There are cars you visit in museums because they are famous. There are cars you visit because they are rare. Then there are cars that stop you in your tracks because they were built by a fellow automotive enthusiast, because what they wanted didn’t exist. The Brummett Maserati Special is one of these special cars, and I stumbled across it inside the Heart of Route 66 Auto Museum in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.
Surrounded by Route 66 memorabilia, Army Jeeps, and the classic full-size American cars that made the Mother Road famous, sits a special little sports car. Low, red, open-cockpit, and unmistakably Italian in spirit, it looks at first like a Maserati Birdcage. The shape is right. The stance is right. The attitude is right. But this is not a factory-built Maserati Tipo 60 or Tipo 61. It is something more personal, more peculiar, and in its own way, more American.
The Brummett Maserati Special
This is the Brummett Maserati Special, a Birdcage-inspired, Maserati-powered sports racer built by Bobby Brummett of Bixby, Oklahoma. It is not a replica in the narrow sense. It is a one-off special, built in the old tradition of men who saw the cars racing in Europe, understood the magic, and then went home to the shop to build their own version.
The first thing most people notice is the body. It has the visual language of late-1950s sports car racing: long nose, low scuttle, cut-down windscreen, exposed cockpit, and just enough menace to make you wonder what it would sound like echoing off the walls of an old road course. The inspiration is clearly the Maserati Birdcage, one of the great racing machines of the postwar era…