LOST

It’s 12 years since Zagato launched its Sanction Lost Porsche programme. As it readies the next instalment in the Continuation story, we reflect on the

FOR MANY YEARS, THE NAME CLAUDE

Storez largely lived in the public consciousness as a corner at France’s Nogaro, a circuit largely unbeloved by drivers and teams. According to one racing name, the track seemed only to exist on the 1988 European Touring Car Championship calendar as an end-of-year excuse to indulge in the exquisite local cuisine.

Fast forward to 2011, and Storez was back in the spotlight. In honour of the 80th anniversary of Ferdinand Porsche’s first engineering and design company, US racer Herb Wetanson asked Zagato to build a recreation of Claude’s long-lost 356A Carrera Zagato Speedster. That set in motion a nine-year Sanction Lost programme that saw the arrival of nine more Continuation 356A Carrera Zagato Speedsters, plus nine 356B Carrera Zagato Coupés.

As we enter 2023, the project moves forward again, with the 356 BTC Carrera Zagato, the Sanction Lost take on the 356 Abarth Carrera GT/L – a car that was supposed to have been built by the carrozzeria in 1959-60, before it was spirited away by Carlo Abarth. However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves – this story really starts with Storez’s quest for ultimate speed.

As with so many of his generation, Claude deserved to achieve more widespread acclaim before his untimely death at the age of 31. In his nine-year racing career, he developed a reputation as one of the most promising French talents of the 1950s.

After so-so results with the Deutsch-Bonnet team, Storez’s career really began to accelerate when he started driving a Porsche 550 RS Spyder at the tail end of 1954. Following a first in class and second overall on the Tour de France alongside Herbert Linge, in 1955 podiums across North Africa were augmented by outright victory at the Circuit de Dieppe. From 1956 onwards, he switched to Porsche full time. Class victories at Reims followed in 1956, 1957 and 1958, and Storez also dipped his toe into touring cars and endurance racing. He teamed up with Robert Buchet in a 356A, and more success followed, most notably in the LiègeRome-Liège race; after finishing second (and winning their class), the duo returned a year later in 1956 to defeat Jo and Arnie Schlesser’s much more powerful Mercedes-Benz 300SL.

In preparation for the 1959 season, Storez contacted Zagato to build a streamlined body for his 356 Carrera Speedster. The new aluminium body was far narrower than that of the 356 Speedster, with a much-reduced frontal area, faired headlamps, rear-hinged doors for easier entry, extra vents for the carburettors, and fins along the rear flanks for extra stability. The wraparound windscreen was originally deemed too low, so this was raised and a wiper added. The car was then sent to Porsche’s Zuffenhausen works in summer 1958 for mechanical tweaks and to be painted.

Once finished, it didn’t get off to a great start – Storez asked his cousin, Michael Maniani, to collect the Speedster from Porsche and take it to Paris. Maniani drove the car just six miles before it was involved in an accident that required it to be sent back to Zagato to be fixed.

The Carrera finally got its competitive debut in late 1958 on the Tour de France. Beaten only by eventual victor Olivier Gendebien on the Reims circuit stage, the Speedster demonstrated its potential even if it failed to finish. Therefore, hopes were high for the return to Reims in early 1959 for the Rallye des Routes du Nord.

Preparations didn’t go well – on the way to the event, the car picked up damage to the front right. Although this was soon hammered out, it’s believed that Storez fitted larger tyres before the race for higher speeds on the straights.

Starting on the front row alongside Pierre

Noblet’s 250GT, he soon got into the lead, but on the ascent toward Muizon Noblet’s superior power swept the Ferrari past the Porsche. To counter on the long downhill straight that followed, Storez buried the throttle deep to keep up with Noblet. He braked late and hard for the Thillois hairpin, but veered to the right at around 125mph, hit a bank and rolled multiple times. It’s believed the bigger tyres may have hit a part of the earlier, unresolved damage.

Storez was thrown from the car, landing 100 metres away. His skull was broken, and his hip sustained huge injuries. Despite a swift helicopter airlift, he died half an hour later in hospital.

The remains of his Zagato Speedster have never been found – it’s believed that it was destroyed not long after the race. When Wetanson got in touch with the idea of building a replica, with no physical original remaining, Zagato had to dig deep into cutting-edge technology to make the dream become real.

“It was built thanks to a photometric process, selecting all the pictures of the original Claude Storez car and creating the mathematical model by computer measuring them,” explains Andrea Zagato. “One of the most important images was the one with the door open, which allowed us to measure the hinges. Using a milling machine, we built a 1:5-scale model first, then a 1:1-scale version.”

Wetanson would retain chassis 00, and a further nine examples were built. However, the opportunity to finish off a historical ‘whatmight-have-been’ was something that Zagato simply couldn’t ignore.

