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Films:
1959 Maserati Tipo 61: Climb Into The Birdcage
Great video. I find these videos that document cars, with engineering that sits on the cusp of a major shift in design or technology to be especially interesting. Monocoque chassis were about to become the lightest and stiffest chassis you could build. And this change would come partly in consequence of better finite element analysis tools to model them. Right around 1959, with the introduction of the DEC PDP-1 computer is when FEA really started to be more accessible. Maserati could not afford that, and so the bird cage emerges as a tube-frame car, where the division of the tubes is so small and the cage so complex that the tubular mesh of the chassis behaves a bit like a monocoque in terms of the broad distribution of load. The birdcage frame reaches the forward thinking monocoque concept, but executes it in a mesh rather in a shell. Soon the price of building monocoque shells would come down, but this Maserati is before that change. The Birdcage sits right on that cusp between the tubular chassis and the load-bearing sheet-metal shell frames, by being a ‘mesh’ of tubes, that distributes load almost as diffusely as a monocoque. I find these transitional designs to be very interesting.
This one is in my top 5 Petrolicious clips of all time. And its no coincidence that this one got almost 10 mins of air-time.
I’m lucky enough to see a Birdcage race almost every year at the Limerock Historics. What a sight/sound. This year I’ll be racing there too. But with a constant eye on the Tipo 51… Kurt
