Timing is Everything: Reventlow Scarab Saga

In our continuing series on ways to lose money in the car business, we present the Scarab Saga. If the Briggs Cunningham story could be titled "A Moment Too Soon" (see our post for 4/15/17), then the story of Lance Reventlow and his Scarab was about arriving just a bit late for international success. While Cunningham paved the way for American efforts at Le Mans with his Chrysler-engined road racers, he was too early for lightweight V8s, disc brakes, and big investments in racing by manufacturers like Chrysler, Ford and GM.  Reventlow arrived a couple of years after Cunningham gave up racing his eponymous cars to sell and race Jaguars, and was just in time to identify and exploit the potential of the then-new Chevrolet 283 as the basis for a sports racer.  Like Cunningham, Reventlow wanted to field an all-American product in international endurance races, and he was willing to spend a fortune on the effort.  But unlike Cunningham, the young Californian never planned to sell customer cars to help defray racing expenses, or to qualify the Scarab as a production car. He recruited a team of talented engineers and car builders from Los Angeles hot rod and sports car culture.

The team included Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes, designers and builders of the tubular chassis, Jim Travers and Frank Coons (later of Traco Racing Engines fame) who built and tuned the bored-out, Hilborn-injected Chevy, and Emil Diedt, who hammered out the alloy body panels over the wooden buck shown above. The harmonious contours of that body were designed by Chuck Pelly, an 18 year-old student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.  Reventlow wanted to race the car in Europe, but was too late owing to a change mandating a maximum engine size of 3 liters.  The Scarab was legal in the SCCA, though, and American road racing fans were stunned when Chuck Daigh drove it to victory over the Ferraris of Dan Gurney and Phil Hill at the Riverside Grand Prix for Sports Cars in 1958. Chassis design reflected mid-Fifties race car engineering fashion, with its lightweight space frame and coil-sprung De Dion tube rear suspension with inboard brakes.  As with the Mercedes 300 SLR and Lancia D Series racers (except the D25), those brakes were finned aluminum drums. Like Cunningham before him, Reventlow failed to source any American-built disc brakes for his racer.  Despite the use of drums, the three front-engined Scarab two-seaters built were a runaway success on their home turf. But this success may have encouraged Reventlow to build a front-engined F1 car, and this proved to be Scarab's undoing.  He failed to read the success of the mid-engined Cooper* as a portent of things to come, and prepared an expensive, largely obsolescent front-engine car for battle in 1960. Worse yet, he commissioned a dedicated engine for this car from engineer Leo Goossen.  The 2.5 liter, twin cam four, designed loosely along the lines of the Meyer Drake Indy engines, featured desmodromic (mechanically opened and closed) valves which underperformed and proved fragile.  Even if the engine had proved competitive, it would have been money down the river, as Formula 1 was changed to 1.5 liter engines for 1961.  So Reventlow's timing was wrong.  Perhaps it would have been wiser to relax the Made in USA requirement a bit, buy some disc brakes from the British, and make some more two-seaters for the American privateers eager to race them... 

The Scarab team finally got around to building a single mid-engined, disc-braked two seater with an aluminum Buick V8 in 1962, and Reventlow drove the car pictured below to a solid 2nd place behind a Birdcage Maserati at Santa Barbara that year.  Reventlow sold the car after closing the Scarab shop, and A.J. Foyt won several races with it after it was re-engined with a more powerful Olds V8.  Still, the few vintage race fans (and fans of a certain vintage) who remember Scarabs at all, probably think of the graceful, perfectly proportioned front-engined brutes that Chuck Pelly sketched as his first design job, six decades ago.

*Footnote:  Mid-engined Coopers won the Formula 2 Championship in 1958, and Formula 1 Championships in 1959 and 1960.  The story of Stirling Moss and the Cooper-Borgward Formula 2 figures in our post for 3/3/17, "Forgotten Classic: When Borgward Went Racing."

Photo Credits:

Top 5 photos:  the author (car #5 at Laguna Seca Historic Races, wooden body buck & righthand drive car #50 from the Revs Institute Collier collection). 

Bottom photo of Scarab mid-engine:  slotblog.net