Sbarro · Geneva · Two Cars, One Patron
Twelve Angry
Cylinders
Two Kawasaki motorcycle engines. Two gearboxes. One gear lever. No differential. Franco Sbarro's Super Twelve is the most gloriously ridiculous hot hatch ever built — and the Ferrari-powered car he built to fix it is a better story still.
Type the name into a search bar and you will mostly find pizza. Rectangular slices under a heat lamp, a food court, a queue of people who have made peace with their afternoon. That Sbarro is an American chain, founded by an Italian family, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what follows.
Although — humor me — the metaphor holds better than it has any right to. Because the other Sbarro also worked by looking at a base and asking what else could be piled on top of it. Engines. Gearboxes. Plural. That is not a typo.
This is the Sbarro Super Twelve. It is the size of an Austin Mini. It has twelve cylinders, two engines, two gearboxes and one gear lever. Each engine drives one rear wheel and there is no differential between them, because there is nothing to differentiate.
Exactly one was made. Having lived with it, the man who built it more or less admitted it was a handful — and then built a calmer version powered by a Ferrari V8, which tells you everything you need to know about the first one.
A Note on Names, Before We Go Further
There are two mad Swiss coachbuilders in this story, and they are not the same man.
Franco Sbarro — born in Puglia, 1939 — built the Monster G and the Super Twelve you are about to read about.
Willy Felber — born 1928, a Ferrari and Rolls-Royce importer near Morges — commissioned Giovanni Michelotti to build the doorless, roofless Ferrari 365 GTC/4 Beach Car for the Emir of Qatar, who canceled the order when the oil crisis hit his liquidity. It was painted bronze instead of blue, shown at Geneva in 1976, and nobody bought it.
Both Swiss by adoption. Both magnificent. Both operating in the same brief window when a wealthy man could ask for something impossible and get it. But the beach Ferrari was Felber's. The Monster and the Twelve were Sbarro's.
It is a distinction worth making, because Sbarro has spent forty years being the more famous of the two, and Felber deserves his own salute.
The Farmer's Son
Presicce to Grandson, by way of a cigarette factory.
Francesco Zefferino Sbarro was born on 27 February 1939 in Presicce, a small town in Puglia, at the very tip of the heel of Italy. His father farmed. By most accounts the childhood was not a happy one, and by all accounts the boy was obsessed with anything that had an engine in it — mopeds, scooters, whatever came past.
In November 1957, aged eighteen, he moved to Neuchâtel in Switzerland and became a mechanic. He worked for a Borgward dealer, then as a technician at a BMW agency. Then he met Georges Filipinetti.
Scuderia Filipinetti operated out of the Château de Grandson, and it was a serious concern — a sometime Formula One entrant that ran cars for Jo Siffert, and had Jim Clark and Phil Hill through its doors. Sbarro became its chief mechanic. He tuned and maintained AC Cobras, a Ferrari P3, Ford GT40s. There is a photograph of him at Le Mans in 1967, standing beside Herbert Müller in a Ferrari 330 P3/412P.
Of the move, Sbarro later told the journalist Richard Heseltine that Filipinetti was more in line with what I wanted to do
. It is a characteristically flat description of the best job in Swiss motorsport.
What he got up to in those years beggars belief. He is said to have dropped a GT40 engine into a Bizzarrini. He flew to America to prepare two L88 Corvettes for Le Mans, under the supervision of Zora Arkus-Duntov. He later converted a dozen Lola T70 racing cars into road machines, and put the turbocharged flat-six from a Porsche 935 into one of them.
He had no formal engineering training. None. He had a farm boy's eye for how things fit together and a racing mechanic's contempt for the word can't.
In 1968 he bought a three-story former cigarette factory at Les Tuileries, near Grandson, and set up the Atelier de Construction Automobile with four employees. Sources argue about whether the company proper dates to 1968 or 1971. Sbarro, one suspects, did not much care.
He was not a manufacturer. He was a fabricator with a Geneva stand and no adult supervision.
What He Was Doing Before
Replicas, mostly, and they made his name. A Lola T70. A Ford GT40. A Ferrari P4. A Bugatti Royale, which is the automotive equivalent of casually rebuilding Chartres in your garage. And above all the BMW 328 replica, launched at Geneva in 1974 on BMW 2002 mechanicals — around 138 roadsters, plus fifteen more with wide bodies and turbochargers. It remains the most numerous Sbarro ever made.
