NART BEFORE TIME

Unseen in public since 1988, this ultra-rare and forward-thinking Ferrari 365 GTB/4 NART Spider will soon be unleashed at The Quail, Monterey. David Lillywhite got to see it first

- David Lillywhite

You could squint and stare at this curious vision in black and red for as long as you like, but without prior knowledge would you ever come to the conclusion that it started life as a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona? You surely wouldn't.

And then would you come to the conclusion that it's significantly more valuable than the iconic Daytona? Maybe don't answer that at this stage... After all, there's more than a touch of the lovechild of Triumph TR7 and Pontiac Fiero at first glance in this rare machine.

But that's the thing about the 365 GTB/4 NART Spider: it pre-empted so many styles of later eras. This car, chassis 15003, hasn't been seen in public since 1988 when it joined what is now the Lee Collection in Reno - but in August this year it will break cover at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering (a highlight of California's Monterey Car Week). It's one of only five 365 GTB/4 NART Spiders created between 1974 and 1981, each one a little different from the next. And its heritage is off-the-scale.

NART at the time was flying high. And NART, in case the evocative four-letter acronym has evaded you until now, was North American Racing Team, created by racing driver and original North American Ferrari distributor Luigi Chinetti.

To understand the car, first you need to understand its creator: Italian-born Chinetti had started young, qualifying as a mechanic aged 14. Two years later, in 1917, he joined Alfa Romeo, where he met a similarly junior Enzo Ferrari. Like Ferrari, Chinetti also began to race, specialising in sports cars and competing at Le Mans from 1932. When World War Two broke out he emigrated to the United States, but he returned to Europe at the end of the 1940s, where he was reunited with Enzo Ferrari.