The Maserati Indy built to commemorate Maserati’s successes in the 500 mile race at Indianapolis in 1939 and 1940. This car originally appeared at salone dell’automobile di Torino in 1968 as a prototype but wasn’t launched until the following year at the Salone d’ Automobile de Geneve, and instantly became a hit with the press and maserati fans.

Unfortunately this one owner Maserati Indy has seen better days and spent a lot of time sitting around unloved and as for all classic cars sitting around and not being used is very bad news.

The Maserati was dug out and taken to Peter Edney classics in Leaden Roding Essex where the mammoth task of restoration began. The majority of the body was rotten and we believe that one guy spent three months just welding this car which shows you the extent of the corrosion. The brakes and fuel systems were also over hauled.

The car then came to us at Kraftwork to refinish the body. We started by removing the front and side windscreens, trims and any panels left on the car, we then began the long task of stripping all the old paint and filler work where possible.

We found that the front of the vehicle and suffered a lot of repair work over the years: inches of filler was covering areas that were not that badly damaged. This is a common problem on old classics as years ago they were finished by hand and used lead as a filler to finish door gaps and body work. Over time when cars got damaged, rather than digging out old lead straightening the metal and repairing properly, they would keep loading an area with the new polyester based filler, so the body ends up being a different shape.

The wheels have now been sent away for refurbishment while we continue working on straighten the body, more details to come……

UPDATE: Check out the next page to see how we got on from there! (The date of the latest update is noted in bold at the top of the page).