He killed it while the order book was still full. Asked about it years later, he explained that the pleasure was in the idea and the working-through, and that I am already thinking about the next one
by the time a car is finished. He did not mind being known for replicas. He was, he said, more interested in original design.
And the originals came. The Stash coupé. The Tiger, with a 6.3-liter Mercedes M100 V8. The Windhound and Windhawk — enormous all-wheel-drive off-roaders. The Monster G, which took a Land Rover chassis, stuffed in that same 6.3-liter Mercedes V8 for 350 bhp, ran the exhaust pipes up through the hood, and rolled on wheels salvaged from a Boeing 727 that had crashed at Geneva airport.
Every one of them was big. Wide, long, imposing, expensive-looking. Sbarro's signature, if he had one, was scale.
Which is why what he did in 1982 makes so much sense, and none at all.
The Man Behind the Man
Bernd Grohe wrote the cheque. Twice.
Philippe Calvet, who has maintained the definitive Sbarro archive for decades, makes an observation that reframes the whole enterprise: most Sbarros are the fruit of a collaboration with an enthusiast — a customer who trusted him, and who became something more than a customer.
Behind every Sbarro, in other words, there is a person.
Behind the Super Twelve there was Bernd Grohe, a Swiss industrialist. He backed the build. When the Twelve turned out to be the deranged animal it was, Grohe did not walk away and buy a Porsche. He went back to Sbarro and commissioned the follow-up.
And years later, Grohe played a significant part in establishing the Espera Sbarro design school.
Hold that in your head. The two most ridiculous hot hatches ever constructed exist because one Swiss industrialist kept saying yes.
The Idea
Two things ruled 1982. Nobody had been stupid enough to combine them.
On one side, the twelve-cylinder monsters. The Ferrari 512 BB. The Lamborghini Countach, poster-bound and impossible.
On the other, the hot hatch — the Golf GTI, the thing an actual person could actually own, which had quietly become the most important car in Europe.
Nobody had crossed them. There were, as the saying goes, excellent reasons for this.
Sbarro's proposition was not "let us build a fast hatchback." Renault was already doing that, brutally, with the mid-engined 5 Turbo. His proposition was: what if the hot hatch had the cylinder count and the theater of an exotic?
Twelve cylinders. In something the size of a Mini.
The obvious route was to borrow a V12 from Ferrari or Jaguar or BMW. It would not fit, and anyway it would have been somebody else's idea.
So he built his own. Out of motorcycles.
The Donor: Kawasaki's Beautiful Mistake
An engine so powerful that France passed a law about it.
The Kawasaki Z1300 arrived in 1979 and made almost no sense. It was a motorcycle with a liquid-cooled 1,286 cc inline-six mounted across the frame, shaft drive, and something north of 120 horsepower. It weighed 692 pounds. The press called it a hyperbike, which was generous, and an Autobahn stormer, which was accurate.
The bore and stroke tell you the compromise: 62 mm bore, 71 mm stroke. Deeply undersquare — because a six-cylinder engine mounted across a motorcycle must be narrow enough that the rider can still put their feet down, and the only way to find displacement inside a narrow bore is to go long on the stroke. Long stroke means high piston speed. High piston speed caps your revs. It made its power at 8,000 rpm and not a great deal above.
It would still cover the standing quarter mile in 11.93 seconds at 114.79 mph. On two wheels. In 1979.
The French government took one look at the output figure and imposed a hundred-horsepower limit on new motorcycles. No other European country followed. The Z1300 was, briefly, a machine so absurd that a nation legislated against it.
It also sold poorly. It was heavy, expensive, and returned 25 miles per gallon. A retrospective review noted that the handling wallowed, weaved and bucked. Kawasaki built it for a decade anyway — around 20,000 of them, plus 4,500 of the American Voyager version — and christened the final two hundred, in 1989, the Legendary Six.
Franco Sbarro looked at this magnificent, unloved, over-engineered failure of a motorcycle engine.
And he bought two.
The Engine That Isn't
Everyone calls it a V12. It is not a V12. It is barely one engine.
