Early in the morning just after I arrived in the car park at the Goodwood Revival a couple of weeks ago I heard the low rev rumble of what was obviously a highly strung racing car, I looked over my shoulder to see a bright red car that looked like a Ferrari, sounded like a Ferrari and even smelled like a Ferrari right behind me. A while later I caught up with the car and mindful of keeping a stock of photo’s of Ferrari’s for Ferrari Fridays here at GALPOT I happily snapped away not entirely sure of what it was I was looking at.

It certainly looked like something from the late 1950’s, an HPI (like Carfax) check of the registration revealed that this car was built in 1958 and had a 2417 cc 147 cui engine an engine size I’d normally associate with a 246 Dino V6 from the early 1970’s.

Yet the car looked like a 12 cylinder Testa Rossa. Searching through Google images I came across another photo of what appears to be the same car labelled as a 1958 Ferrari 196S Fantuzzi Spyder.

I had a look at Barchetta website to see if I could identify the chassis number but could find no 196S model for 1958. There are however two 246S models listed for 1959 and 1960 the first chassis #0776TR owned by Sir Antony Bamford appears to also be known as a 196S, which looks similar to today’s featured car, but has a prominent additional scoop on the drivers side of the bonnet along with a perspex scoop for the carburetors.

The second 246S listed on the Barchetta site is chassis #0784 which I looked at a couple of weeks ago. Having drawn a blank as to which car 415 UXY was I tried asking at Ferrari Chat and was surprised to learn from Ed Niles and tx246 that this car is one of a batch of 12 196S replicas built more or less from scratch possibly in Modena possibly by ‘”Old Timers” that worked for Fantuzzi. Due to risk of these people losing their pensions, they work in secret.’

Searching ‘Ferrari 196S Replica’ in Google revealed two more cars from this mystery batch of around 12 which appear to have been built in the 1990’s, one yellow and one red the latter lists the name of the first owners as Mecanic – Import a specialist vehicle dealer in Belgium whom I have tried to contact and asked for more details about the ‘”Old Timers” that worked for Fantuzzi’ as of the time of writing I have had no reply.

My thanks to Ed Niles and tx246 at Ferrari Chat for their help unraveling today’s mystery car.

Thanks for joining me on the trail for another carcaeoloy hunt, I hope you will join me again tomorrow when I’ll be looking at a Lotus open wheeler. Don’t forget to come back now !