Car Culture · Sbarro Windhound

Release the Hounds

One of them was bred in a Texas kennel from Borzoi and lurcher stock. The other was built in a Swiss workshop from a Fiat windshield, a Volkswagen grille and whatever engine the customer felt like that morning. Only one of them is a dog. Good luck telling them apart.

By Jolice Franklyn · 19 minute read

Dogs are a man's best friend. Always by their side, loyal, loving, and undeniably fun — a bond that cannot be broken even when they're gone.

Take the Windhound, for example.

The Windhound is a graceful, medium-sized dog. Generally affectionate, gentle and intelligent. Most are quiet and relaxed indoors, but become extremely fast and athletic outside. They bond closely with their families, and they usually coexist well with children and other dogs.

Every word of that is true.

Every word of that is also true of a 2-ton Swiss off-road wagon with exhaust pipes running over the roof, and that is the single greatest coincidence in the history of naming things.

Two people who could not buy what they wanted

Here is where it stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern, because the dog and the car were created the same way, for the same reason, by the same kind of person.

The Silken Windhound exists because a Texan named Francie Stull went looking for a dog that wasn't there. She had a kennel full of Borzoi — more than 200 champions in the record books — and she wanted a second breed: something medium-sized, long-coated, healthy, with the poise of a big sighthound and none of the size. She looked. It didn't exist. So in the early 1980s she started building one, crossing her top Borzoi with a multi-generational line of Whippet-based lurchers, and the first litter of what would become the Silken Windhound was whelped in 1985.

The Sbarro Windhound exists because a Swiss-Italian named Franco Sbarro went looking for a car that wasn't there. In 1977, if you wanted four-wheel drive, your options were a Land Rover, a Land Cruiser, a Nissan Patrol or a Mercedes G — all of them, essentially, agricultural equipment with seats. The Range Rover had made a start on the idea that a truck could also be pleasant, and that was about the extent of the market. Sbarro wanted something that was genuinely luxurious and genuinely capable at the same time. It didn't exist. So in 1978 he built one.

Two people, on two continents, at almost the same moment, arriving at the identical conclusion: fine, I'll do it myself. One of them ended up with a dog breed recognized in Slovenia. The other ended up with fourteen cars and a very confused King of Saudi Arabia, and we'll get to him.

Not a designer dog. Not a rebodied G-Wagen.

The Silken Windhound people are prickly about one thing in particular, and they're right to be. Their breed is not a designer dog — not a Borzoi crossed with a Whippet and given a cute portmanteau. No direct Borzoi-to-Whippet cross was ever used. It's a genuine breed with its own studbook, DNA-verified registrations, and a closed gene pool since 2000.

Say the equivalent thing about the Windhound and you'll get the same reaction from the people who care.

Yes, the chassis underneath came from somewhere else — depending on which car you're standing in front of, a Mercedes G, a Jeep Cherokee Chief, or a Range Rover. Yes, Franco Sbarro raided the parts bins of half of Europe to keep the price survivable. The windshield is out of a Fiat 131. The grille is out of a Volkswagen Passat. The taillights are Opel. On some cars the Sbarro badge sits in a diamond on the grille, and on some it doesn't, because consistency was not the point.

And yet nobody has ever mistaken a Windhound for any of those things, because what Sbarro built on top of the borrowed hardware was entirely his own: a long, tall, square-shouldered station wagon riding absurdly high, with an interior that had no business being there. It is a breed, not a cross. The bloodline is visible. The animal is new.

It's built from a Fiat windshield, a Volkswagen grille and Opel taillights, and it still looks like nothing else on earth. That is not parts-bin engineering. That's a pedigree.

Quiet and relaxed indoors

Open the door and the joke lands immediately, because the inside of a Windhound is a gentleman's club that has been dropped 16 inches onto a set of mud tires.

Leather is everywhere — seats, doors, the parts of the cabin most manufacturers in 1978 would have finished in ribbed vinyl and a prayer. The dashboard is burl wood. Not wood-effect appliqué, not a plastic pressing with a grain printed on it; wood. The whole atmosphere is English: restrained, warm, expensive without shouting about it. Deep cognac seats. Proper rear accommodation rather than a bench installed under protest.

And we don't have to take anyone's word for the equipment, because a period Sbarro brochure survives, headlined Grace Under Pressure, and it is a glorious document. The seats are heated Recaros, adjustable for reach and height on both sides, with adjustable backrest angle and headrests, every single function on an electric push button. There is real wood paneling, air conditioning with a three-stage fan, and a choice of color schemes.

There is also, in a 1980s off-road wagon, a laser disc player.

