A star is reborn

But it wasn’t. The giant-slaying victories to which it seemed born never did turn up and even the undeniable fact that it won its class at Le Mans in 1965 has to be seen in the context that it was the only car in said class to finish the race.

And now it’s back. The Bizzarrini 5300 GT is reborn and this is more than a mere re-creation of the kind that has become increasingly popular these days. This is a Bizzarrini, commissioned by the people who own the rights to the name and with the full knowledge of the Bizzarrini family, including 94-year-old Giotto Bizzarrini himself, using original factory blueprints and the knowledge of workers who helped build them in period.

It is perhaps, therefore, more properly thought of as a continuation car, of which 24 will be built, one for every hour spent racing at Le Mans back in 1965, and sold for a robust £1.65 million each. Before extras. It is also what Bizzarrini’s owners describe as the ‘amuse bouche’ for there will be others to come, including a brand new, bang up to date car to be launched in 2024. Indeed the Pegasus Group that owns the name reckons there are up to 15 different Bizzarrini models in the back catalogue that could be revived, in addition to its all new models.

However, before we get into the car as it is today, we should take a look at how it got that way and, most of all, the extraordinary life of the man whose name it bears.

Extraordinary? Well consider that before he got around to putting his own name on a car he’d been the man who at Ferrari turned the elegant but unwieldy 250 Tour de France into the 250 GT SWB, which needs no further introduction here. Its replacement was his brainchild too, and it was called the 250 GTO.

However, cheesed off with Maranello politics and the glacial speed of Ferrari’s technical development (for all its success the GTO was a very conventional car, even in 1962) he left before the GTO was even launched.

He was then briefly involved in the ill-starred ATS project before starting his own Autostar design and engineering consultancy firm in which capacity he designed an engine for another person who had good cause to be disgruntled with Ferrari. This was a tractor manufacturer named Ferruccio Lamborghini who, if the story can be believed, decided to beat Ferrari at his own game after driving to Maranello to complain about his car and being left to stew in silence outside the then not so Old Man’s office until steam came out of his ears.

Bizzarrini’s V12 made its debut in 1963 in the Lamborghini 350GT and would in various guises go on to power every single V12 Lamborghini until the launch of the current Aventador. Miura, Countach, Espada, Jarama, Diablo, Murcielago – all were powered by Bizzarrini’s brilliant motor.

The story of Bizzarrini the car, as opposed to the man, started in 1962 when Giotto was hired by Renzo Rivolta to work on a new GT car the ISO firm – most famous for its Isetta bubble cars – he now controlled. The resulting Iso Rivolta was innovative in the way its torsional strength was derived not just from its platform chassis but the body that was bonded to it.

But its influences were not just Italian. It was powered by a Chevrolet engine that Bizzarrini first experienced in an English car. This was thanks to Nuccio Bertone, whose styling house was working on the body for the car that would eventually be known as the Gordon-Keeble. Bertone lent Bizzarrini the car and while he didn’t care much for it in general, he was blown away by his first exposure to Detroit iron. Indeed for its power and response he rated the Corvette-derived V8 more highly than Enzo’s V12s.

The Iso Rivolta, designed for Bertone by a young Giorgetto Giugiaro, was beautiful but did nothing to slake Bizzarrini’s thirst for a car that could be raced. Rivolta could see demand for a proper sports car, but a racer? In the end he agreed only if one were derived from the other. Which is why at the 1963 Turin Motor Show, there were two versions of the new Iso Grifo: the stunning A3/L road car on the Bertone stand, and Bizzarrini’s brutal A3/C racer on ISO’s stand with a body designed by Piero Drogo, of Ferrari Breadvan fame.

Both cars were instantly successful, the road car gaining praise in the press around the world, the racer showing promise given how new it was, how little money was used relative to what Ferrari was spending and the fact that, unlike the GTO, it really was based on a standard production road car. Key to its speed was not just the beefy 5.3-litre V8, even then giving close to 400bhp, but also its location so far back in the chassis that if you looked under the bonnet you’d see space for a 10-litre V16. At least. It was light and unfeasibly low too.

Racing started in 1964 at the Sebring 12 Hours where an A3/C qualified in the top half of the grid before gearbox issues left it last but one at the flag. But at the Le Mans test, a Grifo was a sensational 9th fastest overall, a mere 0.7sec behind the only GTO taking part. In the race it started 15th out of 55, and despite losing two hours to braking issues came home 14th overall, beaten in the over 3-litre prototype class only by two purpose-built Ferrari racers.

The 1965 season became more chaotic as the relationship between Bizzarrini and Rivolta started to break down, but not before the A3/C showed what it could really do at Le Mans with newly independent rear suspension and a less troubled run, finishing ninth overall. It’s worth remembering too that it finished a single lap behind the Shelby Daytona Coupe, the car that had ended the reign of the GTO in GT racing.

Sadly Rivolta’s cool business head and Bizzarrini’s wild engineering ideals were never likely to make comfortable long term bedfellows and by the end of that summer the situation was irretrievable. Bizzarrini quit, changed Autostar’s name to Prototipi Bizzarrini and a new marque was born, supplied with parts bought in from ISO.