Here is the correction that matters, and almost nobody makes it.
The Super Twelve does not have a V12. It does not, strictly, have a straight-twelve either. It has two separate six-cylinder engines, mounted transversely, side by side, sharing no crankshaft, no block, no head, no timing, and no combustion event with one another.
They are connected by V-belts. That is it. The belts exist to minimize speed variation between the two engines — to encourage them, gently, to keep roughly the same idea about what rpm they are doing.
Not to synchronise them. To encourage them.
Combined displacement is around 2,572 cc. Combined output is 240 horsepower — though Sbarro's own archive and Wikipedia disagree, the latter recording a claimed 260 PS, which is the kind of discrepancy that follows a one-off car through history.
Torque is the number nobody wanted to publish, and it is the number that explains everything. Roughly 178 lb-ft. From 2.6 liters and twelve cylinders. Because these are motorcycle engines, and motorcycle engines make power the way a hummingbird makes progress — with frequency, not force.
Two Gearboxes. One Lever.
This is the best part, and it is the part that makes engineers put down their coffee.
Each Kawasaki kept its own five-speed motorcycle gearbox. Sbarro built a linkage that operated both from a single gear lever, so that when the driver pulled for third, both gearboxes were supposed to find third at the same moment.
Each gearbox drives one rear wheel.
Read that again. The left engine drives the left rear wheel. The right engine drives the right rear wheel. There is no differential, because there is nothing to differentiate — the two halves of the car are mechanically independent from the intake trumpets to the contact patch.
That is the theory. Here it is running — and the thing to watch is that nothing crosses the middle. Power goes down each side of the car and never meets.
Which is fine, right up until the two halves stop agreeing. A differential exists to average out exactly this. The Super Twelve does not have one, so the disagreement goes straight to the road.
It is not a car with two engines. It is two motorcycles sharing a body, in a coalition government held together by V-belts.
Any mismatch — throttle, clutch bite, shift timing, gear engagement, belt tension, state of tune — becomes a difference in torque between the left and right rear wheels.
In an 1,800-pound, mid-engined, short-wheelbase car with no electronics of any kind, a spontaneous difference in torque across the rear axle is not a quirk. It is a yaw moment. It is the car deciding, without consulting you, to point somewhere else.
"Can You Drive It on One Engine?"
Yes. And no. It depends entirely on how the failure fails.
The sources are clear that the car could be driven on a single engine in the event of mechanical trouble. Because each side is independent, disabling one leaves the other perfectly capable of moving the car. Sbarro built himself an emergency half-car mode, whether he intended to or not.
But that only holds if the dead side is free to spin. Declutch it, leave it in neutral, let the wheel turn — fine. You will be driving a lopsided single-wheel-drive Mini with 120 horsepower, which sounds, honestly, like a marvelous afternoon.
Now consider the alternative. A gearbox that seizes. A box that locks in gear. A linkage that jams halfway. Now one rear wheel is being driven and the other is being dragged, or braked, or refusing to rotate at all — and the car is trying to rotate about it.
Limp home? On a good day. On a bad one, you are a passenger.
The Body
Ten feet two of polyester. Five feet nine wide.
An Austin Mini is four feet seven across. The Super Twelve is fourteen inches wider than a Mini, on the same length. The rear fenders are as broad as a Renault 5 Turbo's. The flanks are as broad as a Testarossa's.
Which brings us to the intakes. Those enormous slatted side scoops, the ones that shout mid-engined from a hundred yards — they arrived at Geneva in March 1982. The Ferrari Testarossa, and its famous cheese-grater strakes, arrived at the Paris Salon in October 1984.
Two and a half years earlier. Every serious source describes it as parallel evolution rather than theft, which is almost certainly true and slightly less fun.
The front is geometric and hard, all straight lines and a slatted grille. It softens, swells and rounds as it moves rearward until it is all haunch. Andréini painted the transition as a gradient — hard white at the nose, deepening to red across the body — so that the shape and the color are telling the same story. It is, and I say this with real affection, an extremely 1982 idea, and it works completely.
The rear glass has no frame. Lift it and there is a beige leather cover; lift that and there are twelve intake trumpets in a row. Below, four chromed exhaust outlets emerge through an aluminum plate pierced with ten large holes. One archive describes the pipes as looking like rifle barrels. They do.
