Most Formula One cars end up on display or in the private collections of the wealthy. A car like the McLaren MP4/6 Ayrton Senna drove to the F1 World Championship in 1991 should be in a museum which would have had a nice price tag on it. This guy thought he found this car at space above a shipping office. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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That’s why I thought it was so strange when I thought we found it collecting dust in the space above the shipping-and-receiving office of an aerospace company in Salt Lake City, Utah.
When I received these low-res photos of the car from a reader, I just couldn’t believe it. A real F1 car hidden somewhere in America. Something potentially worth millions of dollars just sitting there. Even more unbelievable, the car was carrying a small Brazilian flag and letters spelling out “S-E-N-N-A.” Oh my god, I thought, could this actually be one of the great Ayrton Senna’s F1 cars?
If it was, then it would be one of the most important finds in the history of motorsports.
The only clues were a chassis tag and two low quality photos passed around in an email. On that tag it mentioned the monocoque for the vehicle was suppled by “Hercules Incorporated.”
A little scavenging through historical photos reveals the car was designed by Neil Oatley under the supervision of a man named Steve Nichols.
If you didn’t know, a little Google searching will tell you that Nichols is the American engineer who designed the MP4/4. He’s from Salt Lake City, Utah.
According to a biography of Nichols he worked as a development engineer for Hercules Aerospace until switching to motorsports design full-time.
