Tania Foster as well as Tim Philps. Thanks to Terry Bowden, Dave Graham, Gary Edgecumbe, Keith Ellis, Ian & Cath Goodwin, Angus Fogg, Nicolai at HPC, Dean Coley, Brian Bennett, Terry Sims and many many more. Thanks also to guys like Steve Holmes of Roaring Season and also fellow gearheads like Craig Stacey and Duncan Fox to name a few.