The episode dives deep into the fascinating story of the Cizeta-Moroder V16T, a one-off supercar designed by Claudio Zampoli. Hosts Jason Cammisa and Derek Tam-Scott explore the car's unique engineering, including its V16 engine and design lineage, while recounting the tumultuous history of its creator. They share anecdotes about Zampoli's controversial character and his relationships with notable figures like Giorgio Moroder and Jay Leno. The discussion also touches on the car's construction quality, performance, and the challenges faced during its development, making it a captivating blend of automotive history and personal drama.
The Cizeta-Moroder V16T was the world's first sixteen-cylinder supercar, beating Bugatti by more than a decade. From its Gandini-designed Lamborghini origins, to disco-backed financing via Giorgio Moroder, a star-studded launch party with MC Jay Leno, and a cavalcade of lawsuits that continued up until the death of company founder and creator Claudio Zampolli in 2021.
Brian Wiklem’s "16" book is available here:
https://www.cizeta-v16t.com/
This is the true story of the Cizeta-Moroder V16T.
The Cizeta’s mysterious engine has left many guessing when it comes to its origins. Turns out, it has 2 cross-plane crankshafts from a Lamborghini Urraco P300 V8, a block design taken right from Ferrari’s 308 V8, and heads dissimilar to each — looking more like Cosworth’s contemporary DOHC designs. We even learn – thanks to Iain Tyrrell's Classic Workshop – that there appears to have been a flat-plane crank version in the works too!
Lots of nerdy engineering talk in this one: the torsional forces acting on crankshafts that make V16s (and straight-8s) not work so well, and how Claudio solved for them with a central power takeoff unit in his transverse V16 with a longitudinal transaxle – as opposed to the McLaren F1 (which debuted not long after) which did the inverse with a longitudinal engine (albeit with 4 fewer cylinders) and transverse transaxle. There were only a handful of V16 engines in the early 1900s, early examples fitted to Cadillacs and Marmons, with the Cizeta and other esoteric oddballs filling the gaps until present day, but now we’re getting a new one in the form of the Bugatti Tourbillon – whose predecessors used a much shorter “W” layout for their 16-cylinder powerplants. In any case, the cross-plane crank in the V16T elicits a raucous, lopey idle, and a Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R Chewbacca-grade WOT bellow accompanied by a cacophony of gear and induction noises. Build quality is exceptional throughout, and puts the Bugatti EB110 and Countach to shame.
Claudio would find himself in very public spats with Jay Leno, the author of the V16T book itself, Brian Wiklem, and countless others at car shows, on Ferrari forums, on Facebook – just about everywhere. He may have been paranoid and a little delusional, but he was an incredible engineer and mechanic, and we’re grateful to have been able to experience the Cizeta-Moroder V16T! Huge shout-outs to owner Brendan Gallaher, Jay Leno, and Brian Wiklem.
At the start of this episode, we’ll also talk Golfs! Specifically MK7s, and the one Jason just bought for his niece. Believe it or not, despite decades of VW-dom, Jason has never owned a real GTI until this car. Now he’s turning the youth into car people one relative at a time, starting with the purchase of a 2006 Infiniti G35 Coupe 6-speed for his nephew a few years ago, and then sending him to driving school with it. His niece got to attend the same driving school in Jason’s E30, Beatrice. And, if Jason leaves the surprise 034Motorsport tune on this new GTI, his niece will inherit a car much quicker than her older brother’s (and Derek may have to buy one too). But should we trust 18-year-olds (or Dereks) with 300 hp cars?
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"...t one-of-one prototype 16-cylinder, which is at a Marauder V16T behind us. Yes, that's a GTI. Okay. You're g..."
The Mercury Marauder is a big car that was made in the 1960s and early 2000s. It's known for being powerful and has a unique look that many car fans love.
The Mercury Marauder is a full-size car produced in the 1960s and early 2000s, known for its performance and distinctive styling. It has a cult following among enthusiasts for its powerful engines and unique design elements.
Car
Marauder V16T
"...one-off, one-of-one, ever-produced supercar, and Derek is turning and looking at the definitely not one-of-one prototype 16-cylinder, which is at a Marauder V16T behind us."
The Marauder V16T is a special type of supercar that has a very powerful engine with 16 cylinders. It's one of a kind, meaning only one was ever made, which makes it very unique.
The Marauder V16T is a unique supercar known for its powerful 16-cylinder engine and limited production, making it a rare find in the automotive world.
"...ch is at a Marauder V16T behind us. Yes, that's a GTI. Okay. You're great. You're pretty. It's lovely. ..."
The Volkswagen Golf GTI is a sporty version of a small car called the Golf. It's popular because it’s fun to drive and has a lot of power, while still being practical for everyday use.
The Volkswagen Golf GTI is a high-performance version of the popular Golf hatchback, known for its sporty handling and powerful turbocharged engine. It has a significant place in automotive history as one of the original hot hatches, combining practicality with fun driving dynamics, making it a favorite among enthusiasts.
"But you made fun of me for buying a turbocharged car, and so I thought I should."
Turbocharged means the car's engine has a special device that helps it produce more power. It makes the car faster without needing a bigger engine.
Turbocharged refers to an engine that uses a turbocharger to increase its power output by forcing more air into the combustion chamber. This allows for better performance without significantly increasing engine size.
"... picture of the three mark sevens. Yours and your eGolf and your mom's car, and now this car. So this is ..."
The Volkswagen e-Golf is an electric version of the regular Golf car. It’s designed to be environmentally friendly and is great for driving around town without using gas.
The Volkswagen e-Golf is the electric version of the popular Golf hatchback, offering a zero-emissions driving experience while maintaining the practicality and comfort of the standard model. It represents Volkswagen's commitment to electric mobility and is designed for urban commuting.
"As Randy said, you know, if not in one of those fancy high class GTIs, just a regular golf. That's what he was racing."
The Volkswagen Golf is a small car that many people like to drive. It's known for being reliable and fun to drive, and there are different versions of it, including sporty ones.
The Volkswagen Golf is a compact car known for its practicality and performance. It has been a popular choice among car enthusiasts and everyday drivers alike since its introduction in the 1970s.
"So nephew came up with his favorite car in the world was a G35. Infinity G35 coupe. He had gotten halfway there to sort of saving up for one. He was doing really well."
The Infiniti G35 Coupe is a stylish and sporty car that was made by the luxury brand Infiniti. It has a strong engine and is fun to drive, which is why many people like it.
The Infiniti G35 Coupe is a luxury sports car that was produced by Infiniti from 2002 to 2007. It is known for its powerful V6 engine, rear-wheel drive layout, and sporty handling, making it a popular choice among driving enthusiasts.
"...her car at home just by chance is an automatic. And she chose it over..."
An automatic is a type of car that changes gears by itself, so you don't have to do it manually like in a stick shift.
An automatic transmission is a type of vehicle transmission that automatically changes gears based on speed and acceleration, making it easier to drive without manual gear shifting.
"...it was a bad coil back. And so he got her coil back and got the car back on the road."
A coil pack helps your car's engine start by creating the spark needed to ignite the fuel. If it fails, the engine may not run properly or at all.
A coil pack is a component in an ignition system that converts the battery's low voltage to the high voltage needed to create a spark in the engine's cylinders. It is crucial for the proper functioning of the engine, especially in modern vehicles that use coil-on-plug ignition systems.
"...flashing check engine lines, stuttering and just being, you know, a broken car."
The check engine light is a warning light on your dashboard that tells you something might be wrong with your car's engine. It's important to check it out if it comes on.
The check engine light is a warning indicator on the dashboard that alerts the driver to potential issues with the vehicle's engine or emissions system. It can signify a range of problems, from minor to serious.
"...maybe you know what? I think I want my next car to be a stick."
A stick shift is a type of car transmission that you have to shift gears manually. It can make driving more fun for some people because you have more control over the car.
A stick shift, or manual transmission, is a type of transmission that requires the driver to manually change gears using a clutch pedal and gear stick. It offers more control over the vehicle's power and can enhance driving engagement.
"...I was looking at jettas and civics and supers, right? The only three sort of sedans you can get with a stick that I think are modern safety and reasonable for an 18-year-old."
The Volkswagen Jetta is a small car that's easy to drive and has a good reputation for being safe. It's a popular choice for people who want a reliable vehicle without too much fuss.
The Volkswagen Jetta is a compact sedan known for its practicality and reliability. It offers a range of engines and features that make it suitable for various drivers, including younger ones looking for safety and efficiency.
The BMW E28 is a model of car that was made in the 1980s. It's part of the BMW 5 Series, which is a line of cars known for being sporty and comfortable.
The BMW E28 is the second generation of the BMW 5 Series, produced from 1981 to 1988. It is known for its classic styling and performance-oriented variants, including the M5.
"So I wound up with a Corolla because I had to have something new and safe and modern."
The Toyota Corolla is a small car that many people buy because it's known to be reliable and doesn't cost a lot to maintain. It's popular for everyday driving.
The Toyota Corolla is a compact car known for its reliability and fuel efficiency. It has been one of the best-selling cars worldwide for decades, appealing to a broad audience looking for a dependable vehicle.
"Well, my parents realized the mistake of their ways when I lemon-law the fucking thing."
Lemon laws help people who buy cars that have serious problems. If your car is a 'lemon,' you can get your money back or get a new car.
Lemon laws are regulations that protect consumers who purchase defective vehicles. If a car is found to have significant issues, the buyer may be entitled to a refund or replacement.
"And then, critically, obviously, a manual. Oh, yeah."
A manual transmission is a type of car gearbox that you have to shift yourself, using a stick and a pedal. It's different from an automatic transmission, which shifts gears for you.
A manual transmission requires the driver to manually shift gears using a clutch pedal and gear stick, offering more control over the vehicle's performance compared to an automatic transmission.
When a car is 'chipped', it means the computer that controls the engine has been changed to make the car go faster or perform better.
In automotive terms, a 'chipped' car refers to one that has had its engine control unit (ECU) modified to improve performance, typically resulting in increased horsepower and torque.
"It's tuned by 0-3-4. And I knew that at the second on the test drive as soon as I floored it."
034 Motorsports is a company that makes parts and upgrades for certain car brands, helping to make them faster and more powerful.
034 Motorsports is a company that specializes in performance tuning and aftermarket parts for Audi and Volkswagen vehicles, enhancing their performance and handling.
"...as soon as I floored it. And it fucking incinerated the front tires all the way up and on ramp."
When the front tires 'incinerate', it means they are spinning so fast that they can get very hot and wear out quickly, usually because the car is going too fast or has too much power.
This phrase describes a situation where the front tires lose traction and spin rapidly, often due to excessive power being applied, resulting in tire wear or damage.
"It does seem to have an aftermarket clutch in it. Even though the owner of the seller had no record of anything and no recollection of anything."
An aftermarket clutch is a part that replaces the original clutch in a car, usually to make it perform better or last longer.
An aftermarket clutch is a replacement clutch that is not made by the original manufacturer. These clutches are often designed to improve performance or durability compared to the stock version.
"...And it had in the rain driving at home, fifth gear wheel spin."
