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Buy America’s First Formula 1 Team, Ready To Race Again

Lance Reventlow’s Formula 1 effort – which campaigned front-engine cars at a time when the rest of the world switched away from that layout – was pretty much doomed from the start. The cars built for the effort, however, have become legendary among vintage Formula 1 fans today and one of them – along with a re-creation of a second and the racing transporter that ferried them both – will head to auction later this year.

While Reventlow might best be known for his Chevrolet-powered Scarab sports cars of 1958, he ultimately had the larger goal of Formula 1 in mind – specifically to field the first all-American cars in the series and to win with them – and so in 1959 devoted all of Reventlow Automobiles Incorporated’s resources to designing and building a competitive car for Formula 1.

He used essentially the same team of all-stars who brought the Scarab sports cars to life: Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes, Phil Remington, Emil Diedt, and Jim Travers and Frank Coon. To that team he added another, Offenhauser engineer Leo Goossen, who – reportedly despite his own objections – designed for Reventlow a completely new four-cylinder, eight-plug engine intended to lay down at an angle and to use a desmodromic valvetrain.

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RAI built two aluminum-bodied cars – GP-1 and GP-2 – as well as a backup car, but testing in 1959 revealed a highly uncompetitive car. “Everything was wrong, from the brakes to the new Goodyear tires,” wrote Harold Pace and Mark Brinker in their book “Vintage American Road Racing Cars, 1950-1970.” In addition, Pace and Brinker argue, entering Formula 1 “was a colossal failure of judgement. No one on the team had any experience in Grand Prix racing, and Reventlow insisted the car have 100 percent American content, which meant they would develop every component from scratch.”

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Nevertheless, Reventlow pressed on, bought a Bartoletti-bodied Fiat transporter that once shuttled Maserati’s Formula 1 team, and entered the cars in the 1960 season to dismal results: In the five races the team entered, the two-car team only finished once, in 10th place at Riverside. Blame fell in part to the desmodromic engine, which hadn’t been fully developed, but moreso to the decision to run front-engined cars against the likes of the mid-engined Coopers. Reventlow abandoned the Formula 1 effort after the end of the season. The team tried to salvage the experience by running GP-2, fitted with an Offenhauser four-cylinder, in a new Intercontinental series the next year, but that only ended with the car totaled and cut into pieces. A couple rear-engine racers followed in 1961 and 1962, but didn’t meet much success, ultimately causing Reventlow to close RAI’s doors and sell much of the assets (though not the cars) to Carroll Shelby.

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Of the eight cars that RAI built over five years, hot rod restorer Don Orosco has owned at least a couple, including GP-1, which spent some time in the Briggs Cunningham Museum and which he bought in the late 1980s from Reventlow’s half-brother, Richard Reventlow. With an alcohol-fueled 3.0-liter Offenhauser powering it, Orosco hit the vintage racing circuit, where the car proved itself far better than during Reventlow’s time with it.

“It’s a tremendous amount of fun to drive, even when left stone stock,” he said.

Pleased with the first, Orosco decided he needed another one. Except the second had been destroyed and the spare chassis, which RAI never finished, was in a museum. So he set about re-creating the destroyed car, using GP-1 as a template.

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“There were never any frame drawings or chassis drawings on the F1 cars, so unless you had one at hand you couldn’t accurately put another one together,” he said. For instance, the rear uprights on the sports cars, which used similar chassis layouts to the Formula 1 cars, were cast, but Remington and his crew at RAI fabricated the Formula 1 uprights from about 50 small pieces of metal, Orosco said.

Nor were the bodies of the Formula 1 cars all identical. To catalog the various differences – hood scoops versus bubbles, minor variations in paint schemes, open oil cooler air passages versus closed – Orosco and his team of restorers pored over the archives of motorsports photographer Lester Nehamkin, who Orosco said shot “gobs” of 8×10 negatives of the cars during production.

Like GP-1, Orosco powered the re-creation of GP-2 with another Offenhauser, but said he does have the makings of about two and a half of Goossen’s desmodromic engines. “I’ve never had the time or ability to track down anybody who really understands the desmodromic engine,” Orosco said. “There’s no question Leo Goossen designed an engine that would work, but it needs to be completely rethought and re-engineered.”

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The Scarab racing in 1960

Since finishing the re-creation in about 2001, Orosco has put it on the vintage racing circuit as well, often with one of his three sons at the wheel. “Replica, tribute, re-creation, I don’t really know what the word for it is,” Orosco said. “The key is the maximum commitment to detail and research that went into it.”

The addition of the Bartoletti Fiat transporter to the collection didn’t take place until the mid-2000s, when, while attending a black-tie dinner at Goodwood, he learned that Dick Skipworth – the man who assembled the recently dispersed Ecurie Ecosse collection, including that team’s Commer TS3 transporter – had his eye on the Fiat, which was then languishing under the desert sun in Arizona.

“He said he should get over and buy that transporter ‘before the bloody Yanks figure out what it is,‘” Orosco said. “But there was no way in hell I’d let him take it out of the country, so by the next weekend I owned it.”

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Thus Orosco and his restorers started “an extremely painful” restoration effort that included casting new windshields, creating new door handles, and even ordering thousands of feet of custom rubber and aluminum extrusions. “There were no spare parts – it was basically a one-off truck,” he said. “I even flew to Italy to see if there was anything left for it at the factory, but the only thing I was able to get out of them was a 55-gallon drum of rear axle seals.”

Orosco said the decision to sell the transporter, GP-1, and his re-creation of GP-2 (a group that includes the desmodromic engine parts he’s collected) didn’t come easy, but he said that at his age he doesn’t know how much longer he’ll continue to take the cars racing. So he’s consigned the three to the Bonhams Goodwood auction, where GP-001 is expected to sell for £700,000 to £950,000 (about $1.1 million to $1.5 million), the GP-002 re-creation is expected to sell for £400,000 to £525,000 (about $620,000 to $820,000), and the transporter is expected to sell for £600,000 to £800,000 (about $940,000 to $1.3 million).

The Bonhams Goodwood auction is scheduled for September 12. For more information, visit Bonhams.com.

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