Cizeta V16T

The front is Gandini's, and it is the same nose he had drawn for the Diablo before Chrysler intervened. Four pop-up headlamps in two pairs, a low sharp prow, and the hard-edged wedge geometry he had been refining since the Countach. Zampolli reworked the rear himself, so the car is not a pure Gandini object, and the join between the two sensibilities is visible if you look for the point where the sharp lines soften. The proportions come from the packaging. A transverse V16 with the gearbox in line behind it dictates a car more than 2 metres wide and around 4.5 metres long, which in 1988 was extreme and today still reads as excessive. Bodies for the Modena cars were built by Giancarlo Guerra, whose earlier work included coach-building the Ferrari 250 GTO. That detail says more about how the V16T was made than any spec sheet: hand-formed panels, on an Italian scale, for a company financed by an exotic-car mechanic and a disco producer.

The V16T never raced, and it was never going to. Homologation for any GT category of the era needed a production run the company could not remotely supply, and Cizeta's total output over twelve years would not have filled half a grid. The firm had no competition department, no budget and no engine spare to develop. The people behind it did have racing form, which makes the absence more pointed. Zampolli had been a test and development engineer at Lamborghini. Oliviero Pedrazzi, who designed the V16, had come from the same place, as had Achille Bevini and Ianose Bronzatti on suspension and chassis. Their collective experience was in making road cars work, at a firm that had famously refused to go racing under Ferruccio Lamborghini, and the Cizeta inherited that outlook wholesale. So the V16 was built as a showpiece rather than a competition unit: an 8,000rpm road engine designed to be unrepeatable rather than to be developed over seasons. What Cizeta was chasing was not a trophy, it was the fact of the engine, and no race result would have made that argument any better.

The Cizeta's cultural life is inseparable from Giorgio Moroder, which is unusual for a car nobody has driven. The producer behind Donna Summer, Midnight Express, Scarface and Top Gun put up half the money, lent the car half its name and wrote a piece of music called A Car is Born for the Los Angeles unveiling on 5 December 1988, an evening hosted by Jay Leno. For a brief moment the V16T was a Hollywood object rather than an Italian one. Then it vanished. Eleven cars cannot sustain a public profile, and the car's reputation since has been built almost entirely by writers rediscovering it, usually under some variation of the Lamborghini that got away. The one enduring cultural fact is the Brunei connection. Three V16Ts were ordered by the Brunei royal family through Hong Seh Motors in Singapore, which places the Cizeta in the most famous private collection of the 1990s, alongside the other cars that only made sense to people for whom money was not a constraint.

There is no such thing as routine maintenance on a Cizeta, only planned work. The V16 is the whole ownership experience: sixteen plugs, four distributors, eight camshafts and two injection systems mean that a full service is a project rather than an afternoon, and the number of people who have done one is small enough to name. The good news is that the engine is not fragile in principle. It is an aluminium block with four heads built by ex-Lamborghini engine men, and the cars that have been used report no structural weakness peculiar to the layout. What hurts is disuse. Most of the eleven have spent long periods static, and static is what kills fuel systems, seals and rubber. Width is the daily reality. At over two metres, the car does not fit ordinary parking and needs judgement on a British or Italian road. And every owner is, whether they like it or not, part of the support network, because with a car this rare, the shared knowledge between the known owners is the only technical resource that exists.