Steering la dolce vita

Click for more photos Steering la dolce vita Steering la dolce vita The 1963 ASA 1000 GT, or baby Ferrari, was in a league of its own, writes KEVIN NORBURY. Ean McDowell loves to tell the story of getting to work one Tuesday morning in Kuala Lumpur and the conversation centred on what everyone did over the long weekend. "And I said I went to Barcelona and bought a Ferrari," he laughs. There was stunned disbelief in the engineering office where he was at the time. But he wasn't kidding. As he tells it, as soon as he knocked off on the Friday night he caught a plane to Paris, where he was met by his contact, Olivier, who next day drove him to San Sebastian, in Spain, to see an ASA, the fourcylinder "baby Ferrari", as McDowell calls it. It was a wreck, so they drove on, across Spain to Barcelona, to see another one. This one was better. It had done a mere 30,000 kilometres. "It was very dirty but it was a very original car," he says. "When it started I just had to have it." Negotiations proved "interesting", though, given the language barrier: a mix of Olivier's French, McDowell's Aussie English and the Barcelona owner's Spanish dialect. "In the end I just gave up and bought the car." Then they drove back to Paris and he flew to Kuala Lumpur in time for work on the Tuesday. Now that's dedication. Advertisement: Story continues below Spend time with McDowell and you soon discover that little ASA mission wasn't out of character. He loves Italian cars, although he started out a Riley man, as was his father. But the son's conversion happened one wet day in 1972 after he traded his leaky Austin Healey Sprite for a Fiat 850 Coupe in suburban Ringwood. "It was more a spurofthemoment thing," he says. At the time Fiat's advertising campaign slogan was "have an Italian love affair". And McDowell did just that Rosetta Stone . He now has quite a collection of Italian cars, everything from a 1958 Moretti to a 1968 Lamborghini Miura S and "little Italian cars (Fiats mostly) that people don't even bother to tow off the street". "But I still think they're great little cars," he says. Many are not exactly pristine, let's be honest, but he loves every one of them. Still, McDowell had always wanted a Ferraribased ASA, the fourcylinder coupe concept that Enzo Ferrari sold to the big Italian chemical manufacturer ASA. McDowell bought one in the US in 1972 but it doesn't have an engine. It was his hunt for an engine that led him to Barcelona and on that same trip he mentioned to his French companion that he'd also love a Stanguellini and three years later, bingo, Olivier calls: he'd found one. In the warehouse he rents to store his cars, McDowell pulls back a cover to reveal a blue and white 1959 Stanguellini Formula Junior race car, number 41 (pictured below). "That's basically as it last raced in 1963," he says. "They were made with total disregard for cost and the performance is staggering.

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