One of my favorite stopping off points downtown is Joe Potter’s shop. A superb restoration specialist who often works closely with the Sports Car Shop across the street, Joe’s particular specialty is vintage rear-engine Fiats. He restored the 600 Multipla CC we saw here a while back. And he’s currently restoring an Abarth Zagato double bubble (we’ll do a piece on it soon), the epitome of these cars. The Sports Car Shop just sold one recently for $95k. It’s the cheapest way to buy a classic hand-hammered alloy-bodied Italian car, a presumably sure-proof investment, given their scarcity.
So here are Joe’s two rides; his DD 850 Spider (also coming to CC), and his summer-weekend ride, a wild and woolly Fiat (600 based) Abarth, ready for the first SCCA races up at Portland this weekend: a veritable rolling cherry bomb.
The Fiat-specialist tuning house of Abarth created a long line of legendary little monsters. All the smaller Fiats got the Abarth treatment, from the two cylinder 500 up. And Abarth built some Fiat-based cars and sports-racing cars, up to the beautiful OT 1300/1600, the superb 2000 Tubolare and the formidable 3000 Spider.
But the staple of the Abarth business were the Fiat 600 and its evolution, the 850. And this one represents the outer limits of the 600′s development. From its original 27 hp, Abarth offered a range of performance levels. My 1969 catalog shows the TCR 1000 as the top of the various steps, packing no less than 110 (DIN) horsepower at 8000 rpm from the bored and stroked 982 cc pushrod four.
Joe was busy under the Zagato’s dash re-wiring it, so I didn’t bother him with what exact level this on is at, but given that these cars weigh some 1200 lbs, power-to-weight ratio and traction makes them ferocious accelerators, and an estimated top speed of some 120 mph is nothing to snort at either. Since this one has a two barrel Weber, I don’t think it’s in full TCR 1000 trim, but the fun factor is what counts here.
Here’s what it takes to do restoration work successfully: organization. I love coming in and checking out the buffet table full of the current project’s parts. There a practical advantage to restoring little Fiats; the tables don’t have to be very strong.
Wow cool little Fiat one of these competes in the NZ targa every year and its bloody fast I have to agree on being organized to do restorations Im not and cant find things for my project despite having two cars dismantled so I should have ample bits
Looking forward to the Double Bubble piece–I remember reading about those cars in Road & Track (I think; sounds like an R&T subject) years ago (has to be almost 30) and obsessing over them for a while. Then life happened, of course.
As much as I want that car or some version of it. As awesome as this car is. I’m not kidding here.. There is a General in the Italian Army that has an odd attraction to an Eagle Kammback. That brings me back down to Earth.
I think it’s odd that we want the “common” cars from Yurp and many gearheads over there want our “common” cars.
I was thinking about the Eagle Kammback the other day–I remember when the Eagles came out that there was a Kammback model, but I don’t recall ever once seeing one in the wild. (But then I didn’t live in Colorado or Vermont when Eagles were popular there.)
I’d hope not to have to check the oil level on a warm engine very often. I see some stout-looking tubing inside that car that I’ll bet isn’t in most of them.
A neighbor had a double-bubble coupe that he’d bought engineless along with some other Fiat engine. He told me that he found out that his engine rotated in a reverse direction from the engine that was in the coupe. I didn’t know enough about Fiats to know if this was true or not…still don’t, for that matter. I’ve heard enough times that those coupes were awesome little goers though….