Wheel spin happens when a car's wheels spin too fast and lose grip on the road, making it hard for the car to move forward. It can occur when driving too quickly on wet or slippery surfaces.
Wheel spin occurs when the wheels of a vehicle lose traction, typically during acceleration, causing them to spin without effectively moving the car forward. This can happen in wet or slippery conditions or when too much power is applied too quickly.
"...my immediate thought is I'm not giving this 300 horsepower monster to an 18-year-old. No way."
Horsepower is a way to measure how powerful a car's engine is. The more horsepower, the faster and stronger the car can be.
Horsepower is a unit of measurement for power, commonly used to describe the power output of engines. It indicates how much work an engine can perform over time, and higher horsepower generally means better performance.
"All of my friends have mark sevens and they're all, they've all been reliant. You're going to make me buy another mark seven."
Mark Seven is a version of the Volkswagen Golf, a compact car that many people like for its performance and features.
The Mark Seven refers to the seventh generation of the Volkswagen Golf, known for its performance and versatility. It's popular among car enthusiasts for its tuning potential and sporty characteristics.
"I mean, I think the stock clutch is marginal for this, for this level of power, for sure."
The stock clutch is the part that helps connect the engine to the transmission in a car. It's what allows you to change gears, but it might not be strong enough if the car has a lot of power.
The stock clutch is the original clutch component that comes with a vehicle from the manufacturer. It is designed to handle the power output of the car as it comes, but may not be sufficient for higher performance applications.
"...wrecking your Porsche. Yes. But then the clutch immediately, not immediately, I think it made it six months..."
Porsche is a famous car brand from Germany that makes sports cars and luxury vehicles. They are known for their speed and performance.
Porsche is a renowned German automotive manufacturer known for its high-performance sports cars and luxury vehicles. The brand has a rich history in motorsports and is famous for models like the 911 and the Cayman.
"But I'll probably do the dog bone mount. I might actually do the, the resonator delete because it's too quiet."
A dog bone mount is a part that helps keep the engine in place and reduces shaking. It's important for making the car feel more stable when driving, especially if you've made performance upgrades.
A dog bone mount is a type of engine mount that helps to reduce engine movement and vibrations, providing better stability and performance. It's commonly used in performance tuning to enhance the driving experience.
"I might actually do the, the resonator delete because it's too quiet. Either that or just chop off the rear muffler, whatever."
A resonator delete means taking out a part of the car's exhaust system that helps control sound. People do this to make their car sound louder or sportier.
A resonator delete involves removing the resonator from the exhaust system, which can increase the volume and change the tone of the exhaust note. This modification is often done to enhance the sound of the vehicle.
Car
Chiseta Maroter 16 V16 T
"We ran out of Chiseta Maroter 16 V16 T's. Yes. There was only one."
The Chiseta Maroter 16 V16 T is a very rare sports car with a special V16 engine. Only a few were made, which makes it very unique and valuable.
The Chiseta Maroter 16 V16 T is a rare supercar known for its unique design and powerful V16 engine. It is a limited production vehicle, making it highly sought after among collectors.
"...are here because we ran out of Chiseta Maroter 16 V16 T's. Yes."
The Cadillac V16 is a very luxurious car from the 1930s that had a powerful 16-cylinder engine. It’s famous for being one of the most luxurious and powerful cars of its time.
The Cadillac V16 is a historic luxury car produced in the 1930s, known for its powerful V16 engine and opulent design. It represents the pinnacle of American automotive engineering of its time, offering unmatched performance and luxury.
"...most people look at it and look at the car and think it's Diablo. And of course, they should because it is effectively a Diablo in design."
The Lamborghini Diablo is a famous sports car made by Lamborghini. It was known for its fast speed and unique look, and it was one of the fastest cars in the world when it was made.
The Lamborghini Diablo is a supercar produced by Lamborghini from 1990 to 2001, known for its striking design and powerful performance. It was one of the first production cars to exceed 200 mph, making it an icon of the 1990s supercar era.
Car
Lamborghini P-132
"...that car, the P-132, the very next day, the announcement was made publicly in April of 1987. That Chrysler had bought Lamborghini."
The Lamborghini P-132 is a concept car that was created when Chrysler bought Lamborghini. It shows how Chrysler wanted to change Lamborghini's style.
The Lamborghini P-132 was a concept car developed during the time when Chrysler acquired Lamborghini. It represents an important moment in automotive history as it marked the beginning of Chrysler's influence on Lamborghini's design direction.
"...ct, it didn't start out that way. So Gisera, Chi, Zeta, is the time for CZ. This is the brainchild of Cl..."
The Lancia Zeta is a roomy family vehicle made in the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s known for being practical and having a stylish Italian design.
The Lancia Zeta is a multi-purpose vehicle produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s, known for its spacious interior and versatility. It was designed primarily for family use and is notable for its unique Italian styling.
"...Jason, everything from the head gasket up is 100% Ferrari 308. Period."
The Ferrari 308 GTS is a stylish sports car from the late 70s and early 80s. It's popular because of its beautiful design and the fun experience of driving it.
The Ferrari 308 GTS is a classic sports car produced in the 1970s and 1980s, known for its sleek design and mid-engine layout. It gained fame for its appearances in popular media and is celebrated for its performance and driving experience.
"...u look, the Bosch CIS units are for our three-way Quattro Avale. Everything really does look like Ferrari u..."
The Audi Quattro is a sporty car that was one of the first to use all-wheel drive, which helps it grip the road better. It became famous for its success in racing and changed how cars are built.
The Audi Quattro is a revolutionary all-wheel-drive sports car introduced in the 1980s, known for its performance in rally racing and its innovative technology. It helped establish Audi as a leader in all-wheel-drive systems and has a lasting impact on the automotive industry.
"... to a V8 after the S54 engine straight six in the E46M3, because they couldn't get the crankshaft to be s..."
The BMW M3 is a super sporty version of the BMW 3 Series. It’s famous for being very fast and fun to drive, making it a favorite among car lovers.
The BMW M3 is a high-performance version of the 3 Series, known for its powerful engines and sporty handling. It has a strong motorsport heritage and is celebrated for delivering an exhilarating driving experience.
"Yeah, pretty wild. So this is the opposite of the McLaren F1 arrangement in which the engine is longitudinal, ..."
The McLaren F1 is a super-fast sports car that was made in the 1990s and is famous for its unique three-seat setup, where the driver sits in the middle. It's considered one of the best cars ever made because of its speed and design.
The McLaren F1 is a legendary supercar known for its innovative design and incredible performance, featuring a unique three-seat layout and a powerful BMW-sourced V12 engine. It was one of the fastest production cars of its time and remains a benchmark for automotive engineering and design.
"Yeah, but to do a transverse V16 and think that that packaging is also not awkward."
A V16 engine has 16 cylinders arranged in a V shape. It's powerful and smooth but is usually found in expensive or high-performance cars because it's complicated to make.
A V16 engine has 16 cylinders arranged in a V configuration, typically providing high power and smooth operation. This type of engine is rare and often found in luxury or high-performance vehicles due to its complexity and cost.
"But... Like the Monte Carlo GTB. Oh, now we're going to have to have an inser..."
The Chevrolet Monte Carlo is a classic American car that was made for many years, known for its stylish look and good performance. It was popular because it combined comfort with a sporty feel.
The Chevrolet Monte Carlo is a classic American coupe that was produced from the 1970s to the 2000s, known for its stylish design and performance variants. It became popular for its blend of comfort and sportiness, particularly in the muscle car era.
"...'s a car magazine compare between it and a 40 and 959 and a Kuntosh. And it sounds like it almost won."
The Porsche 959 is a super-fast car from the 1980s that was very advanced for its time. It had features like all-wheel drive, which helped it handle really well on the road.
The Porsche 959 is a groundbreaking supercar from the 1980s, known for its advanced technology and performance capabilities, including all-wheel drive and a twin-turbocharged engine. It was one of the fastest cars of its time and laid the groundwork for future Porsche models.
".... It has an in, as a resonance that sounds like a GT350, like a Ford Mustang GT350, or Chewbacca,"
The Ford GT350 is a sporty version of the Ford Mustang that is built for speed and performance. It's known for being fun to drive and has a cool design.
The Ford GT350 is a high-performance variant of the Ford Mustang, known for its powerful engine and track-oriented features. It has a rich racing heritage and is celebrated for its thrilling driving experience and distinctive styling.
"..., as a resonance that sounds like a GT350, like a Ford Mustang GT350, or Chewbacca, but it, I couldn't tell whether it..."
The Ford Mustang GT is a powerful version of the famous Mustang car, known for its V8 engine that makes it really fast. It’s a classic American muscle car that many people love.
The Ford Mustang GT is a performance-oriented variant of the iconic Mustang, featuring a powerful V8 engine and sporty design elements. It represents the classic American muscle car spirit and is celebrated for its performance and cultural significance.
"Unlike anything. You, there are some Veyron notes in there. There's, you know, there's a litt..."
The Bugatti Veyron is an extremely fast and luxurious car that was made in the 2000s. It's famous for being one of the fastest cars in the world, with a top speed over 250 mph.
The Bugatti Veyron is a hypercar that set new standards for speed and luxury when it was introduced in the mid-2000s, boasting an 8.0-liter quad-turbocharged W16 engine. It is renowned for its incredible performance, with a top speed exceeding 250 mph, and represents the pinnacle of automotive engineering.
"...s $6 and change, that was more than double what a F40 was. Or a F40 you said $400."
The Ferrari F40 is a super-fast sports car made in the late 80s and early 90s. It's famous for being very powerful and lightweight, making it one of the most exciting cars to drive.
The Ferrari F40 is a legendary supercar produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, known for its raw performance and lightweight construction. It was the last car personally approved by Enzo Ferrari and is celebrated for its racing heritage and iconic design.
"...ights, cornering lights. And the prototype at the E30 side markers, which I thought was interesting. I ..."
The BMW 3 Series is a small luxury car that has been around for a long time. It's popular because it combines a comfortable ride with a sporty feel, making it fun to drive.
The BMW 3 Series is a compact executive car that has been a staple in the BMW lineup since the 1970s, known for its blend of performance, luxury, and practicality. It has evolved through several generations, consistently offering a sporty driving experience and advanced technology.
"Yeah, there were various other things inside of it that I noticed. Yeah, you recognized upside down 9.11 vents. Yes."
The Porsche 911 is a famous sports car known for its unique shape and powerful performance. It's loved by many because it’s not only fast but also practical enough to drive every day.
The Porsche 911 is an iconic sports car that has been in production since the early 1960s, renowned for its distinctive design and rear-engine layout. It is celebrated for its performance, handling, and everyday usability, making it a favorite among car enthusiasts.
"... when I looked at... Two 35s in the front, two in 335s in the back. You'll know better than I will."
The BMW 335 is a luxury car that is part of the 3 Series family. It’s known for being fun to drive and having a comfortable, high-quality interior.
The BMW 335 is part of the 3 Series lineup and is known for its blend of performance and luxury, featuring powerful engine options and advanced technology. It has been a popular choice among enthusiasts for its sporty driving dynamics and premium interior.
"That shitting is a strong word. They gave us that EV1 tend to film. They were very lovely about that."
