Saturday, May 7
Scuderia Rampante is a Ferrari restoration and repair shop in Erie, Colorado. They’ve been in business for something like forty years. Skip arranged a shop tour for the Miata and Lotus clubs. It turned out to be not so much a tour of the facility as the opportunity to wander freely about the place.
Life sized Matchbox collection
It’s loaded with interesting sights. In addition to all sorts of exotic Ferrari automobiles, there were cars of other marques, a helicopter and a half and two stuffed bears. Some of the cars are there in storage but most seemed to be undergoing some repair or other.
I seem to gravitate to the unusual. Certainly it could be said that wandering around a world class Ferrari shop is unusual in itself. For the most part, though, I’ve seen these cars on the road; out in the wild so to speak. But there were a couple of notable “which of these is not like the others” cars.
In the small show-room like entryway was a Ferrari I’d not only never seen before, but had never heard of. In the first couple years of the fifties, Ferrari produced eighty two copies of the 212 Inter. Powered by a three carburetor V-12 that pumped out as much as 165 HP it was capable of hitting 116 mph and going from 0 to 60 in just 10.5 seconds. My how automotive technology has advanced. Someone there told Michael this car is worth $18 million, but a quick search indicates it’s more likely in the $2 to $3 million range.
Ferrari 212 Inter
The 212 isn’t unusual because it’s a Ferrari, it’s unusual because of its vintage and rarity. There was at least one other unusual car of the same vintage, if not the same rarity. In the rack I couldn’t help but notice the Wolseley 16/60 with the Bahamas license plate. This is another car I’ve never even heard of. It’s not out of place here, though. Although the car was made by BMC it was styled by Pininfarina. About 63,000 of these were made.
Wolseley 16/60
Scattered throughout the shop floor were various Ferrari drivetrains under repair. Some where just the engine, others were both engine and transmission. I was quite interested in the flat 12. There was a red Testarossa in the giant car rack with a license plate “FLAT 12” but this engine probably belonged to the black Testarossa on the floor.
Flat 12
Scuderia Rampante wasn’t the only place we went on Saturday. We started at cars and coffee in Louisville and ended at a show put on my Hagarty’s and Auto Archives. Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing a Porsche 918 on US-36 where I managed to get a crappy cell-phone picture. The same car was at Louisville. I hadn’t seen it there before.
We were planning on having hot dogs at the Hagarty event. By the time we got there the weather had deteriorated quite a bit. No longer just chilly and overcast, it was now raining lightly. We elected not to stand in line in the rain for hot dogs. After a quick tour of the new home of Auto Archives we made our way home. It turned out to be excellent timing, as we were hit by an intense hail storm. Most of the hail was BB sized or pea sized but some stones were more like marbles.
Porsche 918 Spyder