Ferrari 250 GT Zagato – Rhapsody in Blue

One of the rarest and most beautiful Ferraris, this Zagato-bodied 250GT garners awards wherever it is shown. But its owner is not afraid to use it, as Mark Dixon finds out

That’s the claim made by owner David Sydorick, and it’s a bold one. But who would dispute it? This Zagato-bodied Ferrari is one of the most gorgeous coupés to emerge from the 1950s, a fact that’s borne out by the steady string of concours awards it’s accumulated over the last 30 years.

Fortunately, that doesn’t mean it never gets driven. On the contrary, Sydorick reckons that regular use has allowed him to evolve and improve the car to the point that it’s literally in as-new condition.

‘The guy who services it for me says that, of all the cars that come into his workshop, it’s the only one that doesn’t drip oil or water!’ he laughs. ‘I’ve driven it on the Mille Miglia, the Colorado Grande, the Copperstate, Brandon Wang’s 250 Tour – where we started from Le Mans and then drove through heavy rain for days and days to Maranello – plus many, many more. We even put it on a barge on the Grand Canal in Venice, to the distress of the gondoliers!’

But this 250 has always led a pretty eventful life. Sold new in early 1956 to an Italian gentleman racer, Vladimiro Galluzzi, who was president of the Milan-based Scuderia Sant’Ambroeus racing team and a good client of Ferrari, it was campaigned by him and a couple of subsequent Italian owners throughout the latter half of the 1950s until it was exported to the USA in the 1960s. Then, as Sydorick succinctly describes, ‘it was passed around various collectors in California for many years’ until he acquired it in the late 1990s. He’s owned it ever since.

To badly misquote George Orwell, ‘all Ferrari 250s are special, but some are more special than others’. And none more so than a 250 bodied by Zagato, which is such a rare bird that it’s not even mentioned in Hans Tanner’s seminal book Ferrari. Nearly all 250GTs were bodied by Scaglietti for Pinin Farina, some by Boano and Ellena, and just five by Zagato – of which Sydorick’s, chassis 0515GT, was the first to be undertaken. Because its buyer, Galluzzi, wanted to use it in competition, Zagato’s ultra-light body construction was ideal for the task.

Regardless of carrozzeria, the 250GT was an instant success as a competition car. An evolution of the 250 Europa, Ferrari’s first series-production offering for the European market, there was one significant difference: while both the Europa and the GT had 3.0-litre V12 engines, the Europa’s was a revised version of Lampredi’s 4.1-litre design, sleeved down to 2963cc, while the GT’s was by Gioacchino Colombo, coming in at 2953cc. The latter of these V12 designs would prove a lot more long-lived. Introduced in miniature 1496cc form for the Ferrari 125S of 1946, it survived – with continual evolution – right through until the angular Ferrari 412 coupé ceased production in 1989.

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But why was a 3.0-litre car called a 250? It’s because, rather cleverly, Enzo Ferrari named his cars not after their engine capacity but by the capacity of a single cylinder in cubic centimetres – which is why, say, the 750 Monza engine has similar total capacity to a 250GT’s, because the Monza has four cylinders rather than 12. The 250 designation was used as early as 1952 by Ferrari for a one-off coupé 250S featuring Colombo’s new V12, which won that year’s Mille Miglia and powered the 250GT to numerous victories through the later 1950s and early ’60s. Most famous of these was the Tour de France, won by de Portago and Nelson in 1956, which earned the GT its ‘Tour de France’ nickname, reinforced by Olivier Gendebien winning the same event in 1957, ’58 and ’59.

The impression of tautness is enhanced by Borranis shod with meaty Englebert tyres

The impression of tautness is enhanced by Borranis shod with meaty Englebert tyres

Sydorick’s car never achieved quite such giddy heights but it put in respectable showings in road-races and hillclimbs with various Italian drivers – plus a couple of concours in 1956. Then, in October 1960, it passed to the Los Angeles enthusiast Edwin K Niles, who over the next 12 years sold it and bought it back no fewer than five times from a total of eight different owners! During 1983-84 it was restored by Steve Tillack, it won the Hans Tanner trophy at Pebble Beach in 1985, and in 1991 it was acquired by Mexico-based collector Lorenzo Zambrano. And then, towards the end of the 1990s, David Sydorick made his move.

‘I’d loved the car since day one and caught Lorenzo in a moment of weakness, because he certainly didn’t need to sell it,’ Sydorick recalls. ‘For years afterwards, he’d come to me and beg me to sell it back to him!

‘I’d decided some time beforehand that I didn’t just want to collect the usual suspects: the 289 Cobra, the 356 Porsche, 300SL Merc and so on. I loved Zagato’s style and so I decided to collect by coachwork rather than marque. At one time I had a pre-war Alfa 8C 2300 Zagato, which won Best of Show at Villa d’Este in 2015, but I then broke my own rule and sold it to upgrade to a Touring-bodied 8C 2900B.