So now we come to the question of naming. The car you see here is a Bizzarrini 5300 GT based with stunning attention to detail on that 1965 Le Mans car. But in the most respected journals of record, that car is listed as an Iso Grifo A3/C. So which is it? The answer is both and reflects how blurred the lines between them had become by then. A Grifo A3/C and a 5300 GT are in all important regards the same car. It was entered into Le Mans by ‘Iso Prototipi Bizzarrini’ and can clearly be seen at the race sporting Bizzarrini badging. So there’s no wrong answer here in what is, essentially, a question of semantics which will delay us no longer.

Today’s car has been engineered, developed and will be built for Bizzarrini by RML, whose stellar reputation speaks for itself. The car is so faithful to the original that those wishing to compete in theirs will find them eligible for FIA Appendix K approval for historic racing. All they’ll need to do is option in the glass-fibre bodywork used in period in place of the standard carbon fibre single piece shell used today.

There are differences however: fuel is no longer carried in sill tanks for very obvious reasons and even if it were within RML’s skillset to build a car as badly as the typical mid-Sixties Italian racer, it is certainly not something to which they’d be philosophically disposed to do. But otherwise it really is the same: it uses the same clunky Borg Warner T-10 gearbox and the same 5358cc Chevy motor fed by four Weber DCOE carbs.

It even has the same approximate 400bhp output, which is impressive because these days it could be so much more. And if that’s what you want (and what you’ll need if you’re to make a success out of racing one), RML will happily build you a full race motor with perhaps 480bhp and presumably gloriously bad manners.

Right now the car you see is the only new 5300 GT in existence or, rather, the only new one made by Bizzarrini. You’ll know that people have been cloning valuable old racing cars for decades and Bizzarrinis are no exception. But this is the first of the official new run, the ‘car zero’ prototype that will be retained by Bizzarrini and therefore not one of the production run, the first of which is in build now and will be produced at the rate of two per month until the order book has been satisfied.

The car looks extraordinary, so low it appears to have melted into the tarmac. The Rosso Corsa colour is an identical match for the red found several layers down on a panel belonging to the original car.

It’s not a particularly easy car to climb aboard but I’ve had far worse, and once installed all 6ft 3in of me is extremely comfortable, even with the helmet the authorities at the Millbrook Proving Ground insist I wear. Ignition and fuel pumps on, press the button and the big Chevy motor rumbles into life. I used to race a ’67 Camaro with a closely related engine and these days race a Ford Falcon, and though similar in size and potential output, Detroit’s rival small block V8s sound distinctly different, at least to me: the Chevrolet sound is deeper, richer and more mellow while the Ford sounds sharper, more urgent and, frankly, more likely to break.

When I drove it, the prototype had done 225 miles, which is the grand total of all development work completed on the modern Bizzarrini project to date, and RML’s Chief Executive Michael Mallock apologises for the car ‘having a few niggles’ in advance. In fact it is stunningly together for a car so early in its development. The gearbox linkage needs some adjustment, the clutch pedal is too long, the steering column could do with a spacer and…that’s about it.

To drive it is pure theatre, an Italo-American festival for your eyes and ears, and the experience is not what the looks might suggest. Because appearances suggest a car that would be temperamental, truculent, tricky and possibly even treacherous. But it is nothing of the sort. Once you’ve got your head around the fact that this is a racing car that puts its rev-counter in front of your non-existent passenger so you end up driving by ear, there the difficulties end.

The Chevy motor is a wondrous thing, awash with torque in its current fast road or track day specification. The rumble becomes a thunder which only just starts to sound slightly strained as the 6500rpm redline approaches. So this is no howling Colombo V12 wanging around to eight grand, but my goodness it gets the job done despite gear ratios that are necessarily long, with just four of them spanning zero to near 200mph.

But it is the chassis that amazes. It feels so sophisticated relative to that of a Ferrari 250 GTO or Shelby Daytona Cobra. They are cars that want to slide and drift, and are in many ways all the better for it, but the Bizzarrini just wants to go fast. The back end is nailed down, traction superb yet it doesn’t even understeer that much. It just feels wonderfully and reassuringly neutral.

At least so far as I can tell. Millbrook is perhaps not the best place to really get under the skin of such a car and I can only imagine what it might be like somewhere properly expansive like the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit, or Spa.

The thinking at Bizzarrini is actually that relatively few of its customers will race their 5300 GTs, and that most will be used as ultra-exclusive track day weapons and for road use. To that end RML can modify the car to pass IVA Type Approval and then supply the customer with a kit of parts that, should they so desire, allows them to turn it back to standard again.

Me? Were I remotely in that league, I’d absolutely have to race it because that is what it is: a racing car that never achieved the success it deserved in period. Why not? It’s purely a question of the limited resources available at the time: when you have a car as powerful and light as this, as well balanced (precisely 25 per cent of the car’s weight sits on each tyre), with such advanced suspension, the potential is clear.

It’s a wildly more sophisticated car than a Shelby Daytona Cobra, the machine that finally vanquished the 250 GTO. Had Bizzarrini had anything close to the money that Carroll and Enzo had at their disposal to develop and race its cars, the story of Bizzarrini the brand could have had an entirely different ending. In fact at the end of Le Mans 1965, there wasn’t even a truck to take the car back to Italy, so Giotto Bizzarrini drove it home himself. Says it all, really.