While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
It was the ultimate Italian supercar, the peak of Eighties excess embodied in 16 cylinders and eight headlamps. The 1988 Cizeta-Moroder V16T promised fireworks but, like a bottle rocket, it burned brightly for a few seconds and then faded away. The sole original example of this Modena, Italy-built exotic to bear the name of its planned primary investor, the car Giorgio Moroder has owned from new, will be crossing the block at RM Sotheby's Arizona sale in Phoenix on January 27, 2022.
The innovative Italian music producer, dubbed "The Father of Disco," was an enthusiastic owner of high-performance sports cars. It was reportedly through servicing his Lamborghini Countach in the 1980s that he met Claudio Zampolli, former Lamborghini development engineer. Zampolli had dreams of designing and building his own ultra-powerful sports car that would top all others with a mid-mounted V-16 engine; this would become the 1988 Cizeta-Moroder V16T prototype, and the subsequent nine Cizeta V16T production cars built between 1990 and 1995. The Italian pronunciation of Zampolli's intials, chee-zeta, would inspire the name, along with Moroder, who took a 50-percent stake in the supercar venture. Moroder's involvement would ultimately be short lived.
This fully functional prototype car, chassis 001, was introduced in December 1988 at a gala event hosted by Jay Leno. It was subsequently shown at the 1989 Greater Los Angeles Auto Show—where it shared the spotlight with the ephemeral Laforza and Bitter Type 3—and 1989 Geneva Motor Show, where it joined the iconic R129-chassis Mercedes-Benz SL and Corvette ZR-1.
