From here on Ferrari went into a mini meltdown. With Enzo out of action for almost a year by illness, Ferrari was not receiving the direction it needed. To make matters worse, Fiat had bought a 50 per cent stake in the company in 1969, and internal politics led to designer Forghieri being booted away from Formula 1 development to another area. At the same time there were problems at the factory in Italy, so production of the new F1 cars, known also as the B3 but different in design to the ‘Spazzeneve’, headed to England. That’s right, England. For the 1973 season Ferrari rolled out the new B3s, which turned out to be slower than the B2. When Ickx discovered the team would sit out the Dutch and German grands prix he’d had enough, and ditched Ferrari for McLaren to race at the Nürburgring where he finished third. Can you imagine such a farce today?
“After one year, the end of 1973, [Enzo] Ferrari came back,” Meiners explains. “He was pissed by the situation, because the cars were not having success. He called back Forghieri and told him ‘I want the car to win, and you do it now’. So Forghieri gave the B3s new bodies, implementing the aerodynamics, the same spoiler as this car. Because with this car he went to the wind tunnel in Germany, to test.
“So with the B3 then Forghieri decided to build the cars back at the factory, starting from chassis 14 which I also have here in Monaco in my shop.” That is the car with “which Regazzoni, in 1974, lost the championship by one point – he was second against Fittipaldi. But he was leading a lot of the season, Lauda didn’t really help him a lot… By one point!”
Finally Forghieri had the winning car he and Enzo wanted, and it wouldn’t have happened were it not for the aerodynamic developments pioneered by the snowplough. And this being a Ferrari, the engine was impressive too. “Three-litre flat-twelve, five-speed gearbox, and the engine turns to 12,500rpm,” Meiners says, grinning. “The engine was too expensive – for [Enzo] Ferrari, the engine was the car. Everything else was not important.”