Wheels Of Fortune

They are labors of love, vestiges of automotive years gone by, when cars created dreams. The vehicles in these two stories - The Mustang Sprint and the Ferrari Testa Rossa - are dreams come true for their owners, and indeed do represent a fortune. A fortune in time and in Value and a fortunate turn for their owners. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "This is like looking at a beautiful woman, one you can stare at without feeling embarrassed," sighed the man clearly enjoying his first view of a seductive Italian.

"Gorgeous. Outstanding." Slowly he strolled round and round, tracing circles, with his eyes glued to the sultry body.

Standing proudly nearby were Pete Lovely and partner Butch Dennison.

Not even Lovely can polish the 1959 car, one of two surviving TR-59 Ferrari Testa Rossas in the world - valued at $3.5 million to $5 million. Dennison "says I leave little marks," Lovely notes. "I can't see them, but he says he can."

But Dennison urges Lovely to drive it hard, twisting the singing V-12 Ferrari engine to 7,000 revolutions a minute, 165 miles an hour.

He will do it tomorrow and Sunday in the Society of Vintage Racing Enthusiasts' annual Pacific Northwest Racing Weekend at Seattle International Raceway. More than 150 cars are entered.

The first of six races each day begins at 1 p.m. (Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children for one day; $15 and $8 for both days.) The event, which raised $88,000 last year, benefits the unpaid care fund at Children's Hospital and Medical Center.

The once glorious TR-59, one of six built, didn't always look like 5 million bucks. Like a stately mansion fallen into decay, it was nearly lost. Until Lovely came along.

He knew the car in its glory days. In 1960, he and then-owner Jack Nethercutt of Los Angeles raced it to third place in the famous 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida.

A year later Yakima car dealer Dick Hahn bought it and had Jerry Grant drive it. But Lovely still called it "my Ferrari."

Over the years the TR-59 changed hands several times, though few appreciated it.

One owner was a Rainier Avenue used-car dealer who "loved to drive it on the street," Lovely recalls.

"I lived in an old house on Cascadia (Avenue) and I could hear him down on Rainier, a mile and a half a way. I knew exactly what it was. He used to go through the tunnel to the Lake Washington bridge, make the turn around and come back, sticking it in third gear and just letting it go."

The TR-59 fell upon still harder times. Its engine needed work.

Tracing its history

"This guy bought it and put it in this little shop off Genesee," said Lovely, who traced the life history of this car with the doggedness of a genealogist. "It was one of those places where you couldn't see the workbench because of all the grease under the debris."

The engine had been taken apart. Pieces were lost. The V-12's six dual-throat Weber carburetors were removed to grace the back bar of the long-gone Grand Prix Tavern on Rainier Avenue.

Twenty-four years ago, a friend told Lovely an acquaintance had seen a Ferrari in Fremont he thought might be the TR-59.

"I went looking for the car," Lovely recalls. "I drove down a dirt alley and there was this rickety old garage. There it was, my Ferrari." Sitting outside, in the weather, stripped.

Lovely's friend learned the owner was an engineering student at the University of Washington. "He knew that it was a wonderful car and he was going to restore it to its full glory" - someday.

But the dream was beyond his means. The student agreed to sell the car to Lovely, but didn't have all the parts - the previous owner kept some of them because the student hadn't paid the full price.

While the student searched for the previous owner's address, Lovely found Ferrari engine parts in cardboard boxes, jumbled with Subaru parts. "This was where he lived, in the furnace room of a boarding house in the U District. He had a mattress on the floor."

The previous owner was in Everett, where he had the bunch-of-snakes exhaust system, radiator, fuel tank, and more he would sell for $300 - what the student still owed.

Reality struck Lovely on the drive home. He'd paid more than he could afford for the car of his dreams - that existed only in his dreams. What was real was a neglected hulk and disembodied guts.

Lovely told his wife Nevele "we are the proud owners of this heap of rubble. She said, `We don't have that kind of money.' "

They borrowed $2,000 from her mother, and Lovely thought he could put the car together and give it a coat of paint. "That's all I was interested in, just getting it together so it would run. We weren't even thinking about restoration."

After an expensive false start, Lovely gave up trying to get it to run.

"I didn't want to sell it, ever, but we would have to win the lottery or something to afford the restoration."

For 17 years the TR-59 sat, watched but untouched.

Then a few years ago Lovely formed a car restoration partnership with Dennison, who said he wanted to work on the TR.

Dennison and his wife Nancy worked on it for 21 months - afternoons after work, nights and weekends.

Take, for example, the wood-rimmed steering wheel.

"The wood was so dry it was all curled up like potato chips," Lovely says. "Butch didn't send it out to a shop or have a new one made. He took it home and started rubbing oil into it every night. He just kept working on it, so it would be all original."

Looking like new

By August 1991, the TR-59 was complete, shiny and looking like new, with all original parts. The engine made the ripping-canvas shriek that distinguishes Ferrari V-12's.

"This is the only car I drive where I don't wear ear plugs," says Lovely. "I want to hear the music."

Lovely and Dennison took their pride to Pebble Beach, Calif., for the influential "Concours d'elegance," where it won first in class.

The following June, at the Ferrari Club of America National Concours, the TR-59 again won its class. Purist judges found only one variation from originality: Dennison had polished the fuel tank. The Ferrari factory did not.

Despite that half-point deduction, the TR-59 was named best of show in an esoteric world where even the pinpoint marks on rivet heads must be properly aligned.

Since then, Lovely has been racing the TR-59. He goes hard, smiling to the music. But why risk damaging it?

"If something goes wrong," Dennison says, "we will fix it."

"If the market value of this car is $3.5 million to $5 million," Lovely adds, "then $150,000 to repair something is a small portion of that value. You say, let's race it. That is what it was meant for."