It’s a bit shambolic these days, but the Geneva motor show was once the unchallenged crown jewel of the show circuit when it came to creativity. You’d see all the wildest customs Europe could muster, not least of them the bonkers creations of Switzerland’s own Rinspeed (functioning aquatic Lotus Elise? You bet). And, should you have been in Geneva for the 1984 show, you would have seen perhaps the wildest hot hatchback ever made: the Sbarro Super Eight. This week, it was offered for sale but failed to meet reserve at $160,000 (£125,000).
We’ve seen a lot of fun stuff come through the auction site Bring A Trailer, but this one was pretty mega. Only one Sbarro Super Eight was ever built, and here it was for auction next to the expected air-cooled 911s and old BMWs. It’s an absolutely crazy-looking machine, part Fiat Panda, part Miami Vice Testarossa, and actually neither underneath. Here’s the story of how it was made.
Sbarro the coachbuilding company was founded in 1968 by an Italian named Franco Sbarro. Short and compact, with bushy eyebrows like Groucho Marx, Sbarro is one of those automotive geniuses who learnt by doing. He had no formal training in either engineering or design, and yet he literally reinvented the wheel.
We’ll get to that part in a bit. First though, we’ll meet Franco at one of his early jobs, working with the team at Scuderia Filipinetti. Born into relative poverty in southern Italy, Sbarro moved to Switzerland at the age of 18 and began work as a mechanic. With Filipinetti, a sometime-Formula 1 team that supported Swiss racer Jo Siffert, and also luminaries like Jim Clark and Phil Hill, he soon broadened his skill set and decided to strike out on his own.
Because he was an insider in racing circles, some of the stuff Sbarro got his hands on in those early days beggars belief. He is said to have swapped a GT40 engine into a Bizzarrini. He flew to the US to prepare two L88 Corvettes for Le Mans under the supervision of Zora Arkus-Duntov. He built several road-going Lola T70s, one of them fitted with the turbocharged flat-six of a Porsche 935.
Larger success came in the 1970s, when Sbarro built a range of replica vintage cars, one of the most successful a BMW 328. Working with fibreglass let him stretch his creative side, and by the 1980s he had built the direct ancestor to the Super Eight, the Super Twelve. As you might expect, this was powered by a rear-mounted inline-12, cobbled together from two Kawasaki motorcycle engines. It worked, but just barely.
Bernd Grohe, the Swiss industrialist who had backed the build of the Super Twelve, commissioned Sbarro to build something a little more resolved. Starting out with a Ferrari 308, Sbarro crafted a muscular hatchback body, complete with deeply straked air intakes down the side, and rear taillights lifted from an Opel Ascona.
Note that this car is contemporaneous with the Ferrari Testarossa, so the side-strakes are more of a convergent evolution than a tribute to Maranello. The Super Eight retains most of the mechanicals of the 308, including the brakes and subframes, and of course that glorious 3.0-litre Quattrovalvole V8.
Shorter than a 308 and much wider, the Super Eight is a bit like a Swiss-Italian Renault R5 Turbo. It also worked perfectly, its various owners racking up nearly 20,000 miles over the years. Sitting on fat, staggered-width BBS mesh wheels wearing Yokohamas, it’s the ultimate hot hatchback.
Classic & Sports Car magazine got its hands on the Super Eight for a demonstration run last year and noted that it performed admirably. It wasn’t some hodgepodge of parts and fibreglass, but a car that drove as if properly engineered by a mechanic who knew how to set up a racing car. Which is exactly the case. Again, there’s a whiff of R5 Turbo about it, but without that car’s catch-you-off-guard turbocharger lag. Instead, you just feed revs into the 32-valve V8 as it sings its Italian aria of speed. Reportedly it sounds even better to drive than an original 308, because the engine is in the cabin with you.
After the Super Eight, Sbarro’s creations got even more nuts. Commissioned to build an off-road vehicle for a client, he took the chassis of a Land Rover and stuffed a 6.3-litre Mercedes-Benz V8 in it, good for 350bhp. He then sketched out muscular two-seater open-bed bodywork, the exhaust pipes bursting through the hood, and attached a set of wheels he got off a Boeing 727 that had crashed at Geneva’s airport. It was called, fittingly, the Monster G.
As a follow-up to this, Sbarro co-founded a company called OSMOS (Original Sbarro Mottas Orbital Systems) to work on the knotty problem of how to build vehicles with hubless wheels. Anyone else would have given up due to the impracticality of the design, but he persevered and built several motorcycles and one car that ran on hubless wheels. The motorcycles in particular have a Blade Runner meets Tron look about them.
Despite his lack of formal training, Franco Sbarro founded several schools of design over the years, and his students still build cars that are shown in Geneva today. Most recently, the Taipan offroader and Replay roadster blend the craft of custom coachwork with the ethos of modern video games.
Too bad it missed the mark during the sale, for that’s the kind of heritage one would have gotten in this one-of-one wild hatchback. It’s a car designed by a mechanic who cut his teeth racing at the highest level, then spent a lifetime building some of the most expressive machines ever made. It’s the best experience of driving a Ferrari, somehow improved upon and then made unique with coachbuilt style.
It is the work of a man whose biography is titled Mechanics in the Blood. Sbarro is one of the masters of the Geneva motor show, and for anyone with room in the collection, the Super Eight is one of his best. Let’s hope we see it again soon.
