Just before he opened the door to the garage, I’d swear he gave me the evil eye and muttered something under his breath. It didn’t sound like English, but then again he was from New Jersey. I didn’t know it at the time, but this man – this voodoo priest, of sorts – had placed a curse on me! A curse which seems to still hang over me some six years later. The curse of the etceterini.
The ad in the local paper was for a FIAT-Abarth Berlina Corsa. The shaman in question said that the car had original SCCA history dating back to the early ’60s. It was too tantalizing to not at least have a look at.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for “unique” (read hopelessly obscure) cars. Stanguellini, Volpini, Ermini, Linguini – if it has an “-ini,” I’d like to own it. As I’ve told my wife many times (usually as she is standing by the side of the freeway with a flashlight in one hand and a can of “Big Bang” starting fluid in the other), “Life’s too short to drive boring cars.” I suppose a related corollary to my personal automotive mantra is that life is also too short to drive or race the commonplace car. Like an African hunter suffering from recurring malarial fever, I periodically become taken by cars that are so unique that either nobody has ever heard of them, nobody knows how to work on them and/or spares weren’t readily available even when the car was new.
Anyway, as I’m sure you can tell by now, I had to buy the Abarth. It was perfect. An empty shell, with no mechanical parts, interior parts or exterior trim… in short, a gutted skeleton of a racecar. Add on to this the fact that it looked like it had been used as one of those cars at the county fair that for $2.00 you can take five swipes at with a sledge hammer. Was that chanting I heard in the background?
I explained to my wife that it was a car that I would restore for her to race (no really, stop laughing), and best of all (everyone chant along with me now), it was a really great investment.
Well, no sooner did I get it home than the shaman’s zombie followers started circling the camp. One guy called to tell me that he had heard from his master, I mean friend, that I had bought the car and did I have any interest in the 5-speed race box that originally came with the car? “Sure,” I said, “how much?” Five thousand dollars was his straight-faced reply. Was that a searing hot pin I felt in my back?
After taking a “pass” on the walking dead’s transmission, I began the search for the 50,000 or so parts I would need to resurrect this “special” car from the grave. After much searching, I tracked down the one guy, in all of North America, who had the “correct” parts that I needed to restore this car to its proper racing configuration. Unfortunately, he turned out to be one of those “eccentric” characters who didn’t just sell parts to anyone. Oh, no – he had to like you – had to get to know you. After a couple of weeks of buttering him up, I finally got “approval” to come over and see what he had to offer. All I can legally say about that experience is that when he started to tell me how he lived for three years in a tree house in Thailand, I started to slowly back towards the door not wanting to make any sudden moves that might startle him.
As time went on, I slowly amassed all the right pieces and had the car about 70% restored, when my wife became pregnant. Overnight, her interest in vintage racing went in the dumpster, which meant if the car wasn’t going to be for her then I’d have to make a decision as to whether I wanted to keep it or my formula car. But as I pondered this, I realized that when completed what I was going to end up with was a very unique, very expensive and reasonably slow racecar. Almost instantly the curse was broken. Perhaps, at this point I should mention one of my other little automotive tenets to live by, which is never own a racecar that uses the descriptors “slow” and “expensive.” As much as I loved that little car, I had to let it go. Amazingly, it sold almost instantly to a guy who must have really pissed off some high priest somewhere, because he had a garage-full of FIAT 600s and 600-based Abarth’s. I think an intervention or exorcism may be called for in his case.
If you too suffer the curse of the etceterini or just have an interest in “unique” Italian racecars, then I’m sure you’ll enjoy Ed McDonough’s profile this month of the Giannini Gruppo 2 Corse. In fact, it has me thinking about obscure Italian cars again. I wonder what the weather in Thailand is like this time of year?