The General Motors EV1 was an early electric car made in the 1990s. It’s important because it was one of the first cars to run entirely on electricity, even though it didn't last long in production.
The General Motors EV1 was one of the first mass-produced electric vehicles, introduced in the 1990s, and is notable for its role in the early electric car movement. Despite its innovative technology, it faced challenges in the market and was ultimately discontinued, making it a significant part of automotive history.
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Hello. Hello. This is the Car Mugin Show. Part of the Hackerney podcast network. That is Derek Tam-Hyphen Scott. This is Jason Camisa. Today, we are talking about a one-off, one-of-one, ever-produced supercar, and Derek is turning and looking at the definitely not one-of-one prototype 16-cylinder, which is at a Marauder V16T behind us. Yes, that's a GTI.
Okay. You're great. You're pretty. It's lovely. I love Mark VII GTI. It's a sport. It's got those wheels.
Yep.
Okay, so this is not off to a good start.
I don't do turbos, and you know that.
Okay. Well, for some reason, there's a GTI here. Nobody knows about it. Why it's here.
We'll tell them the episodes about that she's at a V16T.
Yes. And maybe I'll tell them about the GTI after you clap.
Okay. Do it again.
That was better. That's as good as it's going to get. We're done.
Are we going to address the hamster in the room?
The hamster in the room. That's not an elephant.
It's not an elephant. It has the proportions of a hamster. It's not an actual hamster.
It's not an actual hamster, but the car that is behind us does.
Despite the fact that I think they're very good looking, have the proportions.
Good looking hamster. It's a handsome hamster.
I think hamsters are cute. I had a hamster when I was a child.
I had a hamster as a kid, too. I don't know what happened.
I don't remember how he died, which is probably sad. I should remember.
I probably killed him because I was, you know, my head and illness.
How did you know it had illness?
My mom's a physician.
Did you bring him to the hamster, doctor?
No, my mom, my mom even, like, tried to sort of identify what it was and gave it some treatment that she met.
She dosed it correctly, and it really covered for a few days, but ultimately did die.
Sad. I gather young Derek was very upset at the loss of his hamster.
It was the last time I ever loved anyone or anything good.
I would have preferred a different outcome, for sure.
Anyway.
There's a hamster right here.
Okay, so you guys made fun of me a little bit last week.
You and Nick Mercadante are esteemed guests.
Who is a really fun guest?
Good stories.
Yeah, good stories. He's an adventure.
But you made fun of me for buying a turbocharged car, and so I thought I should.
As if you didn't have enough mark sevens in your life already.
You're referring to that picture of the three mark sevens.
Yours and your eGolf and your mom's car, and now this car.
So this is now Jason has bought a GTI.
Is this your first GTI?
Yeah.
But it's not for me.
It's funny that of all of the Volkswagen that you've done and such a Volkswagen guy that you are that you've never had a GTI.
It would, it would, you serve everything else.
As Randy said, you know, if not in one of those fancy high class GTIs, just a regular golf.
That's what he was racing.
Yeah, I've had a golf.
A two golfs.
I mean, one of the wabbit.
I had the waistwabbit, and then I had the mark three, which I turned into a four door GTI.
But this is not yours.
This is the first, but not yours.
Mine, but not mine.
The first turbocharged car that I've purchased technically not.
I bought my mom's golf.
My mom's golf was a 180.
That was her.
So this breaks no new ground.
Okay.
So what happened was what you guys are making fun of me about and why this car is here is three years ago my nephew turned 18.
And he somehow, between the ages of 17 and 18, became a huge car guy.
Super interested in cars.
And nothing made me happier.
And so was it the acquisition of a driving license?
I think part of it maybe.
But I think no, no, I think it was before I got his license.
But sometimes people just sort of come into their own as car people.
I think, you know, that was 11 or 12 years old for me.
I just feel like he had the environmental.
I'm a lot.
And put a thousand miles away.
Yeah.
It's that's a car guy.
But didn't, didn't sort of like he wasn't a good car guy pusher dad.
Yeah.
But no.
So you were 11 or 12?
I was 11 or 12.
I just, I was totally into cars as a two and three and four year old.
Like I was fascinating about children.
And then at 11, I went to summer camp when you're my mom.
I asked for a stack of every car magazine I could get.
And that was, that's when it went from like an interest that I talked about to everything I did.
I was like that.
I think always.
Literally always.
Always.
No other interests.
You had other planes and stuff.
I've always liked trains and airplanes and stuff like that.
I was a computer.
I was a computer nerd.
I wasn't.
A bicycle nerd.
But then cars just changed that.
But yeah.
So nephew came up with his favorite car in the world was a G35.
Infinity G35 coupe.
He had gotten halfway there to sort of saving up for one.
He was doing really well.
And so I surprised him by finding him the nicest one I could find in 2006.
So the last year with the updated headlights until it's an interior and all that's everything he kind of wanted.
Found the car and went through and did everything to make it perfect to hand it over.
Flume out here, put him through 18 safety driving thing at Thunder Hill Raceway, which was amazing.
He got to slide the car around.
And he did great.
And then we drove it cross country.
And his sister is three years younger.
And I have spent the last three years worried about this.
Like, what am I going to do?
Like, what am I going to do for her?
So last year I did fly her out to do the same teen survival school because I saw that she was heavy on the gas pedal.
And I'm like, okay, she's going.
So she did, I put her in Beatrice.
And she spun around in Beatrice and did all the same stuff and just had a great time.
But her car at home just by chance is an automatic.
And she chose it over, she had a choice between this old Lexus.
And my sister's 170,000 mile Mazda 6 stick shift.
And she chose the Lexus.
And I was very disappointed, heartbroken.
In fact, I almost disowned her.
Okay.
And so I've spent the last three years wondering, what am I going to get this kid?
Like, you know, I got her brother her car.
Like, she's a really good kid.
And I'm not saying that just because she's my niece.
But she's, I mean, yeah, if you were anything but you would, I'm sure, make no secret of it.
I mean, you know, look, kids, I think kids are often on very different paths and start very differently.
And you have to adjust expectations for, you know, for a lot of kids, they start slowly.
But she's just really bright, really cool, really fun, really sweet, does well in school.
She's just a good person.
And I thought, what am I going to do?
And I've come up with like 15 different things, none of which I loved.
And back in November, my sister called.
And she's like, you know, we're going to believe this.
So G was, she was saying something her car broke again.
And my sister, the Lexus broken.
It's got like a million miles on it.
The AC blew up last year, so I know it's got no AC.
Oh, it started running like, and her brother is now a mechanic.
So I asked him to please go through it.
It was a bad coil back.
And so he got her coil back and got the car back on the road.
But she was all freaked out because it was like, you know, flashing check engine lines, stuttering and just being, you know, a broken car.
And she was talking to her mother.
And she's like, you know, hey, mom, I'm sorry.
Grumpy and bad coil pack.
Shh.
I can hear you.
Okay.
She talked to her mom and said, you know, mom, I was thinking, maybe you know what?
I think I want my next car to be a stick.
All right.
Say less.
Uncle Jason to the rescue.
Like, this solves three years now of stress for me.
Like, what am I going to do with this kid, right?
And so I started looking immediately.
My sister was like, yeah, she kind of like sedans.
She doesn't like wagons.
And I was looking at jettas and civics and supers, right?
The only three sort of sedans you can get with a stick that I think are modern safety and reasonable for an 18-year-old.
And I'm like, listen, I don't care who you grow up to love and to marry.
You are not having a fucking Subaru.
Like just, sorry.
There's no supers in our family.
And I just thought like a Civic, and a Jetta.
I mean, a CTR would work or an SI.
Okay.
We're not spending that kind of money and 300 horsepower for an 18-year-old.
Okay.
What about an SI?
I don't think they're in the price range that I was, I'm able to afford.
And so it was just going to be like a regular Civic.
And I'm like, I'm sorry to say these are just basic bitch cars.
And she's just not a basic bitch.
She's really cool.
And I thought, so I called her and I'm like, hey, listen.
I think a car, I didn't want to tell her.
I wanted to be a surprise.
But I think a car is an outfit you put on.
And I don't like the idea of somebody giving you an outfit or costume and saying,
you are going to wear this publicly.
You know, I didn't like the fact that my parents sort of pushed me away from what I was interested in.
And I really loved watching.
Oh, they did that to you.
Yeah, they did that to me.
Mine did not.
Mine refused to let me have any 30.
Show them.
Mine.
I got an E28.
Yeah.
So I wound up with a Corolla because I had to have something new and safe and modern.
And I wasn't going to break.
Fuck all that.
Well, my parents realized the mistake of their ways when I lemon-law the fucking thing.
And the power train fell out while the lemon-law people were driving the car.
It was not reliable.
But I really liked watching my nephew blossom when he got the car that he wanted.
He just came into his own.
And so I called her and I'm like, listen, provide like, imagine a world in which somebody wants you to have a car.
Like, what do you think of like, you know, what do you think of a GTI?
And my sister had a picture of Anthony Esposito, working Anthony's.
He's got a 2017 GTI sport in gray.
And she's like, oh, that's cool.
I love the red accents.
And then she saw the interior.
Like, I love the black and plaid cloth and whatever well I was on my way to drive a car.
So I had found a 2017 GTI sport, which I think is the best equipment level because you got you the really good headlights.
It got you the diff and the big brakes with no other BS.
And you could heated cloth seats.
This is the same thing that they did subsequently with the rabbit edition in 2019.
No sunroof.
No sunroof.
I mean, I love a sunroof book.
No leather.
No sunroof.
Right.
To me, the important thing is cloth seats and good headlights.
And so I found it and just bought it.
And she hasn't seen it yet.
I mean, she's seen pictures of it.
It's a 70,000 mile car.
I'll do some maintenance on it.
And then, critically, obviously, a manual.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
No one in my family drives an automatic end of story.
So yeah, it turns out it's chipped.
It's tuned by 0-3-4.
And I knew that at the second on the test drive as soon as I floored it.
And it fucking incinerated the front tires all the way up and on ramp.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My Mark VII had the same.
Oh my god.
I'm undoing it.
So I hope she doesn't watch this.
Sorry if you're watching this.
I'm undoing it.
I mean, I can redo it if you decide eventually that it's.
There's two reasons.
It does seem to have an aftermarket clutch in it.
Even though the owner of the seller had no record of anything and no recollection of anything.
Yeah, I don't think he knew it.
He's second owner.
But the chip, the 0-3-4, so Nick, who was your last week, ran the van and found the programming.
And so it was this guy that I bought it from, his kid who bought the program, bought the 0-3-4.
So I don't know if he bought it as a gift for his dad.
And the guy just knew nothing about cars.
He was just like, it's just a car.
It's just how I avoid walking when I have to go places.
And so I don't know what the real story of the car is, whatever.
But somebody at some point upgraded the clutch and somebody and his kid, the month he bought the car, chipped it.
So I don't know if he said, if I do it soon enough, he won't notice.
Yeah.
Or maybe it was his car and he drove it for a while, chipped.
And then, you know, it was dad.
I mean, it's really night and day difference.
Mine did not have a chip when I got it.
And it did after I got it.
And it's like very noticeable.
It is.
So it's got bridge stones on the front.
