Abarth 205A Berlinetta

The long version

Before Abarth meant tuning kits for millions of Fiats, it meant this: a bespoke commission for a client wealthy enough to want a one-off Gran Turismo, and a brand-new company willing to build it from a blank chassis up. Carlo Abarth, fresh off the short-lived Cisitalia-Abarth 204A project, tasked Giovanni Michelotti at Vignale with the body — low, smooth, aluminum-skinned, with quad driving lights and a row of cooling louvers down each flank — while the mechanical side got a dry-sumped, heavily reworked Fiat 1100B four fitted with a Cisitalia-derived cylinder head, twin Weber carburetors and a Magneti Marelli magneto, good for roughly 65 hp in a car weighing just 818 kg. The first example was finished in March 1950 and entered the Coppa Intereuropa eleven days later, where co-owner Guido Scagliarini drove it to a class win; a 205A also appears in period photographs from that April's Mille Miglia. Only three were ever built, chassis 205-101 through 205-103, making this one of the rarest cars on the entire Index by a wide margin — rarer than the 1300 OT Periscopica's 50 cars, rarer than the 750 Record Monza's 100. Surviving examples now belong to serious historic collections and concours circuits; asking prices are essentially theoretical since the cars almost never change hands, and when they do it is a museum-to-museum transaction, not a purchase anyone is going to drive to the shops. It earns Valet Royalty honestly: the purest prestige object on the entire Abarth family tree, three cars that exist to be preserved as the literal beginning of the marque.