Gotti alloys, 15-inch front, 16-inch rear. Pirelli P7s, because it was 1982 and there was nothing else worth fitting. Four disc brakes.
Inside
Beige leather. All of it, everywhere, wrapping a cabin that is fundamentally two seats and an engine.
Recaro buckets, proper harnesses, separated by a wide center console. A high-end audio system mounted in the roof, which is either genius packaging or an admission that there was nowhere else for it. A trip computer positioned within easy reach of the passenger, presumably because the driver had other commitments.
And this is the detail that finished me. The instrumentation is doubled. Two of everything, one set per engine — because there is no meaningful sense in which the two halves of the car share a state. Two tachometers. Two temperature gauges. Two of every warning you might need.
One speedometer. Because whatever else is happening, the car as a whole is only going one speed.
Probably.
| Debut | Geneva Motor Show, March 1982 |
|---|---|
| Built | One |
| Backer | Bernd Grohe, Swiss industrialist |
| Engine | Two Kawasaki Z1300 liquid-cooled inline-sixes, transverse, mid-mounted |
| Configuration | Nominal straight-twelve. Not a V12. No common crankshaft. |
| Displacement | ≈2,572 cc combined (2 × 1,286 cc) |
| Power | 240 bhp (Sbarro's archive; Wikipedia records a claimed 260 PS) |
| Torque | ≈178 lb-ft |
| Transmission | Two five-speed motorcycle gearboxes, one gear lever, synchronised by linkage |
| Drive | Rear. Each engine drives one rear wheel. No differential. |
| Engine sync | V-belts between the two engines |
| Chassis | Tube frame |
| Body | Polyester (fiberglass). Gradient paint by Andréini. |
| Length × Width | 10 ft 2 in × 5 ft 9 in (3.10 m × 1.75 m) |
| Weight | 1,764 lb (800 kg) |
| Power-to-weight | ≈3.3 kg per horsepower |
| 0–62 mph | 5.0 seconds |
| Top speed | 125 mph — short gearing. Sbarro's archive also records a theoretical 174 mph. |
| Wheels | Gotti — 15 in front, 16 in rear |
| Tires | Pirelli P7 |
| Brakes | Four discs |
| Instruments | Doubled. Two of everything. Except the speedometer. |
Why It Didn't Work
Its power-to-weight ratio was 3.3 kilograms per horsepower. A Countach LP500 — the poster, the myth, the twelve-cylinder Lamborghini — carried around 4.3.
On paper, in 1982, this Mini-sized fiberglass hatchback made of motorcycle parts had a better power-to-weight ratio than a Countach.
It was not merely theoretical, either. Both Calvet's archive and Cockpit record the same figure, and it is a serious one: 0 to 62 mph in five seconds flat.
Five seconds. In 1982. In a Mini.
To put that in its period: a Ferrari 308 GTB — a proper mid-engined Ferrari, twice the price and considerably more car — took six and a half. The Super Twelve was quicker to 62 mph than the Ferrari whose engine would later be transplanted into its own successor.
Top speed was the sacrifice. Motorcycle gearboxes carry motorcycle ratios, and the gearing was short, so the car ran out of revs at around 125 mph. Sbarro's archive records a theoretical 174 mph, which required a longer road and a great deal of optimism.
And it was, by common consent, horrible.
Sbarro's own verdict, recorded on his own website, is that the engine is not a model of smoothness and proves rather difficult to master
. The Calvet archive adds the diagnosis: the engine lacked torque, and the low weight made the car too sensitive.
Unpack that. A hundred and seventy-eight pound-feet, arriving high in the rev range, delivered through two motorcycle gearboxes into two independently driven rear wheels, in a car that weighs less than a modern Miata and carries its mass behind the driver's shoulders.
Nothing about that is slow. All of it is nervous.
Which is the trap the numbers set. Five seconds to 62 mph is not the achievement it appears to be. It is a symptom. The car accelerated that hard because it weighed nothing — and it was undriveable for precisely the same reason.
It was not a bad car because it was not fast enough. It was a bad car because it was far too alive.
Imagine a Renault 5 Turbo. Now imagine it has been given a Group B fever dream and a motorcycle-engine science project, and then compressed to the footprint of a Mini. Anyone who has tried to master a Clio V6 — a car with only one engine, one gearbox and one differential — will understand why the phone did not ring.