And oh, God, what is the name of this tires?
It's a tire that I'd never heard of.
So lean?
No.
What's your mantra?
They're 54 dollars a piece through a discount tire.
Linglong.
No.
It's Xiangling or hold on.
I'll think of it.
Xiangling.
I could hold on.
Hold on.
Linglong is, in fact, the O.V.
Saigon.
Saigon.
Saigon tires on the back.
Bridge stones on the front.
And it had in the rain driving at home, fifth gear wheel spin.
And I don't mean like, thanks, bridge stone.
A little bit.
I mean, incinerated the tires in fifth gear.
And my immediate thought is I'm not giving this 300 horsepower
monster to an 18-year-old.
No way.
So in my four S's, I have a S-force.
Yes.
It's a garage already.
Great.
So she'll have brand new.
They're not mounted yet.
I'll see some fours.
I'll do a water pump on it because that's a known property.
And she'll fly out next month.
And we're going to drive coast to coast the way we did with her brother.
I can't wait.
I mean, you know, it is I've never wanted kids in my life.
But I knew that my sister did.
And that was enough for me.
And I've been so geographically far away from them for so long.
I was very close to them when they were really little.
And so the idea now that I get to spend five days in the car with my niece is just going to be so cool.
So there you have it.
My first slash second slash my fourth, my second turbocharged car that I've ever been part of the purchase process of.
And the fourth mark seven.
So I put my money where my Volkswagen E-Mouth is apparently.
Huh.
Whatever Volkswagen E-Mouth is.
But I mean, my mom's car, we bought in 17.
It's 40,000 miles on it.
I just put a battery in it because it sat for six weeks in front of my house while she was traveling.
And helping out a friend who had surgery.
And I get in it and the gauges went blank.
And it went wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong started.
I'm like, okay, I keep telling my mom every time I hear it start in front of my house.
Every time she comes to visit, I'm like, your battery's getting weak one of these days.
So I threw a battery in it.
Cars, cars done nothing.
All of my friends have mark sevens and they're all, they've all been reliant.
You're going to make me buy another mark seven.
They're just so good.
Yeah.
That thing is so stupid.
That zero three four programming.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the stock clutch is marginal for this, for this level of power, for sure.
My brother gifted me the tune as repentance.
And for...
Neppelids for wrecking your Porsche.
Yes.
But then the clutch immediately, not immediately, I think it made it six months, five, four.
Not long.
I got it at the beginning, the tune at the beginning of June.
And I got it.
I noticed the clutch slip for the first time in October or November of whatever year that was.
Yeah.
And I just don't think it's fair to give.
It's like an 18 year old.
Right.
And an 18 year old who's new to driving a manual every day, a car and say, don't sit at low revs
and high boost load.
I mean, she's, she's going to catch herself at some point.
Like on the highway freaked out.
She just needs to go.
And I can't clutch.
So not hanging on.
Yeah, for sure.
So it'll go back to stock.
But I'll probably do the dog bone mount.
I might actually do the, the resonator delete because it's too quiet.
Either that or just chop off the rear muffler, whatever.
Okay.
As we learned from Nick.
Yes.
It could be a way to do this.
I mean, she was super excited when she saw the pictures of, you know, GTIs in general.
And then I sent her a picture of this car and she's like, oh my god, it's black and red.
That's my favorite color combo.
She was super happy about that.
And I was talking to her about why I, I was asking her why, if she'd be okay with a hatchback.
Because I, I want to give her what she wants, right?
And I want her to know that if this car comes home, she isn't like it.
And she just doesn't fit her personality.
We'll get her something else.
And I'm going through, I'm like, you know, hatchbacks are great because this, this, this, this.
Here's, you know, the drawbacks are, you can't leave anything in the back because somebody can smash a window and grab it.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm going through the list of things that I liked about this car.
Why I think it's a good fit for her and one is, and by the way, it'll blow the fucking doors off of your brother's G35.
The squeal that this kid let out.
She was like, really?
And I was like, yeah.
And I mean, not even fucking close.
Is that true?
The way it is tuned right now?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I didn't, I hadn't made the final decision.
But in real, in the real world, I mean, this thing will keep up with the G35.
Yeah.
You know, they're 230 horsepower at the wheels.
And yeah.
Anyway, so super excited.
I cannot wait.
I can't wait for her to see it.
I can't wait for her to get it home.
And that'll be her college car.
Cool.
And that is not why we're here today.
The GTR is here.
We are here.
That's why it's here.
That's why it's here.
We are here because we ran out of Chiseta Maroter 16 V16 T's.
Yes.
There was only one.
We are fresh out of them.
Back with its owner.
So last Thursday, if this video comes on time, and I believe it should, you hopefully will
have seen that I did a revelations on the Chiseta Maroter V16 T.
Derek has seen this because he has the ability to see things before they have.
No, they happened last Thursday.
That's right.
They have.
They have.
Definitely already happened.
And so this is a really interesting story.
Yeah.
I'm curious to know how this performs because it's kind of an esoteric, obscure thing.
And that can go one of two ways.
One, nobody cares or two, nobody's ever heard the story.
So it will do well.
So I'm interested to know.
I think most people look at it and look at the car and think it's Diablo.
And of course, they should because it is effectively a Diablo in design.
One telegandini did this.
So I should qualify that.
It is not a Diablo in design.
It actually predates the Diablo.
But again, which Diablo, the original deal, the actual one that went into production.
But one that went into production.
The one that went into production.
The one that went into production.
The one 32.
Yes, so the one 32 was the codename for much elegantini's kundash replacement, called at
the time Super kundash.
And they he was effectively done with the design process.
And in 1987, as they're getting ready to build the tooling equipment for the car, they had
actually first time started it the day before.
And then the very next day, that car, the P-132, the very next day, the announcement was
made publicly in April of 1987.
That Chrysler had bought Lamborghini.
Yeah.
And so that car, the first thing, first Lamborghini, Chrysler says you need to tone it down.
They wanted it smoother and rounder.
Initially they provided, well, so the purchase happened in April.
June, Leia Cook of visits and seized the prototype and says it's terrific.
And then sort of like notes start arriving about how this styling should be revised.
And then eventually scale clay models started arriving about how the design was going to be changed.
And Gendini did two subsequent redesigns of the original Diablo concept to result in the car that ended
up going into production.
Which is incredibly similar to the Gisera and the B32.
The project 132 looks like a Gisera.
I mean, he basically said, okay, I didn't get to make the thing I wanted to make.
So I'm going to sell it to somebody else.
Well, in fact, it didn't start out that way.
So Gisera, Chi, Zeta, is the time for CZ.
This is the brainchild of Claudio Zampoli.
We'll get into him in a minute.
And he approached Gendini.
He was ex-Slamber Gendini works test driver along with Bob Wallace and Valentino Babone and company.
He went to Gendini and said, I need you to design me a super car.
And he did.
Gendini did.
But Zampoli didn't like it.
And then pushed back.
And so what Gendini did instead was just show MP132.
Because that was right at the time at which Chrysler had said no thanks.
And he said, yep, that's it.
It's perfect.
Except that he worked.
Claudio Zampoli worked together with Gendini to redesign the rear because he wanted to be even more aggressive.
So Wanda with halides from the Alpine GTA.
But otherwise, I mean, from the side, you can barely tell the cars apart.
Yeah.
The plunging belt line in the way that it goes down as it meets the windshield is identical between those two cars.
Yeah.
So, you know, most people just sort of, I think, look at that and think it's some weird download.
But I think the centerpiece of the whole thing is engine.
Of course.
So, Claudio Zampoli, by way of backstory, worked for Lamborghini then came to the US to start a dealer and service network.
To sort of investigate that in 1975 Lamborghini pulls out of the US market because of emissions.
And he stayed on as a consultant occasionally working with Lamborghini to help them get cars through emissions as they were ramping back up to come back in the US market in the 80s.
But really focused his efforts on an Italian repair shop, like a supercar repair shop.
But he purchased and it was originally, I think, mostly Alfa Romeo's but then became Ferrari Lamborghini and everyone else.
And really made a name for himself.
I mean, he serviced all the cars for celebrities.
So he worked with Stallone.
He worked with Sammy Hagar.
He worked with...
In Italy, they call them Stallone.
They call who?
Sylvester Stallone.
Because that's how it's pronounced in Italian.
And I do pronounce Sylvester in Italian.
I think it's probably the same.
That's a very difficult thing to say in Italian, isn't it?
Signore.
So they say Stallone and that's easy to pronounce in Italian.
Well, Signore Stallone.
Yeah.
And so he spends his life fixing Lamborghini's and decides he wants to make his own car.
And starts this process.
But he calls all of his old buddies at Lamborghini, basically.
And this is...
From Lamborghini.
Yes.
They were mostly...
I think they had mostly left at that point.
And sets out this idea to make a supercar that is more usable and more user-friendly and more reliable and easier to work on and easier to service than all the Italian stuff.
But he realizes very, very quickly that all of the engineering and building has to happen in Modena.
Because that's where everyone is.
Yeah.
Motor Valley.
Motor Valley.
Together with...
This is all right at about the same time as Bugatti is resurrected with the EB110.
And it's all the same players.
Yes.
So he contracts Technostile, which was an engineering consultancy for him.
A run by a guy named Aurevedo Petrazzi.
Petrazzi had done work for Lamborghini.
He did the Euraco P300 V8.
He'd done a bunch of things.
And Technostile worked for both Ferrari and Lamborghini.
Doing just random work.
Random engineering stuff.
And so that's who wound up engineering the Chezetta.
And so Petrazzi built the engine.
And there's been decades designed and built the engine.
Decades of discussion about what the hell this engine really is.
I would say it's not just discussion, but misinformation.
Yeah.
So this was a really tough one to research because there exists nothing.
There's one book on it by a guy named Brian Wicklam.
And Brian and I met last year at Pebble Beach just standing around looking at a V16T
that was coming up for auction.
And it was just being pushed in for auction.
And we started talking about it.
And it turns out he's the guy that wrote the book.
So he wrote a book on this car that never really got fully published
because Claudio tried to sue him and get to that side of Claudio.
So he and I sort of became friendly.
And he offered to help with the research.
And man, I would have never been able to do this video without him.
As it was, I typically do about a week of research for revelations.
And that I mean like, you know, 12 hours a day, like a lot.
Read three, four, five books.
This one was simple.
So I thought it's going to be one book.
But as it turns out, even he hadn't found all the information.
I found a bunch of stuff that contradicted all the stuff that Claudio.
So he wrote the book together with Claudio, the guy who made the car.
And there's just a bunch of bullshit in there.
There's no other way of saying this.
A bunch of things that Claudio said because he wanted it to appear a certain way.
But the one rabbit hole that I went down and researched for weeks
was where this engine came from.
And so I started just looking at every high-res picture I could get of it.
And so the bore and stroke are identical to the P300 Euraco V8.
And that is a flat plane crankshaft, verbally V8.
Crossplane.
I'm sorry.
Crossplane crankshaft, verbally V8.
Three leaders.
I don't remember the bore and stroke.
But when I talk to the mechanic from Kanapa, Bruce Kanapa shop,
who resurrected this car, he said to me, Jason,
everything from the head gasket up is 100% Ferrari 308.
