Most interesting racers you might not know

The classic car and race car worlds are filled with fascinating people and just about everyone knows the most famous names like Ford, Shelby and Ferrari.

There are, however, many other interesting people who made important contributions to the evolution of cars that many people may not have heard of before. This list of 12 is my favorite among a long list of car people you may not know. I could not possibly place these people in order of importance so they are listed in alphabetical order.

1. Carlo Abarth

An Italian citizen born in Austria, Carlo Abarth was essentially a European hot rod creator. He souped up Fiats with special exhausts and other performance enhancement equipment. He started his own company, Abarth, in 1949 to focus on this business plus build a few of his own Abarth badged race cars. Abarth was acquired by Fiat in 1971 and Fiat has recently released an Abarth branded Fiat. Carlo Abarth died in 1979 at the age of 71.

2. Giotto Bizzarrini

Giotto Bizzarrini is an Italian automotive engineer who worked at Alfa Romeo and later at Ferrari as chief engineer and as developer, designer and a very skilled test driver. His masterpiece at Ferrari was the 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. The Ferrari 250 GTE, the Ferrari 250 Testarosa and the Ferrari 250 GT SWB were all influenced by his ideas and technical solutions. Bizzarrini was part of the “palace revolt” at Ferrari in 1962 where several of the top people were fired by Enzo Ferrari.
Bizzarrini also designed the first V12 engine for Lamborghini and he engineered several cars for Iso Rivolta. His own branded car, the Bizzarrini GT 5300, won its class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1965. His company was founded in 1964 and went under in 1969.
Giotto Bizzarrini is recognized as one of the most influential automotive engineers of the 1950s and 1960s and still lives in Italy.

3. Craig Breedlove

Some people are content with driving fast but Craig Breedlove was only content if he could drive faster than anyone had ever driven before. Breedlove was a land speed record holder that drove cars very fast on the salt flats at Bonneville. In the early 1960s he became the first person to drive a car faster than 400 MPH, then 500 MPH and finally 600 MPH.

His car was named the Spirit of America and it was jet powered, as were his competitors.
Man against nature, man against machine and man against man. This is the essence of trying to be the fastest in the world. Craig Breedlove did have competition but he, and his Spirit of America, stands out from the rest. Craig Breedlove lives in the United States.

4. Briggs Cunningham

Briggs Cunningham was born rich which allowed him the time and the money to follow his passion for motor sports. He became a racecar constructor, driver, team owner, car manufacturer and car collector.

Cunningham began racing in 1930 and in 1933 was the co-founder of the Automobile Racing Club of America, which was later renamed the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), still an important organization in American racing today.

Cunningham owned and raced Jaguars, Ferraris, Corvettes, Listers, OSCAs and Abarths, but he is most remembered for the teams he owned in the 1950s with Cadillac and Chrysler powered sports cars of his own construction. Cunningham also bought the first Ferrari imported into the United States. Cunningham cars are highly sought after collector cars today both the racecars and the street cars.

He won the America’s Cup yacht race in 1958 as the captain of the Columbia. How many other racecar drivers, constructors and car manufacturers have ever done that? I think none. Briggs Cunningham died in 2006 at the age of 93.

5. Keith Duckworth

Keith Duckworth was an engine designer and along with fellow Lotus employee Mike Costin, founded Cosworth in 1958 in Britain. The name Cosworth is the combination of Costin and Duckworth.

The Double Four Valve (DFV) engine developed by Keith Duckworth at Cosworth is one of the most successful engines in racing history. The DFV engine revolutionized Formula One racing and until a few years ago the Cosworth engine had won more Formula One races than any other engine. Ferrari now holds that title and Cosworth is in second place.

Cosworth had been associated with Ford from the beginning and was a subsidiary of Ford between 1998 and 2004 when Cosworth was sold to the Cosworth Group owned by Gerald Forsythe and Kevin Kalkhoven.
Keith Duckworth died in 2005 at the age of 72.

6. John Fitch

John Fitch was a successful racecar driver and much more. He won many sports car races including the 1953 Sebring 12-hour race in a Cunningham car. This was the first Sebring victory for American drivers in an American car. He ran the 24 Hours of Le Mans six times, finishing as high as third.

John Fitch was the only American on the Mercedes-Benz racing team in the 1950s, he later served as the first manager for the Corvette racing team and he was the first general manager of the Lime Rock Park race track in Connecticut.

He was a pilot in the US Army Air Corps during WWII. He is also an inventor, his most well known invention is the Fitch Barrier, the sand-filled plastic-barrel crash cushion that is commonly seen in front of bridge abutments. Used across the United States, it is credited with saving thousands of lives.
John Fitch still lives on the East Coast of the United States.

7. Giorgetto Giugiaro

Giorgetto Giugiaro is the most well known car designer in history and has probably designed more cars than anyone else. In the early days of his career in Italy he worked for the famous Italian design firms Ghia and Bertone.

In 1968 Giugiaro started his own company, Ital Design, now known as Italdesign Giugiaro. He sold this company to Volkswagen in 2010.

Giugiaro is such a talented designer that he was the cover story of the March 1969 issue of Road & Track magazine. In 1999 he was elected the Car Designer of the Century, an international award given to the most influential car designer of the 20th century, voted on by automobile journalists.