Part Two · The Sensible One
The Super Eight
Geneva, March 1984. Same body. Everything else replaced.
Grohe came back. He wanted something more resolved — the same car, essentially, but one you could actually take out on a Sunday without composing your will.
Sbarro's answer was to throw away the entire drivetrain and go shopping in Maranello.
He took a Ferrari 308 GTB. Not just its engine — the whole thing. He shortened the chassis, kept the subframes, the double-wishbone suspension at both ends, the coil-overs, the anti-roll bars, the ventilated discs at all four corners. Then he draped a new fiberglass body over it that carried most of the Super Twelve's language: the louvered nose panel running over the headlights, the chin spoiler, the offset cowl vent, the flared arches, the deep side strakes.
Hagerty's description is the one I keep coming back to: part Fiat Panda, part Miami Vice Testarossa
— and underneath, neither.
The Engine He Didn't Touch
The 2,927 cc Ferrari F106 V8. Twin overhead camshafts per bank, four valves per cylinder — the Quattrovalvole, thirty-two valves in total — and Bosch fuel injection, at a moment when a great many performance engines were still breathing through carburettors.
Transversely mounted, mid-ship, exactly as Ferrari had it. Ferrari's five-speed manual transaxle, dogleg pattern, gated shifter.
Sbarro left it completely alone. It made what Ferrari said it made: 240 horsepower.
Now look at that number again, and then look at the Super Twelve.
Two hundred and forty horsepower. Both cars. Eighteen hundred pounds. Both cars. Identical power-to-weight.
And the torque figures are barely a conversation apart: 178 lb-ft for the twin-Kawasaki, 192 lb-ft for the Ferrari. Fourteen pound-feet. That is nothing. That is a rounding error.
The Super Eight is not more powerful than the Super Twelve. It is not meaningfully torquier. It is simply usable.
Which is the whole lesson, and it took Franco Sbarro two years and a lot of Bernd Grohe's money to prove it. Peak figures describe almost nothing about a car. What matters is where the torque arrives, and how it gets to the road.
The Ferrari's 192 lb-ft arrives low, spreads wide, and passes through one gearbox into one differential which apportions it between two wheels according to the laws of physics rather than the tension of a V-belt. The Kawasakis' 178 lb-ft arrives at the top of a motorcycle rev range, through two gearboxes that may or may not agree with one another, into two wheels that have never been formally introduced.
Same numbers. Utterly different machines.
What It Was Actually Like
Here is the part that reframes everything.
The Super Eight worked. Not "worked for a show car." Worked. Its various owners have put something in the region of nineteen to twenty thousand miles on it over four decades. It has a Clarion stereo with a cassette deck and an equalizer, power windows, and a lockable cubby in the console, because it was built to be driven to places.
Hagerty, having got close to it, described a car that did not feel like a hodgepodge of parts under fiberglass, but like something set up by a mechanic who knew how to prepare a racing car. Which is precisely what Franco Sbarro was.
There is no turbo lag, because there is no turbo — so unlike the Renault 5 Turbo it superficially resembles, it does not wait until the apex to detonate. You simply feed revs into a thirty-two-valve Italian V8 that is sitting in the cabin with you.
And that, reportedly, is the best part. The Super Eight is said to sound better than a 308, for the simple reason that the engine is not behind a bulkhead. It is behind your ear.
Nobody ever published performance figures for it, which is a shame, because the arithmetic is not difficult. A 308 GTB reached 62 mph in six and a half seconds and ran to 150. The Super Eight has the same engine and the same gearbox, and it is several hundred pounds lighter.
The Super Twelve did the same sprint in five seconds and then hit a wall at 125 mph, because motorcycle gearing gives you everything at once and nothing afterwards.
Somewhere between those two cars sits a number nobody bothered to measure. My suspicion is that the Super Eight is the quicker car everywhere that matters, and by some margin — not because it makes more power, but because it can use what it has.
The Details Nobody Mentions
The taillights are from an Opel Ascona. Of course they are. A car with a Ferrari chassis, a Ferrari engine, a Ferrari gearbox and a Ferrari suspension is wearing the rear lamps of a mid-size Vauxhall, because Sbarro needed two red rectangles and there was a parts bin.
