Update 1/14/23 – This one has been relisted with a $4,000 price drop! Find it here on eBay for $9,500.
From 12/22/22 – There are rare cars and then there are ultra-rare cars. This is one of the latter. For sale here on eBay in Fort Worth, Texas, it’s a 1971 OTAS Lombardi 820 Grand Prix. It may look like a fiberglass kit car, but it isn’t—it’s an authentic Italian sports car built in Vercelli, Italy between 1968 and 1972. The owner wants $13,500 for this fairly tidy example, and it’s hard to say if that price is fair or foul—these things come up for sale very rarely.
The listing is terse. It’s an original Texas/New Mexico car, and it was in dry storage for more than 38 years. Judging from the dusty engine minus its spark plug wires, it probably hasn’t been run in that long. But maybe it won’t be hard to get the little two-seater running again. The base is the Fiat 850, and parts for those shouldn’t be too hard to find.
The handsome sports car was developed by the Carrozzeria Francis Lombardi, and sketched in-house by Giuseppe Rinaldi. It was marketed variously as the OTAS (Officina Trasformazioni Automobili Sportive) Lombardi Grand Prix 820, as a Giannini and as an Abarth Grand Prix and Scorpione. This is an example of the first one.
Overall, the car looks like an excellent starting point, with just 27,000 miles covered. It seems to have been last registered in 1984. There is rust (remember, it’s steel!) in the rocker panels, lower front fenders and rear wheel wells, but the undercarriage is a big unknown. The 850 was a big ruster—some of them were rusting when their first owners took them home. But this one may have benefited from the long storage and, before that, the Texas climate. The interior is probably the best part of the car, and is intact and unmolested, with many undoubtedly hard-to-find parts present and looking good.
The engine is low-mileage, but after such a long slumber it’s going to need a rebuild or maybe an engine transplant. It would make a good Scorpione clone if you can find the appropriate power plant.
As first shown, the car had the Fiat 850 43-horsepower 843-cc four-cylinder engine, but there were also 903-cc versions (Abarth Grand Prix), 982-cc versions (Giannini) and 1,280-cc versions (Scorpione, with the Fiat 124’s engine). The car—not fiberglass but all-steel—weighed only 1,390 pounds, so it was good for up to 99 miles per hour. Cars with the 850 Special engines had 47 horsepower, but the Abarth Scorpione SS had a whopping 100. The Scorpione SS could reach 115 mph.
The engine, of course, was in the back, which meant there was a little luggage space up front beside the spare tire, and also some behind the two seats. The disappearing headlights were hand-cranked, and the taillights are straight from the Fiat 850 Coupe. There were two series, the Series I had the Fiat 850’s metal engine cover, and the Series II had a louvered design in black.
A sad part of the OTAS story is that a Cypriot casino owner planned to buy 1,000 cars and sell them in Britain, but he was tragically killed in a tank accident in Cyprus, so only 10 cars made it over to Britain. In the U.S., the car was briefly sold, starting in 1970, as the OTAS Grand Prix 820. It had the federalized version of the Fiat 850 engine, with 817cc. The engine was small enough to not need emissions equipment. Some say 65 were imported, others 100. Tune-up kits were offered by importer John Rich of Glendale, California. In any case, it was all over for the OTAS and its variants by 1972.
One of these in excellent condition was sold at the Quail Lodge by Bonhams in 2019 for $26,880. Getting the one for sale now would probably bring the total outlay to something like that, or more. But how often do these come up for sale?
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