Today we are apparently looking at a 1958 Scarab and a 1965 Bizzarrini P538.
Except that we are not. But before I go down the road of Truth allow me to get excited for a second: Both these cars are truly the stuff of legends. One from America, hailing all that was good and great from that ressourceful country, and achieving the ultimate success in return: They beat Ferrari. That was in 1958 at the Riverside Grand Prix, and you almost could not go any better than that. And Scarab never did: Their entry into Formula One was not succesful and only eight cars with the Scarab name were ever built. As the Scarab story was also that of the racing driver and dashing millionaire Lance Reventlow, dying in a plane crash at age 36, I am pretty sure there’ll be a movie soon. Scarab beat Ferrari six years before Ford, right?
Bizzarrini were never quite as succesful in racing as their own marque, but founder Giotto Bizzarrini did brilliant work while at Ferrari, ATS and Iso and nonetheless built more cars in his own name than Scarab: It certainly helped that his bestseller was the road car Bizzarrini Strada, of which more that 130 were built from 1964 and some years forward. And then there was the P538, so called because of its 5,3 litre 8-cylinder Chevrolet engine. A pure racing car it raced at Le Mans in 1966 (we know how that went, don’t we?) with no success and this also was the fate of the later Lamborghini-V12-powered version. Very few were built, maybe around four or six cars, all strikingly looking cars in the best tradition of the sixties racing cars.
The thing is none of the two cars above are quite what they look like. The Bizzarrini is pretty close, though: It was actually built after Bizzarrini went out of business. But as the former Bizzarrini employee Salvatore Diomante took up the idea of building cars true to the original in the Seventies, surely he must have created one of the first continuation cars ever in the process. Rumour has it that Bizzarrini himself was involved in the first cars, but they were not really counting in Italy in the Seventies and maybe he wasn’t. True to Bizzarrini fashion the number of cars built is not really known either, but it could be eight. Plus minus. The one for sale has had various documents over the years, one stating 1965 as the build year, another one stating 1979. The latter sounds reasonable.
There is not that much fuss about the Scarab, though: It was built in 2010 and is described as having “all the aesthetic uniqueness of the originals, with modern day improvements”. The latter includes a very non-historic Chevrolet LS2 V-8 engine which has been powertuned as well, and I have no idea at all why they specifically mention the “drive by wire” gas pedal. Unless they actually mean an oldfashioned metal wire, of course. But surely the aluminium bodywork (it’s glassfibre on the Bizzarrini) can’t be faulted as the craftmanship looks nice and the car is quite simply beautiful in the correct Reventlow signature blue metallic. Stunning. In eleven years it has been drive 2,513 miles (less than a wet Le Mans 24 Hours) so must drive terribly? And with that engine must be stupidly fast.
My point is this: No matter how you look at it the Bizzarrini, being built in 1979 and for all it is and isn’t – that car is now a classic car in its own right, 42 years old and having been restored at least once. The Scarab is eleven years old, looks brand spanking new and should really be driven more – but will it too eventually end up in a classic car magazine around 2050, praising it as a fine tribute but not least as a classic car for all that it is?
They are both up for auction with RM Sotheby’s, the Bizzarrini in Paris on February 13th and the Scarab on an online auction February 19th to 28th. The Bizzarrini is estimated at between 475,000 and 525,000 Euro (remarkbly precise, actually) while there is no estimate on the Scarab. Personally I’d say half of the Bizzarrini would be appropiate but the owner as well as the auction house might disagree. I don’t mind as I’d budget for ripping out the engine and installing some proper old school throbbing V8.
