1952 Siata Daina

For as long as he can remember, James Peacock of Long Beach, California, has been afflicted with a palate for automotive curiosities…a proclivity for the unusual as it were. Worse yet, he’s had a grand master plan…a plan to retire at 40 and spend the second half of his life restoring a warehouse full of what he calls “forgotten cars.”

And the first half of his plan seems to be working quite well. Over the past 20 years Peacock has accumulated so many projects that he won’t actually utter the number. Suffice it to say that his storage area is packed to the rafters with French and Italian small displacement oddities. Oh, there are Simcas (a Sport 8, a Sport 9, and an Aronde Plein Ciel), and Fiats (one 1100PF coupe, one 1100PF convertible, a 124 coupe, and a Fiat Osca), and there’s even an Alfa GTV. But somewhere stuffed in there is a Siata Daina, a car that Peacock bought in 2003 for absolutely no good reason (my guess is that he is simply incapable of turning an orphan away). It is this last car that has caused Peacock to rethink the plan.