Interesting Comment On “The Ferrari 250 GTO Mystery Is Solved”

by Mike –

Many of you may not have seen this comment below, I think it is worth reading.

Comment by L Sebring on The Ferrari 250 GTO Mystery Is Solved

I attended that race (1963 Daytona Continental) on my 13th birthday. I lived near Daytona at the time & my older brother took me to see the sports cars race for my birthday.
His wife was from Asheville, NC & was friends with Mamie Reynolds. Mamie was the heiress to the Hope Diamond at the time. She married Coco Chinetti, Luigi’s son, & that’s the Ferrari connection. My brother’s wife told my recently that we had lunch with her before the race. I don’t recall that too much but I remember Auggie Pabst in his XKE lifting the front wheel off the ground every time he came out of the hairpin. We were sitting in the infield near that turn. I recall Pedro’s red Ferrari & how cool it sounded…unlike any of the Nascar stuff I had heard run before. I stumbled across the February 1963 Road & Track that had the article about the race. The picture of Auggie’s XKE Jogged my memory & I immediately called my brother to ask him what he recalled about the race. His wife (now ex-) told me more about it & how she and Mamie had been friends as young girls in Asheville. She told me how they had once tied the Hope diamond around Mamie’s Great Dane’s neck & it ran around the yard like that. I was pretty skeptical about that, but then I read some stories on-line about how Mamie had played with it in her sand box. It didn’t sound so impossible after that.

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My thanks to all of you who post comments – it makes My Car Quest a lot more interesting.

Pedro Rodriguez in the 3-hour Daytona Continental-winning Ferrari 250 GTO