The brochure's own summary of the cabin is that you will spend a lot of time in there and you will enjoy it, and that quality is timeless — which is exactly the register you'd expect from a company selling a hand-built truck to people who already own several other cars. Elsewhere it quotes a 5,300 kg trailer coupling, footnoted as specifiable to individual state regulations, which tells you the car in that brochure was being aimed squarely at America.

Remember what else was on sale. A Land Cruiser in 1978 had a cabin you could hose out, which was a selling point. A G-Wagen had a heater and, if you were lucky, a passenger. The Jeep Grand Wagoneer was the only mainstream vehicle in the world making a serious attempt at this, and Monteverdi's Safari — also Swiss, also luxurious, also based on somebody else's truck — had beaten Sbarro to the punch by exactly one year.

What the Windhound did was go further than either. It didn't just add wood and leather to a truck. It was designed from the outset as a luxury vehicle that happened to be able to climb things, which is the founding logic of every luxury SUV sold since, and it arrived roughly two decades before the industry worked that out.

The other Swiss guy

Sbarro was not the only person in Switzerland having this idea, and he was not the first. About an hour up the road from Grandson, in Binningen just outside Basel, Peter Monteverdi got there ahead of him.

Monteverdi's story rhymes with Sbarro's and then diverges hard. He grew up in his father's repair shop, raced hill climbs and junior formulae in single-seaters of his own design, took a run at Formula 1, and spent the late 1960s building Chrysler-powered grand tourers priced against Ferrari. Then the oil crisis arrived and quietly strangled the market for 11 mpg supercars. Casting around for something else to sell to the same customers, Monteverdi looked at what Jeep and Chevrolet were doing in America and had exactly the thought Sbarro would have two years later.

The Monteverdi Safari was shown in 1976 and in production from 1977. Underneath it is an International Harvester Scout II: box-section steel ladder frame, live axles on leaf springs at both ends, power discs at the front and drums at the back. On top of that sits a sharp, slim-pillared two-door body designed in-house and built by Carrozzeria Fissore in Italy, with quad headlamps and a clean grille. Inside: power steering, electric windows, air conditioning, a stereo, front buckets and room for 5.

The engine list is gloriously American. Standard was the Chrysler 318, 5.2 liters and 152 bhp. You could have International's own 5.7. Or you could tick the box for the Chrysler 440 big block — 7.2 liters — which took a vehicle shaped like a wardrobe past 124 mph.

And here is the number that explains everything about the difference between these two men. The Safari cost CHF 39,000 in 1977 — roughly $16,000 at the exchange rate of the day, or on the order of $88,000 in 2026 money — which was just CHF 5,000 more than a Range Rover. Monteverdi priced his hand-built Swiss-Italian luxury off-roader to sit alongside a car you could walk into a dealership and buy.

Read down that table and the difference stops being about specification. Monteverdi was building a product. One platform, one gearbox, one body style, a published price and a few hundred cars over six years. He was a small manufacturer with a catalog.

Sbarro was not doing that at all. Three different chassis, four engine makes, two body styles, no price list, and 14 cars in total. Monteverdi ran a factory. Sbarro ran a kennel.

Monteverdi sold a model. Sbarro sold you a specific animal. That is the whole difference between a production run and a litter.

There was even a third Swiss firm at it: Felber built the Oasis on the same International Scout underpinnings, which means that at one point in the late 1970s, three separate Swiss workshops were independently turning the same American farm truck into a luxury car for rich Europeans. Monteverdi also did a run converting two-door Range Rovers into four-doors, and in 1978 added a cheaper sibling to the Safari — the Sahara, which kept the plush cabin but wore only lightly restyled Scout bodywork. Perhaps 30 of those were made.

And then the donor died. International Harvester stopped building the Scout after the 1980 model year, and by 1982 both the Safari and the Sahara were finished, along with most of Monteverdi. Building your car on one platform means you live and die by somebody else's product plan.

Sbarro never had that problem, because Sbarro never depended on anyone. If the Mercedes chassis had gone away he would have used the Jeep. If the Jeep had gone away he would have used the Range Rover. He was already using all three.

The mongrel outlived the pedigree. Which, if you have ever met either kind of dog, will not come as a surprise.

Extremely fast and athletic outside

Now let it off the leash.

The Windhound rides on hydraulic jacks that raise and lower the whole car on demand. Ground clearance runs from 25 cm to 42 cm — 9.8 inches to 16.5 inches — which means the same vehicle can be a low-slung wagon in the car park and a 16-inch-clearance mountain goat forty seconds later. In 1978. When the state of the art elsewhere was a taller spring.