Many of the most beautiful cars in history were penned by Giugiaro, such as the De Tomasso Mangusta, Maserati Ghibli, Iso Grifo and several other Italian exotics. He also designed the BMW Mini and many Japanese cars.

Giorgetto Giugiaro lives in Italy.

8. Brian Lister

George Lister and Sons was a Cambridge, England based irons works. Brian Lister, one of the sons, was more interested in racecars than iron gates and fences.
In 1954 Lister introduced his first sports car powered by a tuned MG engine. Lister had some success racing cars of his own design and manufacturer. Lister sold these cars in kit form to anyone who wanted to go racing.

In 1957 Lister designed a car to be powered by a Jaguar engine with an aerodynamic aluminum body and a winner was born! They were able to beat the works Aston Martins for the first time and Lister won the 1957 Empire Trophy. Among the Lister customers were the Americans, Briggs Cunningham and Jim Hall. In addition to the Jaguar powered Listers they also used Chevrolet Corvette engines with some success.

While another American racer, Lance Reventlow, did not use the Lister chassis he was influenced by Lister as a result of a visit to their factory in Cambridge. Reventlow built his own racecar, the Scarab.

9. Enrico Nardi

When I hear the name Nardi I think about classic steering wheels. Enrico Nardi, who died in 1966, contributed much more to motor sport than steering wheels. He worked at Lancia and he worked with Enzo Ferrari at Alfa Romeo.

He was an engine expert and he designed and built excellent racecars. The company he started is still around today and has evolved into Nardi-Personal S.p.A.

10. Lance Reventlow

Lance Reventlow’s life had all of the elements of a blockbuster Hollywood movie: rich mother, one race car driving stepfather, and another stepfather, movie star named Cary Grant. Grant remained friends with Lance after the divorce from Lance’s mother, Barbara Hutton, the heiress to the Woolworth fortune, the WalMart of its day.

Reventlow’s father was a count, his other stepfather was a prince and Lance inherited the count title. At the age of 12, Lance’s mother married Prince Igor Troubetzkoy who won the famous Targa Florio car race that year, thus leading to Lance’s interest in motor sports.

Reventlow, who turned out to be a handsome fellow, married the famous and beautiful movie star, Jill St. John, and later an ex-Mouseketeer, Cheryl Holdridge, remained interested in pursuing motor sports, eventually deciding to build his own racecar.

His racecars were called Scarabs and he achieved considerable success racing in the United States. In 1959 Road & Track magazine called the Scarab “the most potent sports racing cars in the world”.

Lance was a friend of fellow racer, and actor, James Dean. On September 30, 1955, Lance was one of the last people to see James Dean alive when they met on their way to a race in Salinas, California. James Dean was killed later that day near Paso Robles in his Porsche 550 Spyder.

When Reventlow dropped out of racing in the early 1960′s, his facility, and many of his people, were taken over by Carroll Shelby who put them to work making the Shelby Cobra and Shelby Mustangs. This team went on to achieve considerable success in racing.

Unlike other racecar companies Reventlow’s company did not make street cars to sell in order to pay for the racing. Lance was rich so he, and his mother, paid for the cost of racing. The result of this is that there are only a handful of real Scarab cars in the world.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a Hollywood happy ending. In 1972 Lance died in a small plane crash in the Colorado Mountains near Aspen where he had a home. Even though he was an experienced pilot he was not flying the plane that terrible day. Lance Reventlow was 36 years old when he died.

11. Renzo Rivolta

Renzo Rivolta realized that Italy needed inexpensive transportation after WWII so he went into the scooter manufacturing business. His company was Isothermos a manufacturer of refrigerators, which he had acquired in 1942. He renamed the company Iso Autoveicoli, moved up to motorcycles and eventually to high performance Grand Touring cars.

But before the GT cars Iso designed and built the Isetta, the “bubble car”. Iso had a difficult time selling this little car in Italy. Starting in 1954, the Isetta design was licensed to automobile manufacturers around the world and the most successful was the BMW Isetta. The Isetta was a financial success for BMW and the royalties paid to Iso allowed Renzo Rivolta to move on to developing GT cars and the income from the Isetta was important for BMW.

Renzo Rivolta hired Giotto Bizzarrini as a consultant to help design the Iso Rivolta GT, which was introduced in 1962. Iso made a comfortable four seater that handled like a sports car. It is powered by a Chevrolet Corvette 327 cubic inch displacement engine.

Iso then went on to produce the beautiful Iso Grifo leading to the Iso Grifo A3/C, which became the Bizzarrini GT 5300.

All of these cars are highly sought after collector cars today. Renzo Rivolta died in 1966 athe age of 58.

12. Sergio Scaglietti

Sergio Scaglietti was a great car designer and coach builder who was inextricably linked to Ferrari and was responsible for the styling of many of Ferrari’s great race cars of the 1950s and 1960s. He also was a personal friend of Enzo Ferrari and the Ferrari family.

He did not draw his designs, he hammered the beautiful shapes into aluminum directly from his head. He was responsible for many of the most beautiful cars every created. One of his creations for Ferrari recently sold at auction for $16.4 million, the highest price every paid for a car at auction.

You know he is a special person when Ferrari names a car in his honor – the 612 Scaglietti. Sergio Scaglietti died on November 20, 2011 at the age of 91.

This article racing legends was pilfered from the website 12most. Pretty cool stuff there.