Will the Cizeta supercar make a comeback?

0 0 December 14, 2024 Edit this post

by Bill Buys

SOME people familiar with the Gran Turismo Playstation video game might know of the Cizeta supercar, but very few of the remaining eight billion population of Planet Earth know anything about it. Because only a dozen – maybe only 10 – were ever built. And it would be rare even among the Gran Turismo fraternity, because players have to qualify and earn enough points to buy it or one of the other supercars in the excellent video game’s 420-car inventory. No easy matter. It all started in 1984 when Claudio Zampolli, who had worked at Lamborghini for about 20 years, emigrated to the US and set up a company in Los Angeles dealing in high performance Italian cars. He called it Cizeta, pronounced chee-zeta, which was Italian for his initials, and zeta. Then he met fellow Italian car enthusiast and music industry mogul Giorgio Moroder, who used to take his Lamborghini to Zampolli’s company for servicing and tune-ups. They had some serious chats about building a car to rival or better Lamborghini and soon formed a partnership to build what they expected to be the world’s best supercars. They called their product the Cizeta-Moroder V16T. The suffix referred to the V16 engine and the T to its T-shaped transmission. It seemed to be the right time, since there was a supercar boom and hot ones, like Ferrari, Porsche and Lamborghini were battling to fill orders.

Zampolli employed a group of former Lamborghini technicians, among them Oliviero Pedrazzi, who was chief engineer and whose job it was to design the V16 engine. Also ex-Lamborghini were suspension and chassis experts Achille Bevini and Giancarlo Guerra. The V16T's design was by Marcello Gandini, who had earlier penned the Bugatti EB110 and Lancia Stratos as well as the Lamborghini Countach and Diablo. It was a longer than expected project but what emerged after four years of development, was one of the world’s most astounding production cars. The strikingly-styled Cizeta V16T featured a 16-cylinder engine which was mounted transversely behind the driver. It was essentially a pair of Lambo Urraco V8s stuck together side-by-side, which made the car a shade more than two metres wide. With a capacity of 5995cc, the claimed power output of the V16 engine was 560bhp (418kW) at 8000 rpm, although the rev counter red-line was set at an eye-opening 9000 rpm. With two overhead camshafts per bank and 64 valves doing their stuff, the sound would have been incredible. There were two Bosch K-Jetronic V8 fuel injection systems and a five-speed manual transmission sent power to the rear wheels. The company said its V16T was capable of 204 mph (306km/h) and it could run to 100km/h in 4.4 seconds. Zampolli was adamant that the Cizeta had to have the best of everything, but he was dead set against all-wheel drive and turbocharging. He felt all-wheel drive would add too much weight and complexity, which would compromise the competition-style suspension geometry -- and that a turbo would blunt throttle response too much and adversely affect the driving experience. He did want anti-lock brakes, but Bosch wanted far too much money, so he settled for 12-inch ventilated discs, two-pot calipers and single-nut wheels. The pearl white-liveried prototype was unveiled in December, 1988, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills, then exhibited at the LA Auto Show and Geneva Motor Show. It was the only example to ever carry the "Cizeta-Moroder" badge.

One-off 2003 Cizeta V16T Spyder Zampolli could not believe the positive reception they got: 167 people were interested in the car and from those, 14 signed for a $100K deposit in order to get one. He was ecstatic at having made $1.4 million in one weekend, but even more thrilled to have the chance to build his dream car. Zampolli projected the company could build 100 cars a year, each priced at about US$400,000 (AU$600,000). But it took another three years, until January, 1991, before the first Cizeta was ready for delivery. By then, annual projected capacity had dropped to about 15 cars – and the price has escalated to $630,000 (AU$945,000). That was twice the price of a Ferrari Diablo. Among the buyers was the Sultan of Brunei, who took two. Another ended up in Singapore, but years later that one popped up in the US where it was offered for sale at US$725,000 (a bit more than AU$1 million). In 1992 Fast Lane magazine managed to put one of the rarities through its paces and columnist Stefano Pasini reported that the V16T was "enormously fast”. When the mammoth powerplant was revved "the hum quickly becomes a frantic, high-pitched roar, a kind of explosion of mechanical savagery that you find only in the highest-level Italian supercars." At that stage, with production down to a trickle, a frustrated Giorgio Moroder walked away, taking his money and his name with him. So the Cizeta-Moroder V16T again became just the Cizeta V16T. Pretty soon funding became a serious issue, and in 1995, after about 12 had been built (some reports say there were only 10) -- the company called it a day. Surprisingly in 2003, Zampolli unveiled a spyder version of the V16T, and said he planned to build four more. So, almost 20 years after the V16T project had begun, although the Cizeta was theoretically available in spyder and coupé forms for years after -- no more V16Ts were ever built. But wait . . . In 2020, Italian businessman Antonio Mandelli bought the remains of Cizeta Automobili, with plans to bring the brand back from the dead. He claimed to have the backing of Deutsche Bank to the tune of 40 million euros. That was four years ago, and so far no more cars have seen the light of day. But who knows if there might yet be a phoenix moment for the wide-tailed wunderwagen? Cizeta founder Claudio Zampolli died in 2021, aged 82.