Porsche had seen the raw speed of the Storez Speedster, and contacted Zagato with a view to designing and building a closed racing car with a sub-700kg kerbweight. At the time, the 356 was beginning to struggle against newer, more focused machinery, so Zagato’s wind-cheating and weight-saving nous was deemed necessary. Ercole Spada’s team set to work with design sketches, but nothing came of it at the time.

ABOVE Claude Storez’s star shone brightly but briefly; he was killed during the 1959 Rallye des Routes du Nord after being thrown from his tumbling Zagato Speedster.

More than 50 years later, however, the dream became a reality, with the help of Porsche itself, as Andrea explains: “The design was derived from resources at the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, and the images we found in our archive. It was virtually identical to the Speedster up to the beltline, and the roof reminds me of the Ferrari 250 and Lancia Appia.”

Nine Coupés would end up being built between 2015 and 2017, but now there is yet another addition to the Sanction Lost programme, one based on what should have been a Zagato project but for the actions of Carlo Abarth – the GT/L.

Abarth had got to know Ferry Porsche and Anton Piëch (Ferdinand Porsche’s son-in-law) through his friendship with Tazio Nuvolari during his pre-war racing days. After World War Two, he became Porsche’s Italian distributor, and he also acted as a consultant to Piero Dusio’s Cisitalia concern.

By a quirk of fate, Abarth and Porsche’s futures would entwine. The enormous sum Dusio paid for Ferdinand Porsche’s 1939 design for a four-wheel-drive supercharged flat-12 Grand Prix car would bail the German out of a French jail, where he’d been for 18 months on charges related to his wartime activities, alongside Anton Piëch. Dusio never quite recovered from this financially, and to pay Carlo Abarth for his time, he gifted to him the cashless Cisitalia operation. Abarth – the company – was born.

More than a decade later, the Porsche 356 was starting to struggle in the 1.5-litre class in endurance racing, with competition coming from Lotus Elites and Alfa Giuliettas. However, an FIA rule change for 1959 provided Stuttgart with an opportunity to redress the balance.

The new regulations stated that as long as the car weighed a certain percentage of the original model, the body could be modified –perfect for a concern such as Zagato, which had been making lighter and slipperier bodies for Alfa Romeo and Fiats for some time.

Approaching the carrozzeria directly was out of the question for Porsche, because Zagato was building special bodies for its direct rivals. Instead, the auto manufacturer needed a go-between – and Porsche turned to Carlo Abarth to act as a trusted mediator, much like he had done with Cisitalia.

At the time, Abarth was building Zagatobodied, rear-engined Fiat sports racers, but relations were becoming frosty with the Milan-based carrozzeria. Nevertheless, in September 1959 Abarth made his way to the Frankfurt Motor Show to meet with Ferry Porsche, head of sales Walter Schmidt and technical director Klaus von Rücker. Abarth wasn’t the only coachbuilder in the race –Nuccio Bertone and Carlo Dusio were also sounded out on the plans.

In the Frankfurter Hof hotel, Abarth set out his plan – 20 356B Carreras with tooling, at a price of one million lire each, with the bodies to be built as light as possible. Ferry approved the plan, and set a deadline of late October for the initial designs, pricing and sales projections.

In the meantime, Porsche supplied Abarth with a 356B and specific engineering requests, in particular with regard to locating the oil tank and providing enough ventilation for the engine bay. Ferry was particularly keen on using Abarth’s connections with Zagato to produce the car, having watched first-hand when a Fiat 8V Zagato took victory at Avus only a few years before.

The Porsche engineer assigned to the project, Franz Xaver Reimspiess, proudly declared that the bodies would be built by Zagato – but this is where the story starts to have two sides. On one hand, according to Rene Straud and Zagato, the cars were designed by Gianni Zagato, Luigi Fabiorati and Celestino Zoppi, with the first prototypes built by the carrozzeria. Carlo Abarth next awarded the production contract off to Viarenzo & Filliponi, and then to Rocco Motto.

However, automotive historian and writer, and fellow Magneto contributor, Karl Ludvigsen believes the prototypes were designed by Franco Scaglione, with the first prototypes built by Viarenzo & Filliponi and Rocco Motto building the 20 production models, plus one more unofficial car on a 356B chassis for a Porsche dealer. Either way, Zagato was out of the picture for the production version.

Whoever was responsible for the prototypes, the changes were dramatic – the body was variously 5.2in and 4.7in thinner; the frontal area was reduced by 15 percent. It scythed through the air much more smoothly, with a drag co-efficient of 0.365 with the engine cooling flap closed and 0.376 with it open, compared with the standard car’s 0.398.

Thanks to an entirely aluminium body, it was substantially lighter than factory by some 45kg, yet it had also been significantly beefed up in the chassis. The new car would weigh 780kg –a featherweight, but still comfortably above the FIA’s minimum weight limit.

Arriving three months late in February 1960, the first car delivered to Porsche was a disaster. The marque’s engineers found that not only was the oil tank in the wrong place and the engine far hotter than was optimal, but the roofline was so low there was insufficient room for even the titchiest Porsche driver.

