For a teenaged Chris Amon, it was love at first sight.
"It was exactly how I imagined how a proper Grand Prix car will be - and it did everything you would imagine a proper Grand Prix car would do."
Half a decade after the fact, the memory of slipping behind the wheel of one of the most famous Grand Prix cars of all time remains fresh in his memory.
Sitting into the wide cockpit, behind that massive six-cylinder engine, the Maserati 250F was unlike any other car he'd known. But that just made it all the more exciting to the then 17-year-old.
"It was something of a beast, I suppose," he recalls of the highly-prized Southward Collection star machine, to be demonstrated at Manfeild during the New Zealand Grand Prix meeting this weekend.
"But it smelt right, it spun the wheels and it sounded great. I couldn't wait to drive it."
He can fully understand why the cigar-bodied 2.5-litre single-seater is today revered as the last of the great world championship front-engined racers.
So highly regarded, that it was recently named the greatest racer of all time by a British enthusiast magazine. Highly valued, too - just 26 were built and surviving examples are worth millions.
Introduced for the 1954 F1 season, the 250F - F for Formula One, 250 in reference to the 2.5-litre engine - it competed in a total of 46 F1 championship events between 1954 and 1958.
It is particularly associated with one of Amon's boyhood heroes, Juan Manual Fangio of Argentina. As the best balanced of all front-engined Grand Prix racers, it perfectly suited Fangio's high speed four wheel drifts - a style Amon was to emulate.
It took five-time world champion Fangio to victory in what is regarded as one of the greatest races of all time, on Germany's vaunted Nurburgring where he overcame a 50-second deficit in just 20 laps, breaking the lap record 10 times, to take the lead on the final lap.
The 250F remained in use by customer teams until 1960 and privateers continued to favour the type even after it was outmoded by the new-era rear-engined cars.
Amon can understand why: It's a car with a special something, he says. Of all the hundreds of cars he has raced over the years, the Maserati is among the few he wished he'd been able to keep.
"It's a car with huge character. There aren't that many cars from my career that I can say I wished could have kept - a Ferrari from 1967, the Ford I won in at Le Mans, two Matra F1 cars. But, yes, the Maserati as well. That's special."