Period.
Like, it is two Ferrari V8s.
And I kept saying him, but the crank is, he's like,
it doesn't matter what the crank is.
The heads are Ferrari.
So knowing that this guy touched everything and he was great, he was awesome.
Like, he was super cool, very knowledgeable.
I mean, he made the thing run.
I realized where he got that information from.
And you look, the Bosch CIS units are for our three-way Quattro Avale.
Everything really does look like Ferrari until you pull the head off the motor.
And so you can see where the head gasket surface is.
And I can, this one had been a revelations video.
It's a 100% match of 308 head gasket versus Chizetta head gasket.
So there are, you know, the four cylinders on each side.
There are three low pressure oil return galleys that are in between them
and there are four high pressure oil lines.
But where they're positioned and the shape of them plus all the coolant openings,
100% match.
So we know the head, the block's surface is apparently Ferrari.
And when you look at the crank case itself,
it's a aluminum block that has cylinder liners that are pressed in.
And Ferrari uses his bevel and his edge and whatever.
It's a 100% match for 308.
So you pull the head off and you think, oh, 100% Ferrari.
The problem was when I, how do you get a Ferrari head
to match up with a Lamborghini block, a crankshaft design,
that has totally different board centers, board spacing.
There's no, it's not going to work.
So that sort of made me go down this rabbit hole of trying to find the cranks.
So the crankshafts are, I confirmed, P300 cranks,
which means that the heads can't be just Ferrari heads,
because the spacing isn't correct.
So then I went and down this rabbit hole for days
of looking at pictures of everything I could find.
And what I realized is all of the Italian v8s of the time,
all of the Italian engines with four valves for a cylinder at the time
were based on two valve press cylinders designs.
And so if you're looking down the length of the camshaft,
on a single or two valve press cylinder engine,
you have the bearing caps for the crankshafts on either side of the lobe.
So you have the bearing cap is in between the cylinders,
because you only have one lobe there.
When you do a four valve press cylinder, double overhead cam engine,
you have two lobes for cylinder,
and the quote-unquote correct thing to do
would be to put that bearing cap in between the two cam lobes,
because that's the place that's under the most stress.
None of the Italian engines of the time had that.
The Ferrari kept the bearing caps where they had been
when there was only one valve press cylinder being actuated by each cam.
So I immediately knew that Cesetta has the journal in between the valves.
This is its own head.
Like it has to be its own head.
And I looked through the pictures of every single cylinder head
of every four valve press cylinder engine in production at the time in 1987,
which we're not that many.
Honda had one, Yamaha had one, saw that one.
That was the match. Porsche had one.
Porsche is weird in its layout because it's got a timing chain in the center.
The cam motor, and then they actuate the second cam shaft off the first one with a chain.
With a short little chain.
The closest I could find is all of Cosworth's designs always had the bearing cap in the middle,
and if you look at the sort of spider, the webbing of how the structure works,
it looks very similar.
So it's my best guess, and I can't confirm this, and I probably never will be able to,
that Padratzi took basically his crank from the P300,
the Euraco V8, took the block design from Ferrari,
which was vastly superior to what Lamborghini was doing.
So how did they deal with the spacing between the bore center issue?
They just made their, they took the combustion chamber design and expanded it,
you know, expanded the space in between it.
Of the Ferrari.
Of the Ferrari stuff, yeah.
So they're using basically the fundamentals of how each one of those motors are.
I don't think, I guess the, the bore, so the head gaskets are not interchangeable,
but you know, because the Bors are farther apart.
I don't think they are.
So when I asked the Canapa guys, they had never, they didn't pull a head off,
and they, we have no way of knowing what the actual bore and stroke of this engine is,
because you can't believe anything, Claudio as I'm fully said.
But if we are believing what he said, and the, and the, the crankshaft,
is it a visual match for the, for the Lamborghini?
And it was reported in time that it, you know, used, was inspired by Lamborghini.
What I had read previously was that this engine was two Euraco V8s,
but it can't be, because when you look at the casting of Lamborghini's block,
it's the most, I'm sorry to say this, ghetto, like it looks like 1800s casting stuff.
The Ferrari stuff is beautiful by comparison.
And just where the bosses are for the, for the head bolts, it's just entirely different.
So it's 100% a match for the Ferrari block, with the Lamborghini crank,
with the Lamborghini crank, and then the head gasket surface design itself is Ferrari,
but then I think the head is probably a copy of Cosworth.
But I can't see, I couldn't find a single picture, and I looked through thousands of pictures
that Brian was able to provide to me, not a single picture of the valve side of the head,
of the underside of the head.
So I don't know, you know, if it's a Pentroof design with 45 degrees in between the valves,
I would say, yes, it is a copy of Cosworth, but I can't see that.
No one's seen it.
Interesting, very, very, very interesting stuff.
But I had to solve that for me, my mystery, because, you know, if like everyone's been,
is it this or is it that?
I'm not going to do a video on a car, and then I'll be able to solve that mystery.
Interestingly enough, Ian Terrell, I called, you guys have ever watched Terrell's classic workshop,
very soft spoken, very slowly and deliberate British man, elegant gentleman.
He was called by Claudio's daughters after Claudio passed away to come and inspect what he had there
to help get rid of this warehouse full of parts.
And they, I don't think they realized what they'd stumbled on, but they stumbled on an engine
that was on an engine stand in the middle of being built, and it was a final engine
that was being put together, and there are two flat plane crankshafts.
All right.
So clearly, Claudio's importantly was building a double flat plane crank V16.
And, you know, the minder was there as a mechanic who had worked for him
who didn't seem to really know too much in the way of detail or didn't want to talk about it.
He said, oh yeah, one of these engines is on a dyno in Michigan somewhere being tuned right now
and missed the forest for the trees.
They're tuning it because the firing order's completely different
because it's a flat plane crank.
Like that's a soak.
I can't wait to hear that.
Hopefully somebody buys that, makes it run, and it'd be amazing.
But, so the engine is two flat plane crankshafts.
If you think the way they did it was the old one.
Sorry, the old one is two cross plane crankshafts, but they're not in line with each other.
They're opposite each other, but one is turned 180 degrees around.
Right, because we've left out the part where the power take-offs in the middle.
Right.
The problem there is...
Crank shaft length.
Yeah.
Is the concern?
I mean, this is what happened with inline eights in the 1930s
in Alfa Romeo applications, long crankshaft when you have an eight cylinder inline.
Which is about comparable to a V16.
Yeah.
So they take off in the middle.
Yeah, so the problem is, imagine crankshaft being a big long shaft, which is what it is.
And the cylinder, the piston that is furthest away from that,
is going to be almost three and a half feet away.
In the case of this car, it's more than three feet away from it.
And you're putting a sudden twisting force on that one side when that combustion event happens on that furthest cylinder.
And so now the crankshaft has to absorb that huge torsional load.
And then there's a negative load on it when it's compressing.
So the positive and negative, positive and negative.
And that torsional load will excite the crankshaft and break it.
Same reason why BMW went to a V8 after the S54 engine straight six in the E46M3,
because they couldn't get the crankshaft to be strong enough to...
Supported to support any more beyond.
Well, they couldn't go any more stroke because they were at the limit for piston speed.
And they couldn't go any more length.
And they were at the limit for four.
So they were done, they had to go to V8.
So yeah, so what they did was, so what he did was the crankshafts are asked to ask.
Basically, it's got two timing chains that run off of that in the two sets of timing chains, I guess.
And then there's a bevel gear that pulls the power off the center and goes straight back.
T in V16T.
On the side.
And it's transverse.
Or the shape that it makes if you're looking at it from above.
Because the engine's transverse, and then it's just a ZF dog-like fax.
So it's longitudinal?
The engine is...
The trans-axle longitudinal.
The trans-axle longitudinal.
Yeah, pretty wild.
So this is the opposite of the McLaren F1 arrangement in which the engine is longitudinal,
and the trans-axle transverse.
Yes, that's true.
This is very, I mean, I don't think that anyone else...
No one ever did a center takeoff.
Otherwise.
In modern times, no.
I associate that treatment with like pre-war or early post-war.
Yeah.
I mean, this is not the first V16 ever produced, right?
Correct, Cadillac did it and Marvin did it as well in the 1920s and 30s.
But this was the first sports car.
And the problem with, again, 16 is the length you can't get revs out of it.
And this thing revs to 80, 8,000 plus.
And so...
Yeah.
But really interesting when you start looking at like the crank shafts.
So that's why the engine's transverse.
Yeah.
Car because you're taking the power off the center.
I mean...
I guess you could do it in a longitudinal arrangement.
You just have to run a shaft down the back half of the block.
Right.
But the problem with that is the engine's so long, then, that you have an awkward shape.
Yes, of the styling and packaging.
Yeah, but to do a transverse V16 and think that that packaging is also not awkward.
This is the joke.
This is the interesting part about having a car designed by a mechanic.
Right.
Everything is accessible.
Yeah, but it's just wide.
Yeah.
It's hugely wide.
You know, nobody even did a transverse V12 after the mirror.
Let alone a 16.
16.
It's just...
The wild thing is it has a viscous fan on either side.
And if you think one of them is running backwards.
Right.
So actually the fan blades are reversed.
You pitch the fan.
It's just the fan, by the way.
Yeah.
So wild to see that.
And so you have the engine.
You have the water pump on...
I think it only has one water pump.
And so one side's got a full set of belts within alternator.
This is the left side.
And then the right...
I may be wrong.
Whichever one.
The other side just has a belt just to run that fan.
So you have the engine, the water pump, the fan radiators, and then the side of the car.
And it's 5 feet.
It's crazy.
It's a big car.
It's a very big car.
But yeah, he...
So the engine is obviously the most important part, right?
I mean, if this was a 12-cylinder, we would never have talked about it.
Because whatever.
Another V12.
But...
Like the Monte Carlo GTB.
Oh, now we're going to have to have an insert of the Monte Carlo GTB.
It's another one of these random esoteric, exotic cars that never went anywhere.
But it was 12 cylinders.
So no one cares.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's such a wild thing.
I mean, we now have a Bugatti Torpeillon coming.
Yeah.
We've got a V16 in approximately 470 million years, other than the Chiseta.
Other than Chiseta, yeah.
And it would be interesting to see how they dealt with torgional crank.
That's probably a map.
Material science advancements.
Yeah.
It's been a lot of years.
You know, the W16s that were in the Bugatti shirol and veron are much, much shorter.
Yes.
Still long.
But they also don't rev that high.
There's 7,000 at the absolute most.
And you know, turbochargers.
I wonder what a naturally aspirated version of that engine would be like.
Not that characterful.
So here's the weird thing about it.
We spent a lot of time in the episode talking about the sound of the V16T.
Because, you know, Tarell in his video was saying, I've always heard it being a flat plane.
And I have it with all due respect to him.
I completely disagreed.
Always.
That thing, every recording I've ever heard of that Chiseta sounds very burbly.
It's very, very, very, very, very idle.
And it's just revving so fast that what you're hearing are 2,8,000 RPM crossplane cranks.
V8s.
And confirmed.
