Motor Sport has always been a part of the story of the motor car, and right from the beginning manufacturers used motorsport as a way of exhibiting their wares and also of proving them. Even Rolls-Royce entered into events to prove the endurance and reliability of their cars, whilst others wanted to prove speed, economy or technical advancement. Almost as soon as they started doing this customers began to ask 'can we have one like that?' The age of the sporting version, sometimes called the 'Speed XYZ', was born and the open two-seater sports version quickly followed. In the 1940s and 1950s the age of the sports car was at its height, and the idea was that you bought a car in a showroom on Saturday, took it to a circuit on Sunday, changed the tyres, removed the windscreen and stuck numbers on it and raced; at the end of the race you drove it home. However, very quickly these 'sports cars' either became very tame and soft and unsuitable for true competition, or became too specialised and hairy for road use. The Racing Car was one rung up the ladder beyond even the hairiest sports car; often Racing cars were produced in very small numbers, sometimes differing one to another. Manufacturers such as Ferrari and Maserati tried to exist purely from the sales of Racing Cars and only grudgingly sold road cars. Other manufacturers such as Riley and Talbot and Bentley virtually bankrupted themselves with the money they spent on racing their cars. Enzo Ferrari almost pioneered the idea of the 'production' Racing Car, with models like the Ferrari 250 GTO which was supposed to be a production model, but in fact had almost nothing in common with his production Ferrari 250 GTs.