‘Even though it didn’t really need it, in the early 2000s I had the 250GT restored again by the master of Ferrari restorations, the late Wayne Obry of Motion Products in Wisconsin. Similarly, I had the engine gone through by Rick Bunkfeldt, also of Wisconsin, who’s known for his expertise with 250 and Alfa 8C engines. Again, it probably didn’t really need it but now it’s solid and it’s strong and it doesn’t leak.

‘I love the typical Zagato features like the flush doorhandles, the little air vents above the rear ’screen, and the engine turning that’s inset into the dash. The main colour is Lancia blue and the reason for the white roof is supposedly because the girlfriend of the guy who ordered it wanted a convertible, but he didn’t, so he had the roof painted white so that it would seem to “disappear”.’

It’s certainly a colour combination that suits the car perfectly – and ‘perfect’ is a word that you’ll find yourself frequently muttering as you do a walk-around. Zagato’s work is just astonishing: the body seems to be shrink-wrapped around its underpinnings. Look how little metal there is between the top of the rear wheelarch and the upper surface of the rear wing, for example. The car is at once massively purposeful and yet also entrancingly delicate in appearance – and, in some respects, in physical construction, too. The slender bumpers, for example, are attached straight to the body and there are no chassis-mounts to soak up parking nudges.

This impression of tautness is enhanced by big Borrani wire wheels shod with meaty Englebert tyres. ‘Those Engleberts are hard as a rock and I normally only use them for display; I put on a set of Michelins for serious road driving,’ explains Sydorick. Which sounds like our cue to head out into the manicured surroundings of Beverly Hills.

Surprisingly, those wafer-thin doors close with a solid clunk, which is a harbinger of just how completely sorted this Ferrari really is. Inside, the car wraps around its occupants just as tightly as it does the mechanical elements in front and behind. That double-bubble roof really proves its worth for a taller person, although what appears to be a thin plasticised headlining also helps maximise interior space. Nothing is labelled on the dashboard, and the turquoise-blue coaming that surrounds the instrument binnacle and tops the bright white-painted metal dash, with its glittering engine-turned inlay, gives an appropriately toy-like feel to this tiny jewel of a machine.

Nothing toy-like about that 3.0-litre V12, however, which fires instantly and busily. A couple of minutes while the oil and coolant warm through, and then we ease gently away, the lightness of the steering immediately apparent through that big-rimmed wheel. The delicate aesthetics of Zagato’s coachwork are mirrored by the ease and precision of the controls, and by the cream gearknob etched with black Roman numerals shifting the four-speed gearbox slickly, aided by a gentle-acting clutch and the motor’s ample torque.

All those miles that Sydorick has accumulated on the car, all the visits to specialists for tweaking and refining, have evidently paid off. This 68-year-old car literally feels like new. There are no rattles, no squeaks. The white-piped blue seats, door-cards and carpets are absolutely immaculate. While it’s always lovely to discover a car with patination, there’s also something uniquely fascinating about a piece of artwork – Sydorick is not wrong when he describes it as such – that’s presented looking so fresh and vivid.

Where cars score over paintings or sculpture, of course, is that you can also drive them. Interestingly, the 250 sounds quite different depending on whether you’re inside or outside. The occupants are treated to a mechanical symphony of intake and exhaust noise overlaid with a whisper of valvetrain and bolstered by the thresh of transmission, a harmony with a central theme that strengthens as the engine revs rise yet never becomes raucous, instead developing into a crisp fanfare. From outside, the composition is more complex. The individual voices separate out: there’s a trace of exhaust burble, and also a little crackle from what Octane’s founding editor Robert Coucher would call the ‘snaps’, those four pea-shooter pipes that spear from under the car’s tail. The 250 sounds more extrovert to the onlooker than it does to those inside.

Of course, for the sake of the neighbours we’re using barely half of the engine’s 7000rpm limit. And that second half of the rev range is where all the action really happens. Back in 2006 I drove a 1958 250GT for Octane 031 on some lightly trafficked Swiss roads, and came away suitably enthused. ‘As the crankshaft speed rises above 3500rpm, the V12’s growl develops into a percussive, drilling wall of sound… the high-pitched whine of transmission and valve noise steadily dominates the mechanical dialogue as the revs build, until both parts combine in a thoroughbred scream that has you grinning like a madman.’ Phew.

As Sydorick says, this Zagato-bodied Ferrari is very much a connoisseur’s car. In 2022 he sent it on a transatlantic tour that encompassed events in the USA, Italy and the UK. The last of them was Salon Privé at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, where the 250 won Best in Show – and where it caught the eye of a certain well-informed Ferrari fan who was visiting from America.

Sydorick explains: ‘While it was at Salon Privé, the Hollywood movie director Michael Mann saw it and insisted we should take it to Italy so it could be in his new Ferrari film. So we packed it up and sent it to Brescia.’

Needless to say, it wasn’t used for the racing scenes in the movie. But, as set-dressing goes, it made one hell of a prop.

1956 Ferrari 250GT Zagato specifications