I actually went and spent 2 hours tracing every one of the spark plug wires from the distributor
to just verify absolutely that it was, that's a crossplane crank in this car.
Because this is the car that we had is the prototype.
The only one ever made with Bosch CIS, the nine later cars all had different,
that magnet of Morelli, I think it was Morelli Weber fuel injection on them.
So I just wanted to make sure this thing was actually running a crossplane crank.
Here's something I couldn't go into the video.
So I'm talking to the guy from Canapa.
And he, again, super cool guy.
Like we spent hours on the phone, just shoot the shit.
And so George O. Moroder.
So Moroder is the guy who did all of Donna Summers stuff.
He's known to be famous.
The king of disco.
Yes, although I would say he's the king of chapter 2 of disco,
because he did all the electronic stuff that I don't particularly care for myself.
Donna Summers, the queen of disco.
Yes.
But he did, you know, absolutely legend in the music world,
for introducing electronic.
Yeah, he's more of the father of electronic music.
Yeah, that's how I would say it.
But Moroder was, he bankrolled basically the project.
He was a customer of Claudios, and then, you know, bankrolled this whole project,
and whatever.
And they wonder having a falling out, and he walked away with this prototype.
And so it was his car up until it sold at auction two years ago.
Three years ago, somebody thought.
And as part of the process,
George O. Moroder called Jay Leno and asked Jay,
like, hey, I need to get this V16T running to sell it.
Who do you recommend?
And he said, just send it to Cannabis shop.
And so they approached it with the car has never,
they were told it never ran properly.
What do we do?
And so this mechanic, you know, I was, I didn't have a chance to get this permission to use his name.
So I apologize for all the vagary here.
But he was like, yeah, I sort of, I'm a race mechanic.
So I just dug into it from start to finish.
Like, where is everything?
How is everything triggered, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And the first thing he did was replace all of the fuel distributors,
both fuel distributors and all of the injectors, right, right off the bat.
So what you do with CIS.
And then replace just distributors and cap and rotor and all the stuff.
Like, just got all the basics right.
And started it.
And it started right up and ran like shit.
And it wasn't running.
Right, he couldn't figure out exactly what was going on.
And it takes a heat gun and realize two of the cylinders are totally dead,
not firing at all.
And two are barely firing.
He's like, oh, that's weird.
So he's sort of V12.
Exactly.
It's a V12 plus a bit, right, because two were firing in properly.
So he went through this like long process of redoing all of his work.
Turns out he had a bad plug, a bad plug lead that he finally found.
He had a bunch of other stuff that couldn't get these four cylinders running properly.
And then so what he wound up eventually finding out was each group of four cylinder,
they're four, right.
So each bank, let's call each V8, has two distributors and two coils.
Each one of those coils, I think it's wasted sparks, so I think they fire twice.
The trigger, there are two triggers on each one of those end of the cranks for that V8.
One of the triggers was bad.
And when he pulled it apart, it was bad from the factory.
So whoever made that trigger back in the 1980s reversed the polarity of the two wires on it.
So that coil never fired at the right time.
It would fire at the wrong time and weakly enough for two of those cylinders to occasionally light off,
and two to never light off.
And he's like, this is crazy.
How did this car run?
But he couldn't figure it out.
And just he was like, how did that cylinder?
He looked down in the cylinders with a scope.
And the two that never fired, you could see writing on them.
They were never fired in their entire life.
And he's like, but how did the cylinder walls not get washed down?
Typically, you don't fire.
Your fuel is getting sprayed in there.
Fuel is a cleaner.
It's like spraying wind decks.
If you wash the oil off and then you'll get scoring.
But the cylinder boards look perfect.
So he went back to the box and pulled out the two injectors.
The old injectors pulled them apart.
And CIS injectors are basically like hairspray nozzles.
They're no electronics on them at all.
So it's just a flared hard fuel line that goes in and screws in.
And when he opened it up, ball bearings fell out.
So somebody had put a ball bearing in to plug the fuel lines
to those two cylinders to make sure they never fired.
To prevent damaging the boards.
And then I've seen receipts back to the 90s from a rotor
that showed trying to get the car through smog.
And it had outrageously high hydrocarbons.
Well, two cylinders not firing at all.
It wouldn't do anything.
But two firing poorly.
What?
Yeah.
So there is some evidence this car never ran on 16 cylinders.
Which is nuts prior to, prior to kind of a firing it up.
And I asked it to please.
Did you put it on a dyno?
And they're like, no, it was out of scope.
We just wanted to get it run it.
It ran perfectly for them.
And that was it.
So like, that's so cool.
And you know, I quoted a lot.
There's a car magazine compare between it and a 40 and 959 and a Kuntosh.
And it sounds like it almost won.
But for a bunch of things.
Including being down on two and a half cylinders.
Two and a half cylinders.
Pretty wild.
Wow.
Pretty wild stuff.
Okay.
So how was it to drive?
Harrowing.
Harrowing.
Scared to death.
Because of the value and irreplaceability of it,
or because of its intrinsic characteristics.
Also, yes.
So what I will say, first of all,
for whatever reason had no driver seatbelt.
I don't feel comfortable driving any car without a seatbelt,
especially one on a road like we were on.
So the road that we filmed that segment on is very narrow,
very steep, very twisty, very bumpy.
And a bit of a moment in a car like that
would potentially be off a cliff or down into a ditch and fatal.
And I was really scared.
Plus you have a situation where first gear is 60 something miles an hour.
So I'm in first a lot, just to try to keep the revs up
to have a build between the corners.
But I'm also not willing to go 7, 8, 9, 100 miles an hour
between corners.
It's typically slow stuff.
But to run through the gears on a car like that,
you're going to have to.
Once you're in it, the pedals are offset,
but not as offset as you'd think because the car's so wide.
Right.
You have to be.
The clutch is, I think, the heaviest I've ever felt in my life.
But actually is totally usable once you're used to the heft of it.
The shifter was.
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First gear isn't where you think it is.
Once you learn where it is, you're fine.
But I definitely practice a lot in here before I got out on the road
because I knew if I had to make a, you know, a 58-point U-turn at some point,
I had to make sure that I'd be able to find first gear.
And it's not, you know, it's dog leg, but it's not.
If you go all the way to the left and down, there's no more there.
It's halfway in between.
Oh, that's probably the axis where it reverses.
Yes, all the way over to the left is reverse.
Yes.
And you have to not go past first gear, because you end up in the detent.
But there's no additional detent.
So there's a detent to get from the H over into the dog leg,
but not a second one to get over the thing.
Yeah, so you have to look around for first gear and make sure you don't overshoot it
and then you end up where it reverses.
In the axis where it reverses, and it just doesn't go.
It doesn't grind or anything, just doesn't go there.
But actually it was really easy to drive.
Like really easy to drive.
No power steering doesn't need it.
Pretty decent turning radius.
Pretty good.
Actually surprisingly.
Yeah, me too.
And, you know, other than the long gearing, really fast.
Like not by modern car standards at all.
But just so much noise.
I'm pretty sure it's the bevel gears, making these great,
the power take off, bevel gears.
Making these like mirrors.
No.
No.
I don't, I'd say it's not as pleasant as the mirrors noises.
So the mirror, for example, the 308.
Yes.
The Ferrari 308 has three dropped bevel gears.
Yes.
There's a sort of pleasant worry.
Yes.
And you clutch in and it goes.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Ooh.
And you know, it sings and moves in general.
And this thing has a lot of noise that I, at first,
I don't, I didn't, I wasn't sure what the hell was happening.
It has an in, as a resonance that sounds like a GT350,
like a Ford Mustang GT350, or Chewbacca,
but it, I couldn't tell whether it was,
I don't know.
I couldn't tell whether it was an intake,
like the whole intake box, which is five feet wide,
vibrating or bevel gears moving around.
But it makes a weird noises.
Not music, per se.
But it's one of the most, put it this way.
It doesn't sound that loud on video.
It doesn't sound like it would be that bad.
And it's not that bad in the car.
It's very, very talkative.
But we, we did something we hadn't done for revelations,
which was, you know, doing this whole sequence where I'm
revving the engine so we can really hear it because I wanted it.
I thought it was important for everyone to hear it.
So I was going to do it on a cold engine.
So we backed the car out into the, into the,
a lot outside and let it fully warm up.
So I waited till I had like 180 Fahrenheit oil temp.
I'm not going to abuse someone's car, especially something like this.
And then we sort of pulled it back halfway in the thing
and cheated the whole thing.
And so it's sitting there in idle.
And one or two people came by to look and see what this,
this very loud sort of full thing.
And then I started revving it for the camera
and the entire complex cleared out.
I mean, there was a whole crowd of people around.
They all just came running.
Like, what the hell is that?
It doesn't seem loud in the way like a modern car does where
it's just hitting one frequency.
Really that it's a wall.
Yeah, it's nice.
Not music per se.
But distinctive.
Really.
Unrepeatable.
Unlike anything.
You, there are some Veyron notes in there.
There's, you know, there's a little bit of that.
Just a cool thing.
And spectacularly well-built.
This was the crazy thing.
But the interior is beautifully turned out.
No climate control on this one.
Again, prototype.
No climate control.
No radio.
But everything that was there, which wasn't worked,
it just kind of functioned.
And if that's pretty amazing.
And if you look at just how the interior fit together,
and I actually asked the owner where the paint came from,
because I want to know what paint shop did this.
It's the most beautiful paint shop I've ever seen in my life.
It's original.
So that was done in 1988.
Wow.
Crazy, crazy stuff.
And so then Claudio Zampoli.
Oh, God.
So look, the car is what it is.
Revelations about the car.
But it's also, you know, back stories of these cars.
This was a tough one.
Because it certainly seems like Claudio was a dick.
Let's come back.
Yeah.
So I do know one person who called me.
He was like, oh, you're doing just that.
This is great.
Don't say anything bad about Claudio.
Man, he got a bad rap.
What a great guy.
And I was like, do tell.
So this Claudio had built this friend, a Mura engine,
that was bad.
And I remember it was just smoking whatever.
And he said, oh, well, no, Claudio was a total gentleman about it.
I drove it 300 miles.
It's still smoked.
So he boxed it up, sent it back down to LA.
And he built another one.
And he was furious.
And I'm like, oh, he's serious.
Because Claudio had a fucking temper.
And he was like, no, no, no, furious.
Because someone told him to use these new rings,
these new stainless steel rings.
And they just wouldn't bet.
And he was mad that he had listened to the advice.
And I said, well, let me tell you something about Claudio.
From everything I can see, Claudio just was not willing to accept failure.
And of course, he was going to blame someone else.
So there's a history there of his entire career where he was never at fault
and everyone was out to get him.
And so the whole thing started with
Meroder as his business partner, but from multiple other side accounts.
All he did was make fun of others, the idiot who just gave me another 250K.
And this guy is a fucking idiot, fucking idiot, fucking idiot.
Sort of shitting on biting the hand that fed him, so to speak,
which didn't sit well with the people who had sort of recounted that to me.
And the whole process, I think they were in a total investment
of a million bucks by the time the engine was done
and to stay sort of started to work on the car.
And the Meroder's investment, I think, was supposed to be one million
and it wanted to be two point something, like two point two or something like that.
