Everybody Needs a Mentor in Something

Everybody Needs a Mentor in Something

And in regards to cars I had a great one. If you are following along in this blog you already briefly met Ernie Mendicki the same day I did, at a Ferrari Owners Club picnic in Woodside (American Champion). Little did I know how deep and valuable that meeting and friendship would become.

Heck, I didn't even know Ernie was a railroad model builder in the same scale I was...it was Gary Winiger who put us together in that regard. But that came a bit later.

Ernie was a big man in every sense of the word...about six feet tall and, I would guess, somewhere around 250+. One of his hands would cover both of mine. And yet his body awareness was such that he could ease sideways through a narrow aisle with rows or glasses stacked on either side without one of them so much as shivering. I on the other hand am such a klutz that entire stacks would fall just to get out of my way before I even entered the building housing them.

And eyesight? He was annoyed that his was “failing him.” It was “down” to something like 20/15. Ernie could read the license plate on a car coming down the street to his house before I could even figure out what make it was.

Despite his bulk his small motor skills were amazing. I won't go into model railroad details much in this blog, but suffice it to say he could super glue open stair treads to a scratch built replica of stations along the old Yosemite Valley railroad so they were absolutely straight...in N scale, which is 1/160 actual size...the entire building is no more than a couple of inches long.

But he could also model in what he liked to call 1:1 scale...when Kent White somehow “lost” the original door panels to my race car Ernie simply carved an exact replacement out of the wood and fabric he told me to buy.

To say Ernie was “in to” cars was like saying the Kardashians are “in to” publicity. He started as a draftsman working for HP and Disney, but when I knew him was a business forms salesman and never earned more than about $25K in a single year from this “day job.” Yet when he died and his widow and I sat down to come up with the total number of sports and classic cars he had owned over his lifetime, the number reached over 100. Among these were the first three liter Ferrari racer...which won the Mille Miglia in 1952, a Tour de France Ferrari, An EMF (look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls), a REO, a Cord, a Bugatti Tipo 40 Grand Sport, a Ferrari Boano, an AC Ace Bristol, a Siata 300BC (you might hear more this model later), a 330GTC...and several other rare racers including the 250SWB that won its clas first time out at LeMans. He simply parlayed his work on one car after another into steps up from the more mundane to some incredible machinery, meeting and earning respect from major and minor player in the car world alike. Ernie knew everyone and everyone knew and respected him and his car knowledge. He could call and chat with Strother McMinn at the Art Center College of Design or Steve Earle about the Monterey Historics, and could definitely “walk the walk and talk the talk.”

Which was how I got talked into a very specific race car.

By the early 1980s many of my Ferrari Club buddies were migrating into vintage racing. They were not giving up their Ferraris. In fact many of the cars would migrate into these events as well, but old abandoned race cars were being snapped up and put back together as well. Once you rebuilt one of these, most of the FOC types were “hands on” and wanted place to play with them...and many were not street legal...so it made good sense to start clubs and rent race tracks. That really is how vintage in the US started...an all volunteer effort to just enjoy seeing, smelling, hearing, and most of all driving old race cars. Once I got into it I played many roles in those days...grid setup, corner worker, dirver observer ( a sort of steward's driver behavior role), starter, and tech inspector.

The Ferrari was too heavy, too big, and too expensive to fix, and was a GT street car. At least those were my excuses for migrating right along with everyone else. So once I let it out that I wanted to play, Steve Tillum, who had decided that it might be fun to buy and sell some cars, made me aware of an Elva Mk I he had for sale. Kind of a strange role for the Chief of Neurosurgery at Kaiser in Redwood City, but...

The car was not quite up to the level of restoration as my friend Dennis Adair's as shown in this shot from elva.com.

Let's just say the car “had needs.” Actually it needed a full restoration, something at that time I was smart enough to realize was way beyond my modest capabilities.

So next I somehow learned that Jim Cesare had an Alfa for sale...one like this.

Rare, beautiful, and fast

 This 1.9 liter coupe is bodied by Zagato and is as achingly lovely and exotic as every Alfa is...and more so.

Enter Ernie. He knew what I did not know about cars...which was pretty much everything. He told me the Alfa was going to be expensive to maintain, was overly complex for a racer, and was also quite fast (“isn't that good”? I asked...”not if it kills you”, he replied).

Ernie suggested something a little...different. Emphasis on “little.” I had never heard the name Siata (who had in those days? Yeah, John deBoer and his dad, but come on, that's a pretty narrow population).

Ernie asked me if I liked the Ferrari Barchetta. Sort of like asking if I liked Sophia Loren. Who can spell “car” who wold not like this gorgeous creature ?

Hey! I meant the car!

. The name means “little boat” and what a lovely craft it is. But even back then it was several zeros too costly...and also as complex, with its tiny V12 displacing all of 2.5 liters, as the Alfa.

I thought he was nuts...until he told me about the “Baby Barchetta” he had sitting in his shop. Among his other accomplishments, Ernie had managed to build his own home in an unincorporated corner of Cupertino, with a 1500 square foot garage/workshop behind it. And in that shop, among the other exotics such as I mentioned earlier, sat this tiny red creature..looking every bit the part of the real thing, in about ¾ scale.

ST 428 on the pad in front of Ernie's shop

 Though I have numerous photos of Ernie's car I pulled this one off Cliff Reuter's web site...a gold mine of information about many rare Italian makes. You can find the Siata stuff at http://www.cliffreuter.com/etceterinisiata.htm.

It really was love at first site. Ernie then had me drive the car down his street. Of course I stalled it twice first...the clutch was an on-off switch and the engine snarled like I had stepped on a cat. It snapped my neck back and not only looked like, but sounded and, most important, felt like a real race car.

I knew and needed to know nothing else.

“Where can I get one?” I begged.

And then things got interesting.