The Cooper-Maserati

I have been quoted as saying that I didn’t much like the Tommy Atkins Cooper-Maserati. Now, I don’t know if I was right about that, but I do remember some of its characteristics pretty well. The power range was about a 1,000 revs, maybe 1,200 maximum, and that meant it was all or nothing at all. You would start driving and say, “Look it’s getting out of line already!” It would hit the power range and then you would need about three hands to control the thing!

I did say that I found it would understeer and then oversteer, and I guess I did find it brutish, but if you think about it now, I suppose we didn’t test much. It was a new and different car, and we took it to races as soon as it had been built, so I was finding out how it worked as I was racing. I was happy to do it, as I liked working with Tommy Atkins. He was a wonderful guy and I had been driving for him since 1958. He was originally a motorcyclist, that was what he loved, and I think he had done a fair amount of racing on bikes. I did have some good sponsors at the time, and he certainly was one of them.