“Of all the Garth Souness cars you chose to Orecreate, it had to be the most complicated one to do!” I said to my dad one day as we were midway through quite the thrash to recreate the ‘Morrari’ — an All Comers saloon car from the ’60s. My comment was partially from frustration but mainly delivered with great banter and sarcasm.
Some 10 or 15 years ago, my father, Mark Stokes, came out one day and said how he had always wanted to recreate the Morrari. “The what?” The late Garth Souness was a South Auckland car salesman and stock car racer of the ’50s, and also a motor racing driver, mostly at Pukekohe. The short-lived Morrari was one of his more notorious race cars.
As saloon car racing evolved from pre-war Ford coupes in the early ’60s, the class evolved into the All Comers, and, basically, you could ‘run what you brung’ in terms of breaking all the rules and pushing the boundaries. Much has been documented on the Morrari and this heyday of racing in NZV8’s sister publication, New Zealand Classic Car.
So, 10–15 years ago, our path to recreating the Morrari began, exhausting all avenues of research in publications and online. As you can imagine, people’s memories were hazy, andevident due to the short race history the car had.