By the way, Brian is making a new updated version of the book
with a bunch of the corrections that we found together and whatever else.
And I'll put a link in the description.
I can't wait to see this book because it's really cool.
But so Meroder was on Claudio to get the car done on time and whatever.
And it was just excuses, excuses, excuses, excuses, excuses.
And finally, Meroder put his foot down.
And it was two years, I think, it was two years into their deal.
Mid-88, summer-88.
He said, you know what?
I spent $350,000 on an unveiling party for Hollywood.
And this is all on YouTube.
It's unbelievable.
They got Jay Leno to MC the whole thing, Jay being Claudio's friend at the time.
And it was just star-studded celebrity celebrity celebrity to trot out the car.
And so basically, he was him saying, Claudio got the car, fucking car here.
It's got to be done because we're trotting it out one way or another.
That happened.
Everyone was horrified at the price, which was $250, which is a joke because the final asking price for the car was $650.
No one ever paid that much, but that was the price ballooned.
And $250 would have been about twice a Testerosa or Quintosh at the time, probably.
I guess.
All I know is at the end when it was $6 and change, that was more than double what a F40 was.
Or a F40 you said $400.
One and a half times.
Yeah.
One and a half times at F40.
So yeah.
Well, the McLaren F1 when it came out was $640 or $670.
And that's probably why he was adjusting the price because he saw what was happening.
Right?
McLaren had a hard time selling at F1s.
Right.
So he and Marauder started to lock on.
So that was $88.
June of $88 is when I think Marauder gave him the ultimatum.
And December 88 is that big gala.
And then they went to Geneva early 89.
And in March, March 89.
And they were there.
Marauder went and talked to everyone.
And March 89.
And that's the Geneva at which the R-129 they viewed.
Yes, it is.
And he went and talked to Kimbala of all people and said, hey, can you help?
And so Kimbala said they could get the whole car done in production in six months using five of us body.
And to BMW 850, I motor.
And Claudio flipped the fuck out.
I mean, you know, they had a huge fight.
And his point was, and I think it's valid without a 16 cylinder.
No one will care about this car.
And it has to have a 16.
But Marauder was right with no engine at all.
Because at that point, the engine wasn't done and this was the other thing.
His Claudio said the same thing that Romano Artioli, who was the CEO of Gotti,
said was that the suppliers, techno stele, by the way,
same olivero padrazzi, did that V12 for the EB110 also.
That suppliers wouldn't give them parts because they were getting pressure from Ferrari and Lamborghini.
I don't know how much of how true that actually is.
We'll never know.
But it wouldn't surprise me in the case of the V16 because anyone working for Ferrari
would take a long hard look at some parts of that engine and be like, I know that.
Like that's mine.
And he was probably buying crankshafts from Lamborghini.
And so you can imagine a world in which the Ferrari and Lamborghini were like, don't help this guy.
Also his nickname was the Savage in Modenesis slang, which probably doesn't bear well.
Like if that's how he was seen.
So anyway, Marauder tries to get the car in production by Kimballa with a BMW V12.
They have a falling out on the spot.
Marauder was so pissed.
He's offered $5 million to buy Claudio out and say, fuck you out, $5 million.
Claudio said, yes, initially.
And then, no, because he wanted a lump sum payment and not to be paid by unit.
But eventually, they break up and Marauder takes his car with him.
Which is the car.
And it's the only car that was ever driven by the press.
So car driver, everyone covered it.
It was the same, it was like two riders that wrote the coverage for everyone else.
But could have had a V12.
Did have BMW 850 corner lights, cornering lights.
And the prototype at the E30 side markers, which I thought was interesting.
I have a little video of that.
Yeah, there were various other things inside of it that I noticed.
Yeah, you recognized upside down 9.11 vents.
Yes.
The same, it was really funny because the Chiseta was in here at the same time as the Lancia Tama A32.
The same A8 back.
The same A8 back.
Which was also used in the sob 9,000.
Right.
But it wasn't hooked up with anything.
Yeah, it wasn't hooked up with anything.
There was also, I feel like Windows switches.
There was a bunch of shared stuff.
But none of it was obvious.
Like, it was all good stuff.
The same way Aston Martin did.
Yeah.
But yeah, another, I mean, the car was genuinely well constructed.
But I just think.
So he has his falling out with, I think, so it comes back to his character, right?
So he's just falling out with Moroder, goes about it on his own, sells a couple cars.
But then has a falling out with Leno, with Jay Leno.
And what happened was apparently he needed to raise some money.
And he tried to sell Jay Leno Amura SV.
I've talked to Jay about this.
And he's still very emotionally damaged about this, or I would have asked him to be part of the episode
because he plays such a crucial role in, you know, being the MC for the car.
But I could see it's still really just upsets him.
Jay, by the way, listens to this podcast.
I don't know if you know this.
And, you know, the word I used was mortified.
And of course, now I'm even more mortified watching this.
And I'm like, Jay, he's like, yeah, it would be great if you guys could put the time into the research, you know,
and production quality that you put into the Revelations video.
I'm like, we just don't have time to do that once a week.
But what he likes about the podcast and I can pat ourselves on the back is we have a podcast that's about cars
and we talk about cars.
We're not talking about cigars and ball cream and all the other stuff that some of the other podcast do.
And so I don't watch them.
Do they do that?
Huh, yeah.
This is weird.
Why?
Isn't that a car podcast?
Sponsors.
And we don't have those.
Okay, yeah.
But also, I mean, but also we always try to make this about the cars.
We'll talk about ourselves and we talk about experience.
The idea is that we're trying to impart knowledge.
I think a lot of other car podcasts are just about, let's chat.
So, so I would have loved to have Jay on it, but he's clearly just, you know, damaged from this.
So what happened was somebody is driving by very, very loud stereo.
So hopefully, I bet nobody can hear it.
Okay, if you can hear it, someone is screaming along with their stereo.
It's very bad.
He, Claudio tries to sell Leno a Mura SV.
And the owner of the car is behind him doing this, like behind Claudio going like,
Jay, no, no, no.
And it turns out Claudio was trying to sell a Mura that he didn't own and didn't have the right to sell.
And was going to take the money and do whatever he wanted with it.
So what ensues then is a rift between the two of them that comes to ahead at a car show in somewhere in LA.
But they, Claudio approached Jay with another guy.
And Jay said to the other guy like, hey, watch your wallet.
If you're friends with him, he's going to come after your wallet next.
Claudio got nasty.
Jay got nasty.
Jay was accused of saying some pretty spicy shit that I did not.
Well, it sounds like he deserved it.
I'm not going to make that judgment.
However, Claudio then sues Leno for $150 million.
Nice.
I don't even know how you could come up with a number that absurd.
To the point where I had to, in the video, the revelations video, do the Doctor Evil $150 million.
Because it was such a stupid number.
And he said that was what it would have caught.
That's what the damage to his reputation will cost his business.
That he couldn't get investors anymore because Jay called him a crook.
They called him with a crook.
But when I asked Jay about it, he's like, I called him an asshole because he was.
And I'm like, fair point.
Somebody tries to screw you and you catch him.
But Claudio's accusations were way worse than that.
And we're absolutely hilarious.
But anyway, comes up with his $150 million number.
And he finds a lawyer.
And the lawyer was a car guy.
And I think came to Claudio's shop to have his, he had a Maserati Mistral.
And no one would fix it.
And he had collected all these rare parts that he found in, you know, over the course of years or whatever.
And brings it all to Claudio.
And the deal they strike is this guy, Tristram Buckley is his name.
And Buckley's a young attorney.
He strikes a deal with, for example, he would represent Claudio in the lawsuit against Jay.
And the way Jay tells it, you know, the lawyer called him and they sort of locked horns a little bit and whatever else.
Lawsuit starts.
And so Tristram is getting his car fixed in exchange for this whole thing.
Right?
So Claudio has the Maserati, has all the parts.
The lawsuit proceeds and finishes in summary judgments against Claudio.
And Jay's favorite saying it appears that there has been.
Claudio had previously been sued so many times and found guilty of fraud.
And the judge's statement was apparently, if somebody calls you a child,
something along the lines of, if somebody calls you a child molester and you're not, it's liable.
It's lander.
If you are, it's just fact.
And there can be no damage done.
If somebody is stating a fact and frankly, it seems like if Leno did call you a crook,
it's probably accurate.
And so fuck off.
I mean, that's, you know, you probably wrote that in different terms.
But probably.
But summary judgment in favor of Jay Leno lawsuit dismissed.
So a couple months later, the lawyer calls into its Claudio shop.
And oh, oh, hold on, excuse me, sorry.
Before the, before the lawsuit ends, Claudio calls this lawyer at one point is like,
hey, I need, I need some money to keep my team interested in your project.
And he's like, wait, what are you talking about?
He's like, well, you know, my guys are working on this.
And normally I charge $6,000 for this repair, but I'll give it you for three.
And Buckley is apparently like, I heard a statement from Buckley.
And it was like, it was apparently like, wait, what?
Like, I'm doing this.
I'm representing you in this lawsuit against Leno in exchange for this.
And he's like, well, you know, I'm good for the money.
I'll get it back to you.
Bubble law.
Well, you know, trust me.
And he got really aggressive.
And so lawyer meets Zampoly like at a bank and gets given $3,000 of the cash.
And Zampoly fucks off.
And has not seen for a couple of weeks.
Goes to Italy, right?
This is a man whose bankruptcy has no bank rep has no money, no business being in Italy.
So he disappears for a little while.
Comes back and attorney calls in and says, hey, just check on the car.
And Claudia's like, what car?
He's like, my mom's ready.
What mom's ready?
My mistral.
Like, the mom's ready that you're working on.
I'm not working on any mom's ready.
Hey, I gave you the parts in the car and the $3,000?
You didn't give me anything.
The $3,000?
I didn't give you anything.
Like literally plays fucking dumb car gone.
The parts gone.
The money gone.
He double crossed his own lawyer.
Like, this is the kind of shit.
That's pretty short-sighted.
That's unbelievable.
So of course, Buckley sews him and wins.
But if he's bankrupt, he has no money until he starts trotting out of it.
Zampoly starts trotting out V16Ts to cars of coffee and revving the engines and making spectacles as YouTube videos of this.
All over.
Buckley finds out about this, calls the feds and they come in and SWAT team raid his storage facility in Orange County
and sees two V16Ts, one of which was a customer car.
And that customer coughs.
Somebody coughed up whatever it was, 50K for Buckley and whatever to pay all of his outstanding debts off.
And then in the lawsuit against Leno though, and I didn't go into this at all in the video,
Claudio named fucking everybody as co-defendants.
Like everyone was ganging up on him.
His wife, his mistress.
Of course.
Of course.
Of course.
Of 10 years.
Who by the way kept asking him for a race.
She was working for him, kept asking him for a race.
He kept saying no.
And then finally made her an officer of the company right before he declared bankruptcy.
So she lost her house, her car, and everything.
And then by the way, broke up with her.
So you're an officer of the company.
Unbankrupt, it's over.
You no longer have a house or a car or any money.
That's the fucking dickest move of them all.
And then in the statements for this lawsuit, somebody, I think it was the mistress flat out said he has sexually assaulted all four of his daughters.