The wheels are staggered-width BBS multi-piece basketweaves, fifteen inches, with gold centers, on Yokohama AVS AV1-40s. In 1984 there was no cooler combination of objects on Earth.
The steering wheel is a three-spoke MOMO in brown leather. Behind it, Veglia Borletti instruments — a speedometer optimistically calibrated to 174 mph, and a tachometer that reads to 10,000 rpm.
The cabin is brown leather with cloth inserts, wood caps on the door tops and across the dash. Color-keyed carpet. Shoulder belts. Sbarro built this one for elegance rather than lap times, and it shows.
And in the back, where the luggage would go if there were any luggage space: a red spare wheel, sitting on top of the engine cover, held down with four leather straps.
That is the entire trunk. A spare tire, strapped to a hot Ferrari V8, in a Mini.
| Debut | Geneva Motor Show, March 1984 |
|---|---|
| Built | One |
| Commissioned by | Bernd Grohe — the same man who backed the Super Twelve |
| Engine | Ferrari F106, 2,927 cc V8, transverse, mid-mounted |
| Valvetrain | DOHC per bank, four valves per cylinder — Quattrovalvole, 32 valves |
| Fuel system | Bosch fuel injection |
| Power | 240 bhp — Ferrari's own factory rating, engine untouched |
| Torque | 192 lb-ft |
| Transmission | Ferrari five-speed manual transaxle. Dogleg pattern. Gated shifter. |
| Drive | Rear. One differential, like a normal car. |
| Chassis | Ferrari 308 GTB frame — shortened |
| Suspension | Ferrari double wishbones front and rear, coil-overs, anti-roll bars |
| Brakes | Ferrari ventilated discs, four corners |
| Body | Fiberglass, two-door. Much of the Super Twelve's styling carried over. |
| Weight | 1,764 lb (800 kg) |
| Wheels | BBS multi-piece basketweave, 15 in, staggered width, gold centers |
| Tires | Yokohama AVS AV1-40 |
| Taillights | Opel Ascona |
| Steering wheel | Three-spoke MOMO, brown leather |
| Instruments | Veglia Borletti — 174 mph speedometer, 10,000 rpm tachometer |
| Interior | Brown leather with cloth inserts. Wood door caps and dash accents. Power windows. Clarion stereo with cassette and equalizer. |
| Luggage | A spare wheel, strapped to the engine cover with four leather straps |
| Performance | Never published. The donor 308 GTB managed 150 mph and 0–62 mph in 6.5 sec — and weighed considerably more. Draw your own conclusions. |
| Mileage | Roughly 19,000–20,000 miles. It got driven. |
Twelve Against Eight
| SUPER TWELVE · 1982 | SUPER EIGHT · 1984 | |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | Two Kawasaki inline-sixes | One Ferrari V8 |
| Cylinders | 12 | 8 |
| Displacement | 2,572 cc | 2,927 cc |
| Power | 240 bhp | 240 bhp |
| Torque | ≈178 lb-ft | 192 lb-ft |
| Gearboxes | Two | One |
| Gear levers | One | One |
| Differential | None | Yes |
| Weight | 1,764 lb | 1,764 lb |
| 0–62 mph | 5.0 sec | Never published |
| Top speed | 125 mph | Never published |
| Chassis | Sbarro tube frame | Shortened Ferrari 308 |
| Wheels | Gotti | BBS |
| Verdict | Difficult to master | Drove properly |
| Miles covered | Effectively none | ~19,000 |
Sit with the bottom two rows.
One of these cars was declared difficult to master by the man who conceived it, and has effectively never been driven anywhere. The other has covered twenty thousand miles.
Same body. Same weight. Same power. One differential.
The Paper Trail
What happens to a one-off, forty years on.
The Super Eight was displayed at Geneva in March 1984 and delivered to Bernd Grohe, its patron. From Grohe it went to the Sbarro Museum. From the museum it was bought by a private owner. It spent time in a Swiss collection. It appeared on Bring a Trailer in May 2018. It was listed by a dealer, Speed 8 Classics, in 2021. It was road-tested by Classic & Sports Car in February 2023. In December 2024 it went back to Bring a Trailer, consigned by a dealer in Paris.