Drive is non-permanent four-wheel drive, engaged when you need it. Gearboxes were 4- or 5-speed manuals or automatics, whichever the buyer preferred. Brakes were drums, with front discs available on request, which is a wonderfully period way of saying that stopping was an option on the order form. It weighs between 1,850 and 2,000 kg (4,080 and 4,410 lb) depending on how it was specified. Top speed is around 180 km/h — 112 mph — in a vehicle shaped like a filing cabinet and tall enough to change its own lightbulbs.

And on the most famous car of the lot, the exhaust pipes and the air intake run up over the roof, like a snorkel that got ambitious. We'll come back to how that happened, because it's the best story in this article and it involves a dog running away from home.

Every one of them made in its owner's image

This is the part that makes the dog comparison stop being a gag and start being uncomfortable.

You did not buy a Windhound. You commissioned one. Three doors or five. Manual or automatic. Discs or drums. And — the detail that turns the whole thing into a personality test — whichever engine you happened to like, because Sbarro would fit more or less anything with a Mercedes, BMW, Jeep or Fiat badge on it and longitudinal ambitions.

This was not an inference anyone had to make. It's the brochure's closing pitch: the car pictured, it says, is only an illustration of what's on offer, and there is a lot more they can do for you. Tell us what you want, it finishes. Whatever can be done, we will do it.

No manufacturer on earth would print that sentence today. Their lawyers would set fire to the building.

So the fourteen cars are fourteen different animals, and each one is a fairly direct readout of the person who ordered it. Buy the 6.9-liter Mercedes V8 and you are one kind of human being. Ask for the 2.8-liter inline-six out of a 280 GE — the brochure car, quoted at 156 hp, with cross-country reduction and differential locks — and you are a different, quieter, arguably more sensible one. Go Jeep and you're an American at heart no matter what your passport says.

Fourteen cars. Fourteen owners. Fourteen sets of decisions that can never be repeated, because the man who made them stopped making them.

Which is exactly what people mean when they say a dog picked them.

The five-door, and how to spot one

From 1980 Sbarro offered a five-door, and only 3 were built. They're worth knowing on sight, because the changes went well beyond a pair of extra handles.

The five-door swapped the three-door's twin round headlamps for a grille carrying two rectangular units, with round fog lamps set into the lower bumper. At the back, the tailgate gained an integrated roof spoiler — a spoiler, on a 112-mph off-road wagon, in 1980, for reasons that were almost certainly aesthetic and are absolutely correct. The rectangular headlamp treatment was good enough that it later migrated onto some three-door cars, so the lights alone won't settle it. Count the doors.

Then somebody entered one in the Paris-Dakar

The first Windhound ever built was ordered by a customer in Neuchâtel. Three-door bodywork. Fiat Campagnola suspension. A six-cylinder BMW engine. Leather and wood inside, of course, because that was the whole point.

He then sold it, and the car's next owner did the single most Windhound thing imaginable, which was to take this hand-built Swiss luxury wagon with the wooden dashboard and enter it in the 1980 Paris-Dakar Rally, with Michel Diallo driving.

It got 3,500 kilometers — roughly 2,175 miles — into the Sahara before a series of rollovers ended its rally.

And here is where the article's entire thesis stops being a metaphor. Because Franco Sbarro heard what had happened to the first car he ever built under that name, and he went and got it. He bought the wreck back. He had it repatriated to Switzerland. And when it finally arrived he discovered that it had been picked over and looted where it lay, which is the automotive equivalent of your dog coming home from a fight missing a collar, a chunk of ear and most of its dignity.

So he rebuilt it.

And when he rebuilt it, he did not put it back the way it was. He fitted it with the spectacular roof-mounted exhaust and air intake pipes it wears to this day — the ones that make it look less like a car than like something that should be tranquilized from a helicopter. The dog ran away, got badly hurt, came home, healed up, and came back louder.

Sbarro bought back a looted wreck from the Sahara, dragged it home, rebuilt it, and gave it exhaust pipes over the roof. Nobody does that for a product. People do that for pets.

Coexists well with children and other dogs

Both halves of that line hold up, and the second one is documented.

On the children: there is no research here, no owner survey, no data. There is only the self-evident fact that a vehicle standing 1.70 m tall on hydraulically extendable legs with pipes coming out of its roof is the most exciting object a seven-year-old will encounter all year. Adults in 1978 looked at a Windhound and saw an expensive curiosity from a small Swiss workshop. Children looked at exactly the same vehicle and understood it perfectly and immediately.

