FIA Homologation Papers

[bbrown]

Greetings Trevor,

Maybe a few days late, but to answer your question about Ed Freutel's effort with the 427 Cobras in Europe, I do know the people connected with this "crazy" effort. The cars were prepared in a little shop in Pasadena CA and shipped to Europe. One was a street car, the other a comp. They were prepared in Frank Monise's shop. Frank was a long time Cal Club member that started racing about 1950 in Jags and continued up to the nineties in various Lotuses (or Loti?). During his prime he was a damn good shoe. He was a long time friend of Ed and Frank travelled to Europe with the cars. His son, Frankie, remembers helping prepare the cars, getting parts from Shelby American, etc. In fact, he got to drive the street car to high school on several occasions. I'll have to check with Frankie to see if they actually built them to FIA homologation sheets or just used available parts.

If you are including a section about these cars in your next book, I invite you to correspond directly with the people involved. Frank would get livid when he read a magazine article about those cars because no one got the story right, and yet in the 35+ years since those cars ran, no one ever contacted him.

Bert Brown
Danville CA