Cici Muldoon has led an interesting life already. Growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, she was on track to become a dancer before she moved to the east coast of the United States to study physics at Princeton. A phD then brought her across the pond to Oxford, and after a bout in Switzerland following the completion of grad school, she has settled (for the moment) in the English countryside.
The Cotswolds offer quintessential British B-road driving, and Cici’s Triumph TR3—her first classic car—fits into the area almost too perfectly. Her Ferrari Dino and its unique color scheme stand out a little more. She’s named the 246 GTS “Viola,” but affectionately refers to her as a bit of a pimpmobile too. After all, it is a mid-engine Italian sports car with purple paintwork and a removable roof.
The Dino seems like a perfect candidate for a “weekender,” but in the two years that she’s owned this example, Cici has come around to the idea that it doesn’t need utter pampering, and she doesn’t mind dipping a Cromodora into the occasional puddle should the Saturday driving mood happen to strike on a rainy Tuesday.
This is her first Ferrari, but she’s not unused to seeing them out in the family stable. Growing up, her father had a collection that had a few prancing horses in the ranks, and though Cici describes her childhood self as “quite girly”—she was set on being a ballerina for no short while— she was always happy to attend rallies, concours, and motorsport events with him.
Cici credits her father with stoking her enthusiasm for cars, and while she was interested in them to some degree throughout her life, she came to really appreciate the vintage element during her time in grad school. She joined just two clubs while at Oxford: the Wine Society, and the Oxford Universities Motorsport Foundation. As a member of the former, Cici versed herself in the arts of distinguishing between grapes that came from this rainy French hillside rather than that rainy French hillside, and as a member of the latter she learned how to tear down an engine and then do it in reverse.
After a stint in Switzerland post-Oxford, she moved back to the UK to start her company and chose to call the little town of Woodstock—a few miles away from her alma mater—her home. Cici loves the English countryside, and living in the Cotswolds provides more than just the charms of life away from the city. Hedgerows crowd narrow lanes that never run flat or straight for more than a few feet at a time, and when you and a workman’s panel van coming from the opposite direction aren’t crawling past each other they offer some excellent driving, and as you can see in today’s film, Cici is making good use of them, rain or shine.
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