On the other dogs: there is a photograph in the Unicorn catalog of a Windhound towing a trailer, and on the trailer sits a Sbarro BMW 328 replica. One Sbarro carrying another Sbarro. The big one pulling the little one. If you have ever watched a Borzoi tolerate a puppy with visible patience, you have seen this photograph.

Sidebar · One-off · 1979

Release the hawk, then

You cannot write about a hound without the bird, and in this case you don't have to, because Sbarro built that too.

In 1979, King Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia saw a Windhound and wanted one — with modifications. He was a serious falconer, and what he wanted was a vehicle that could cross Arabian terrain flat out and let him hunt without getting out of it. Sbarro was given a free hand on everything except the engine, which had to be a Mercedes, because roughly 90% of the King's fleet already was.

The result was the Windhawk: a stretched, six-wheeled Windhound with a polyester and fiberglass body, the 6.9-liter Mercedes V8, and a 350-liter (92.5-gallon) fuel tank so the desert wouldn't be a problem. It kept the Windhound's hydraulic ride height, 25 cm to 42 cm.

Then Sbarro solved the actual brief, and the solution is magnificent. The seats rise 80 cm — 31.5 inches — on hydraulics, lifting the hunter up through two opening roof panels so he stands above the car and can launch his falcons from a moving vehicle. And because a working falcon has to be paid for its trouble, there is a refrigerator on board to keep the meat rewards cold while the whole apparatus crosses the desert.

It is not really a 6x6, and this matters. Nearly every write-up calls it six-wheel drive and leaves it there. In fact it's a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a third axle that is hydraulically brought into play only on request, when things get difficult. Impressive, but a different animal from a permanent 6x6 — and the distinction gets lost everywhere.

Its only real contemporary was the Lamborghini LM, which could claim comparable capability and considerably less reliability.

Sbarro liked the commission enough to run it back. He later built a second falcon-hunting vehicle, for the King of Morocco, based on a Rolls-Royce Camargue — a sentence that should be read twice.

Built

1 car, 1979

Engine

Mercedes 6.9-liter V8, 217 hp

Gearbox

5-speed manual

Drive

4WD + hydraulic third axle on demand

Brakes

2 front discs, 4 rear drums

Body

Polyester and fiberglass

Fuel tank

350 liters (92.5 gal)

Seat lift

80 cm (31.5 in), hydraulic

Weight

2,000–2,500 kg (4,410–5,510 lb)

Onboard

Refrigerator, for the falcons

Two numbers to distrust. The 6.9 V8 is quoted at 217 hp everywhere, but the same engine made about 286 hp DIN in the Mercedes 450SEL 6.9. Either it was seriously detuned — plausible for low-octane fuel in the Gulf in 1979 — or one figure has been copied for 45 years. And the top speed is given as 200 km/h (125 mph) in one breath and 180 km/h (112 mph) in the specification table of the very same source. A 2.5-tonne fiberglass six-wheeler on 217 hp does neither.

Bonds closely with its family

Here is the last thing the two Windhounds have in common, and it's the one that actually matters.

The oldest known Silken Windhound lived a few months past her twentieth birthday. It's a breed that tends to live into its late teens and die of old age rather than of anything in particular — which, in a world of purpose-built breeds with purpose-built health problems, is a genuine achievement of Francie Stull's.

The Sbarro Windhound is doing the same thing. In August 2023, the owner of a surviving three-door car photographed it out in Burgundy, where it runs regularly — 45 years after it was built, in a body style of which fewer than a dozen were ever made, with no factory, no parts supply and no dealer network standing behind it. Somebody keeps that car alive because they want to, which is the only reason anything like it survives.

That is not how people treat vehicles. It's how people treat animals.

Good boy

The luxury SUV is now the most profitable idea in the car industry. Every manufacturer on earth sells one. They are, without exception, descended from the proposition that a vehicle can be genuinely capable off the road and genuinely lovely inside it at the same time — and that people will pay a lot of money for the combination.

Franco Sbarro proved that in 1978, in a workshop in Switzerland, fourteen times, one customer at a time, using a Fiat windshield and a Volkswagen grille. The industry took about twenty years to catch up and has never once credited him.

He didn't build a product. He built a small population of individually specified animals, sent them out to families who wanted something nothing else could give them, and one of them promptly ran off into the Sahara and had to be carried home in pieces.

The dog people have a closed studbook, DNA-verified registrations and a national breed club with shows on three continents.

The car people have fourteen survivors, a rumor about a white one, and a photograph from Burgundy.

Both of them are Windhounds. Both of them will outlive you. Only one of them needs a walk.