He has beat his wife.
He has just went down the line of just really character assassination, and he denied none of it.
Which is particularly telling because if you sneezed in front of him, he sued you for libel.
So my buddy who had an engine built by him is the only person who had anything nice to say about this man.
And then I found the Facebook post and the Ferrari chat post.
And I spent an evening reading this.
And it's the most disturbing shit I've ever read.
I mean, he's nicknames for everyone.
Jay is the clown.
Valentino, Valboni's the idiot.
This one's a scoundrel.
This is whatever.
And it's just this fucking like stream of consciousness of paranoid delusional hate.
That was just so upsetting to read.
And it's like, I have never other than Jay Leno.
And I don't know the fuck else.
I have never had an enemy in my entire life.
And then Buckley, the attorney's like, I'm your enemy.
No one's ever sued me.
I have.
And somebody else is like, so bye.
So bye.
So bye.
I mean, it's just like.
It was just the art Ferrari chat.
Oh my God.
There's many ugly parts of Ferrari chat.
Holy shit.
There's some beauty right there for you.
It was like, I was upset.
Like every, I was like physically upset reading all of this craziness.
It's only a sample of the data a couple of years ago.
I'm sure plenty of people said Goodridden's based on what you're recounting.
I mean, the one thing I will say that I did put in the videos at the end of the day.
Everyone said great shit about the car and everyone said great shit about him as a mechanic.
And even Leno to this day is like, if you would have just shut up with that stupid fucking lawsuit.
Jay, I'm not, this is not a direct quote.
Sorry Jay.
If you would have just shut up and, you know, he could have made more money off of me fixing the cars
because by everyone's account, he was the best mechanic around.
And from what I've heard from other Mura owners, for example, as no matter who touches your car,
if you send it to Claudio, it came back totally fixed like better.
So shame.
But you know, shame, I don't understand how you could go through life making so many enemies
that everyone sues you or you sue them.
Like, it's pretty, pretty sad.
I've been advised that you cannot be sued for a slander by a dead person.
So hopefully I'm...
Godspeed.
And basically everything I put in the video is just stuff that I found in court documents, whatever.
Like if it wasn't, you know, even...
Yeah, that's the standard of care that you use for truthfulness.
Trying to, like I'm trying to, you know, I have to think, like imagine, you know, his family is still around.
Like imagine somebody said this about my parent, right, or my ex or what, you know,
whatever the fuck these are human beings here.
And so imagine he was actually a great guy,
which apparently he was until he needed something and then he would screw you.
But like, I just...
I treaded retread it.
Treaded it.
Treaded it.
I tread very...
I wanted to tread very, very lightly and very carefully.
So it was...
The only things I really included are things that are corroborated by people who have never spoken to each other
or legal documents.
What?
Well, that sounds like there's plenty of fodder in there.
Holy shit.
Even using that standard.
Holy shit.
It was the...
I honestly could have done a three-hour Netflix documentary on this man's life,
because it just goes deeper and deeper.
But, you know, the first time I've ever done a character discussion as a revelation,
but the man's name, Cheet Zeta, CZ, those are his initials.
The whole car was based on his reputation in his name.
The great irony being that his reputation in his name was in LA.
And, you know, the car he designed the car for LA traffic and LA heat and whatever,
and then never homologated for sale in the US.
Never had an order from the US, so never did.
So, none of the cars were ever US legal.
Couldn't be bought by the people that he designed it for.
It's a shame it sounds like it was quite the car.
It was Kuntosh.
It was Max Kuntosh.
Yeah, but, like, it sounds like it was actually good.
Kuntosh is not really good.
Okay, so when I say Max, I mean, you know, Kuntosh take into its logical extension,
make it good, make it, you know, how does it handle?
I don't know, right?
I mean, I certainly wasn't going to push it that hard up the hill.
Does it have like normal tire sizes, such that they could be replaced?
Identical to...
They were identical to F40.
So, that's, what is that?
Two 35s in the front and 335?
No, two bigger in the front.
Something, yeah.
I remember when I looked at...
Two 35s in the front, two in 335s in the back.
You'll know better than I will.
You know, the only real thing that was different was center lock wheels.
Otherwise, everything was entirely conventional in that car.
Nothing broken.
I mean, the engine, obviously, it was.
But nothing was off the track.
That's F40 and 288 used center lock wheels, so it had been...
It certainly was not used.
Right.
But other than that, I mean, just kind of looking at the way the whole car is constructed.
Like, you could work on that.
No problem.
Figuring out the firing order was a bitch and a half, so many spark plug leads.
And because the distributors were from an engine that was a flat plane crank,
each distributor on the Ferrari stuff powers one bank.
So, you have a distributor and then the four leads go to that bank.
Right.
Oh, this case, you have to cross over.
Two go to each bank.
So, two go to one side, two go to the other side.
Tracing those wires without breaking anything and without ripping anything out and whatever.
That was...
I spent a lot of time just staring at the car.
Like, just staring at little thing.
Like, how the hell does this work out?
It's genius.
Genius design.
Should have been two flat plane cranks.
Because I can't even imagine what it would have sounded like.
But clearly...
I like the way it sounds.
Oh, I like the way it sounds.
But, you know, burbley V8.
Yeah.
Two flat planes.
Two flat planes.
I would have been sounded like a Formula One car.
You know, because now you're talking about the exhaust pulses of a 16,000 RPM flat plane V8.
And that would have been a Formula One car.
So...
What a disappointing little cul-de-sac.
I mean, car.
It shouldn't have ended up as a cul-de-sac.
It shouldn't have.
The car didn't deserve that.
The car didn't deserve that.
Because it sounds like it's way better.
I mean, I've interacted a bit with...
Lamborghini's like Kuntosh's not that much.
But all of the 80s, 90s for our Italian stuff, the supercar stuff, was kind of crap.
You know, it was just haphazardly welded.
And he thought about things in different ways.
For example, the whole thing was a space frame.
But it has one tube down the center of the car that housed all of the coolant pipes and all the electrical and all of everything.
It was so very tidy.
And then the way Ferrari and...
The way over all the other Italian space frames were built is they would take a piece of tube, cut it, and weld it all together.
And then, you know, weld on all brackets and shit like that.
And so you wound up with a bunch of detritus inside the tubes.
So they cut everything outside, made sure the tubes were empty.
And then before anything was ever put together, all of the tabs and all the mounting points and all the brackets.
Everything was welded on beforehand.
So you had a really, really gorgeously well-built, well-constructed stuff with no metal scraps on the inside of tubes.
And things were weatherproof properly.
I mean, it was just really, really well done.
And, you know, I struggled with, like, I don't want to make a negative revelations.
Oh, this is a bad car.
Thank God. I mean, the car sounds like it's great.
The story of Claudio didn't...
Wasn't quite as nice as I expected.
But at least the car itself blew my mind.
I mean, you compare that to an EB110.
Yeah.
That EB110.
I don't even think of Kuntosh's attempt as bad as an EB110.
I think that might have been the worst constructed car we've ever had in the studio.
It was bad.
Nothing fit.
I mean, it was just a hand-built, cobbled together from, you know, a hundred feet away.
It looks fine.
But now I see why they command the relatively low prices that they do.
There's seven figures.
There's seven figures, but it's Bugatti.
You know, it should be eight figures.
And I think if it was constructed like this Chisetta was, they would be double-digit millions.
Hmm.
I mean, a bespoke three and a half-litre neutral.
I remember.
That's 100.
I mean, 959's, they made 272, no.
I don't think they made it.
It's a lot.
I don't think they made it anywhere close to that.
Many EB110's.
And even 280HETOs, they made 272.
That's where that number came from.
And the best one of those in the world is six or seven million.
And what McLaren F1's, they made 60-something.
64 road cars.
Another 30-something race cars.
I would love to, I've not spent time in, I've never driven them F1.
I would love to see the difference in how these things are constructed.
But there is a letter I've seen it.
It's in the book, actually, from Gordon Murray congratulating Claudio on the quality of the construction of the prototype.
Which is fucking saying something.
It's Gordon Murray.
Yeah.
I mean, it's the car stunningly well-built.
Not without its faults, obviously.
But this is now a 40-something year old prototype.
That has, that's, it's the nicest pearl white I've ever seen in my life.
Cool, cool, cool story.
Yeah.
Cool car.
Wish it was in the background, but we didn't, you know.
We had in the background when we had Randy here.
Yeah.
For no reason, other than it was here.
And now it's, now it's not, it's back with its owner.
Where it's back, I think it's at the Peterson.
Which is not its owner.
It was not its owner.
And did not ask the owner for permission to do the video on it that they published.
See that look on your face?
That was, that was my look too.
I also didn't bother to do much research or whatever.
Anyway, well, we're good.
This concludes the shooting on the Peterson segment of the car presentation show.
That shitting is a strong word.
They gave us that EV1 tend to film.
They were very lovely about that.
And I will say, regardless of whatever else, that that's a hell of a museum.
Sure.
I'm happy to go hang out at the Peterson anytime.
As am I.
Everyone should go.
Yeah.
Who is interested in cars.
Even those are not.
That's probably a good culture.
Probably a good culture in the cafeteria.
Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a form of culture, for sure.
Okay.
Well, that concludes this episode of the car engine show.
Unless you have something you would like to add.
Again, I could have done a three hour documentary.
There's so much more.
But the only I can, I really should say is a huge thank you to everyone involved in that.
Because it's especially the owner.
It's a big lift to get a prototype car.
And to have permission to just go drive it.
Yes.
He's a great guy.
He's very cool.
Leno was amazingly helpful in giving me some information.
But mostly Brian.
So I'll throw a link to the book.
It's chiseta hyphen v16t.com.
I think is the, is the.
That your L was available?
Yes, shocker.
I think he's had it for a while.
He's a huge, he's not a journalist.
He's not our research.
He's just a huge fan of the car.
And then wanted to be coming friendly with Claudio for years.
They hung out in Claudio helped him make the book.
The problem became that Brian said a couple of things in there that he didn't like.
Like he talked about the Leno thing.
And had to, of course, point out that summary judgment in favor of Leno.
And Claudio didn't want that in there.
And then Claudio sued him and the publisher.
And so he had to long, long drawn out drama there.
But now it can be published.
Now it can be published.
And because I think more, more light has been shined on Claudio's character,
I think Brian is able to distance himself a little bit from his friend because they were friends
and say, okay, well, let me tell.
Let me ask the people involved.
So I know he's spoken multiple times to Georgia and Marauder.
He's sort of spoken to everyone involved in the process to try to sus out what really happened.
And so the later version of the book, which I think will be published in a couple of months,
I think it's now just a sign up thing.
It should be pretty good.
So yeah, anyway, cool story.
Hope you guys watched the video because what a car.
What a noise.
Yeah.
What any meets piece of history.
And now I will go back to a four cylinder hamster to get me home with the speeds now.
Or are you talking about some other episode of revelations that's coming up?
No.
I'm talking about the GTI that's over there that I can't wait to go spin dire in fifth gear the whole way home.
Yeah, if any luck, it'll be raining when we go outside.
No.
No more.
All right.
Okay.
Thank you for joining us next week.
That's it.
Cut.
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