Sports car privateer Giampiero Moretti died at home in Milan on 14 January following a long illness. He was 72. While the term ‘gentleman driver’ has in recent decades taken on largely negative connotations, Moretti epitomised the enthusiastic owner-driver. He was a highly competent amateur, one who used motor sport to promote his MOMO line of steering wheels – and memorably so.

Moretti’s motor sport career began in 1961. While studying political science at the University of Pavia, he began hillclimbing a Lancia Appia Zagato. Around this time he also designed his own steering wheel, desiring something with a smaller diameter than was then the norm and with a thicker outer rim. His efforts attracted considerable attention, not least from Ferrari’s sporting director Eugenio Dragoni who requested a batch for the Scuderia’s F1 team. John Surtees claimed the 1964 Formula One world title gripping one of Moretti’s tillers.

In 1966, he formed MOMO (a contraction of his surname and Monza), with Ferrari a regular customer. During his many visits to Maranello, he developed a close friendship with Piero Lardi (later Piero Ferrari) which years down the line would have a profound effect on his competition aspirations. Appropriately enough, it was aboard a Ferrari 512S that Moretti made the leap from club driver to international player: not one to do things by halves, he drove one the 5-litre sports-prototypes in the 1970 Daytona 24 Hours having completed all of three test laps at Monza beforehand. He and Corrado Manfredini retired just 90 minutes in. However, in September of that year he claimed his first big win – and Ferrari’s maiden success in Japan - in the Mount Fuji Golden Race. The Ferrari’s engine was later removed and put in an all new car intended for the European Interserie championship but this overstretched the team.

Instead, Moretti turned his attention to the US where for the better part of 20 years he ran a succession of Porsches – 935 and 962 – along with the intriguing Alba-Ford and a Nissan NPT-90 before helping to instigate the mighty Ferrari 333SP. Ever since that first outing at Daytona, winning the 24 Hours at the Florida circuit had become an Ahab-like obsession. Moretti persuaded a sceptical Lardi and the Ferrari board to initiate a customer sports-prototype and aboard the Dallara-conceived machine he rounded out his racing career with outright honours at Daytona in 1998 alongside Didier Theys, Mauro Baldi and Arie Luyendyk. As he commented on the eve of the race, the cost of his 15 attempts thus far hadn’t concerned him; he just wanted the watch awarded to the winning drivers. ‘With all the money I have spent at Daytona, I could have bought 1000 Rolexes easily’, he joked.

Victory at his fifteenth attempt was followed a month later with honours in the Sebring 12 Hours. By now the wrong side of 50, he also claimed the Watkins Glen 6-Hours alongside Max Papis that same year before hanging up his helmet.