Worse still, when said pilots crow-barred themselves in, they felt the ‘outsides’ wanting to become ‘insides’ via an almighty roof leak. Critically, the wheel openings were so tight that the steering lock was significantly hindered – just what you want on a racing car…

Much to Porsche’s relief, these issues were later fixed for the Motto-built, or rectified, production versions; the many slats in the rear bodywork did much to cure the overheating problems. The bodies often varied from car to car, with brake-light designs and side-window shapes usually the most obvious changes.

A mere 20 were built, at a cost of 25,000 Deutschmarks – over 3500DM more than a Carrera bodied by Reutter. You certainly got the performance, however – the GT/L could crack 100mph in less than 21 seconds, having kissed goodbye to 60mph in under nine, according to an Auto Motor und Sport test of the time.

The car got off to a good start, firstly with class victory for Paul Ernst Strähle and Herbert Linge on the Targa Florio. Two weeks later, Linge and Sepp Greger took second overall and first in class in the Nürburgring 1000km, with a fastest lap time some 20 seconds quicker than the class record, thanks partly to the fitment of experimental disc brakes. Two other GT/Ls filled out the podium.

The GT/L turned out to be highly successful, taking 49 class victories over six years, including three consecutive class triumphs at Le Mans. It also notched up 30 outright wins.

Zagato has denied involvement with the GT/L project for many years, but the association stuck. Now the carrozzeria is building a Sanction Lost series of cars, fulfilling the original idea pitched to Porsche more than six decades ago, before Abarth took the construction elsewhere.

“The idea came from when I read an American article on Gmund dated from 1980, and then a second one in Sports Car International dated February 1993,” explains

Andrea Zagato, who further researched the story with the aid of the Porsche Museum’s celebrated Carrera book.

“After superimposing the GT/L package over our 356B Zagato Coupé, we discovered that the positioning of the steering wheel and seats, and the front-tank design, were absolutely identical.”

The new GT/Ls use the same mechanical underpinnings as the earlier Sanction Lost Zagato Coupés, but the body has been rebuilt using photometric measurements from the earliest pictures of the very first car, with design and mathematical input from Porsche’s archives.

While Zagato can usually fulfil virtually every automotive request, however extravagant, the Sanction Lost cars are a different matter. “A contemporary project starts with 2D and 3D processes, and clients have some room for bespoke specifications,” Andrea explains. “However, with a Sanction Lost project, it starts with an historical reference, and in this scenario we limit this area of personalisation in favour of consistency with history.”

Andrea finds that clients tend to understand and respect these restrictions. “For body colours, we recommend they stay with the original Porsche or Zagato configurations from the past,” he says. “One of the nine Zagato

Coupés was finished in Bianco Gardenia from the 1958-60 Alfa Romeo SZ Zagato, while a Speedster was finished in Grigio Nürburgring from the Fiat 8VZ from the mid-1950s.”

There’s a similar approach to the engines: “We stay with period technical specifications, from the 75bhp version of the standard BT5 and the 90bhp of the Super 90, right up to the Fuhrmann-specification Carrera motor.” Carrera powerplants made their way into only three of the earlier Sanction Lost projects – one Speedster and two Coupés. The options are the same for the new GT/L, and at least one has been specified with the full-fat Carrera engine.

After initially being conceived in 2021, the first car was due to be delivered at the end of 2022 to an Italian fashion designer. Just 19 are expected, and each one takes eight months to be built in Italy; the Carrera engine, however, comes from a Danish specialist.

Looking to the future, Andrea is keen to draw a distinction between Sanction Lost and Continuation cars. “The Porsches were all named Sanction Lost because the original cars don’t exist anymore, while the Continuation series is made on models that still exist,” he explains. “The Sanction Lost series is made on our own initiative, based on the intellectual property rights and the original drawings in our archive. The Continuation cars are made together with the original manufacturer, sharing the intellectual property rights and using a Continuation number for the chassis that can only be provided by the manufacturer.”

Pressed on what to do for the next Sanction Lost project, his mind turns immediately to Zagato’s most famous Milanese neighbour. “It could be the Alfa 8C 2300 Aerodinamica –probably the best body among all the ones made by Zagato on the 8C Monza, Mille Miglia and Le Mans chassis,” he says. “Another alternative could be the Alfa-Abarth 1000 of the late 1950s.”

However, it is the Continuation series that could be the most tantalising yet. “The next Continuation could be the Alfa TZ2 that we have proposed to Alfa Romeo Heritage, having scanned the example in the marque’s museum.”

In the meantime, Andrea and the rest of the Zagato team are working on the next batch of GT/L cars, hopefully with no roof leaks this time. Along the way, we trust that Claude Storez’s name will be remembered better as the man who kicked off a six-decade saga with his irrepressible quest for speed.

Thanks to Andrea Zagato and everyone at Zagato, as well as Karl Ludvigsen.