And here the documentation becomes genuinely strange, in the way that only one-off cars can.
The car carries Dutch registration. That registration records it as a 1980 Sbarro — which it is not. The document lists the engine number, F106AB31465, in place of a VIN. The last five digits of that number are stamped on the steering column, which is itself a Ferrari 308 part, carrying a Ferrari 308's identity.
The seller, by his own admission, could not locate a full chassis number anywhere on the car.
Read that again. The most legally definitive thing about the Sbarro Super Eight is a number belonging to the Ferrari it was built out of.
There is no chassis number, because there was never a chassis line. There was a man in a converted cigarette factory with a hacksaw and an idea.
In December 2024, bidding stopped and the reserve was not met. The high bid was $160,000 — around £125,000.
One hundred and sixty thousand dollars. For a one-of-one, Ferrari-powered, Franco Sbarro hot hatch shown at the Geneva Motor Show, with the provenance of a man who prepared L88 Corvettes at Le Mans under Zora Arkus-Duntov, that is documented in Classic & Sports Car, and that actually works.
It did not sell.
Which is, if you think about it, exactly what happened to the Super Twelve in 1982. Everybody looked. Nobody bought. The market, occasionally, has no idea what it is looking at.
What He Did Next
Sbarro read a review of the 1984 Geneva Salon in which some journalist complained there was nothing new. He spent the following six weeks working day and night and produced the Challenge — a one-box wedge so extreme it had no mirrors, built on his own chassis, with a Jeep Cherokee transfer case sending drive to all four wheels.
He built it out of spite. It is one of the great cars of the decade.
In 1989 he presented the orbital wheel — a wheel with no hub, no center, nothing in the middle at all. He co-founded a company to pursue it, called OSMOS: Original Sbarro Mottas Orbital Systems. Anyone sane would have abandoned it. He built several motorcycles and one car on hubless wheels, the Osmos, powered by a 350-horsepower Jaguar V12, with a spoiler mounted in the empty middle of the rear wheel. Two decades later he put the electric motors into the void where the hubs used to be.
In 1992, a man with no formal education founded a school. Espera Sbarro still teaches car design and fabrication, and its students still take cars to Geneva. In 2011 twenty-five of them built the Evoluzione concept in thirteen weeks.
Bernd Grohe helped make that school happen.
Born Exactly on Time
People say of certain figures that they were born too early, or too late. Sbarro was born at precisely the right moment, and it is worth being specific about why.
He needed a world with an enormous surplus of interesting mechanical parts, freely available and cheap — engines, gearboxes, transfer cases, running gear, Boeing landing gear, all of it lying around waiting to be misused. He needed a regulatory climate in which a man could build a car with no crash structure, no emissions equipment, no type approval and no differential, and then drive it onto a stand at the Geneva Motor Show in front of the world's press.
He needed fiberglass to be cheap and steel to be workable and clients to be rich and eccentric. He needed the specific European moment when private money would fund an idea purely because the idea was strange.
Ten years earlier the parts would not have existed. Ten years later the lawyers would have.
He also needed to be the sort of person who looks at a finished object — a functioning motorcycle, a completed design, somebody else's very good idea — and thinks, quietly and without malice: that's not finished.
The Ultimate Hot Hatch
It is not a hot hatch. A Golf GTI is a hot hatch. The Super Twelve is a miniature exotic wearing a hatchback costume: the footprint of an economy car, the cylinder count of a flagship, the drivetrain logic of a dare, and the usability of a hand grenade with Recaro seats.
It changed nothing. It influenced no one. Precisely one was made and precisely one survives, and no manufacturer has ever again been foolish enough to hang a car's stability on the assumption that two motorcycle gearboxes will find the same gear at the same instant.
Its importance is not what it caused. Its importance is what it proves: that there was a window — coachbuilders, private money, Geneva, fiberglass, motorcycle engines, no rules — in which "because we can" was an entirely sufficient reason.
There are better-looking hot hatches. There are far faster ones. There are none, anywhere, in any era, as gloriously, expensively, mechanically ridiculous.
We salute you, Franco Sbarro. Twelve cylinders, two gearboxes, one lever, and not the faintest idea when to stop.
Order the pizza. Keep the car.
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