With more than fi ve feet between the wheels, there’s plenty of room for center seating.

Campagnolo knock-offs are in magnesium alloy, Lamborghinis generally used wire wheels.

Passenger bubble doesn’t actually match passen-ger seat. It’s Italian, it doesn’t need a reason.

[Giampaolo] Dallara, who also engineered Ferrari but was working at Lamborghini, and we got the four-liter racing engine from Dallara, and we put it in the Bizzarrini, the P538, and it had a top speed of about [140 mph]. It was very competitive.”

While the A3/C and 5300 GT borrowed liberally from the Iso, the P538, in either V-8 or V-12 configuration, was unusual to the point of being alien. Giugiaro drew a fiberglass body that one contemporary review described as “a hunkered-down lizard,” almost exactly twice as wide as it is tall. FIA regulations dictated some ele-ments of the design, such as a passenger seat and room for a suitcase (as the class was for production-based cars). But no one said anything about putting the driver in the center, the passenger on his left and equip-ment on his right.

The trunk and flat front profile required a minuscule radiator, not ideal for endur-ance racing, and the rear-mounted engine required some fancy plumbing, so Bizzarrini routed the coolant though the round-sec-tion frame rails, as a sort of supplemental radiator, and, we suspect, supplemental foot heater. The frame itself is a spaceframe, a little beefier than Touring’s Superleggera, but the fiberglass body is bonded directly to it as in a Lotus, helping stiffen the wide-open car. Either engine works with a de Dion rearend and Girling disc brakes, inboard in the rear.

The 3.5L Lamborghini engine in our fea-ture car—the 18th V-12 they built, #0127—is fed through six Weber twin-throat carbu-retors. Estimates of the power output vary, and current owner Van Horneff plans to test it on a dyno, but when Lamborghini first put the engine on a dyno in 1963, it put out

370hp, although Dallara later “civilized” it to a mere 336 (SAE) in their 350 GT. The transmission is a transaxle in unit with the engine, and suffers in feel somewhat from the distance to the shifter.

Gammino raced the first 4.0-liter V-12 car once, after which he retired from rac-ing. Bizzarrini must have liked the idea, however, because he commenced con-struction of this car with a 3.5-liter engine: Le Mans 1967 was the target. Bizzarrini’s operation was on a shoestring at best, how-ever, and after finishing 1966 with neither a result at Le Mans nor anywhere else, they failed to get the new car built in time for Le Mans 1967.

As the spring of 1968 approached, it looked as though they’d be ready for the race, but the Automobile Club de l’Ouest revised the engine formula for the new season, dropping the displacement limit for their Sports Prototype class to 3.0 liters, and ending the competition hopes of the V-12 P538s.

Nineteen-sixty-eight did not turn out to be a good year for Bizzarrini at all. “Bizzarrini was a character, he was never a very good businessman,” Gammino told us, and his finances disintegrated to the point where he was forced to declare bank-ruptcy. It’s unclear how much of the car was built when he ran out of money, but in the eyes of an Italian bankruptcy court, it should have been sold to help settle his debts. Bizzarrini had other ideas.

When the assets of Scuderia Bizzarrini were sold off in 1970, including at least one V-8 P538, the 3.5-liter car was not only not among them, it had disappeared alto-gether: Before the court locked the doors, Bizzarrini took #002 apart and, along with

Chevrolet V-8 powered carsBizzarrini used the first P538 built for development work in the beginning of 1966, and it prob-

ably crashed that winter. The car that appeared at Le Mans four months later may have been this car, it may have been a second car or, more likely, it reused any and all salvageable parts of the original car, whatever those were.

In 1967, Bizzarrini rebodied at least one V-8 as a coupe and sold it to the Duca d’Aosta. Some sources suggest this was a third V-8 car, possibly constructed as a second 1967 Le Mans entry. Another, possibly the 1966 Le Mans car, was also rebodied; it ended up in the hands of Giugiaro at ItalDesign; he rebodied it a third time (at least) as his Manta show car. Both the Duca d’Aosta and ItalDesign cars have remained in those configurations, and are the only V-8s that can be reliably confirmed as Bizzarrinis built in the 1960s.

Lamborghini V-12 powered carsMike Gammino’s 4.0-liter car, often called 001 but actually un-numbered, was completed in

1965, after which he imported it into the U.S. He ran it once at Bridgehampton, where “we had some problems with it.” He gave it to his mechanic, Liberto Girardi, and at his death, it passed through a series of owners until it landed at the San Diego Automotive Museum.

Van Horneff’s feature car is stamped P538 002 on a front stabilizer. It was built for the 1967 Le Mans 24h but never completed. Disassembled by Bizzarrini by 1970, it was finished it as a com-mission in 1974 or 1975.

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