This is Ferrari’s “snowplow” F1 car that never raced

Owner Franco Meiners wasracing the Ferrari at the 2022 Monaco Historic Grand Prix, competing against other F1 racers from 1966 to 1972 with 3.0-litre engines. He knows a thing or two about motorsport, having run Ferrari’s racing activities, with the exception of F1, from 1986 to 1996. That’s right, everything from the F40 BPR to the F50 GT and 333SP.

“It’s a 312 B3, chassis number 009,” Meiners tells us. “It’s a Formula 1 prototype – the only one built,” he continues. “And it was more an experimental car because in period, 1972, the designer Mauro Forghieri, was looking to understand how it was possible to get downforce from a Formula 1 car, because in the same period he did the 312PB sportscar.”

Forghieri’s idea was simple: “He said ‘I will build a car that is wide, with lots of surfaces, a big front wing and also a very short chassis, because he wanted to test an F1 car with a shorter chassis overall, 2,330mm.

“He did this car, and then he went testing with Arturo Merzario, Jacky Ickx and Clay Regazzoni. They went everywhere – they started in Fiorano, to Modena, they went to Misano, they went to Monza. They did lots of testing.”

Testing didn’t go to plan. The drivers couldn’t find the balance they wanted, with Ickx only just able to go as fast as the new car’s predecessor, the B2. In the end, despite being entered into the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, the car never raced, the B2 soldiering on instead.

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.”

How did Meiners come to own the car? A friend was moving house and couldn’t take it with him. “[My friend said] ‘I want to sell to someone I like,” adds Meiners. “Someone who’s a friend and someone who can use it because I’m not able to. So you have to buy it’. So since 2010 I have the car, and I’ve brought it to events – I’ve brought it to Goodwood. And because I’m living in Monaco I like to bring it here to show it.

“Monaco isn’t too long, isn’t too fast, because this car, everything is original – the engine, the gearbox and so on, and the parts you cannot find them. I don’t have the possibility, as with a Cosworth engine, to say ‘I want a new engine’ – with Cosworths you find everything.”

When we ask if there’s one thing about the car in particular he finds special, he shakes his head: “It’s everything. You sit in the car, you look at the instruments right in front of you, the gearbox which is a piece of art.

“It’s not like the other gearboxes from Hewland, for example, because you cannot shift down from fifth to third or second when you arrive out of the tunnel – I have to shift down every gear to first. With the Cosworth engine and a Hewland gearbox you go down fifth to second, and the Cosworth has more torque than a 12-cylinder Ferrari, so if you go out of the corner – boom, they give you 20m, then at the end of the straight I join them. The gearbox is quick, but Ferrari didn’t want anybody to break the engine, to do fifth to second.”

As for driving in Monaco, “It’s like you drive a Formula 1 car on a rally track”. In a one-off Ferrari F1 car with more than 500PS (368kW), no traction control, no power steering and no anti-lock brakes, that doesn’t sound intimidating at all…

Photography by Pete Summers and Tom Shaxson.