As Longtime Readers will know, one of my favorite — perhaps my absolute favorite — sports car of all time is the (Ferrari) Dino 246 GT from the 1969-1975 period. I’ve written before about the rights and wrongs of the thing, but all that aside, I am in love with the Dino simply because it is so drop-dead beautiful to look at.
Which is probably why Fiend Reader Darrell M. (who should know better) sent me a video of a Jay Leno’s Garage episode which featured a modified Dino — modified not with a Porsche Cayman engine (as I’d thought about), but a Ferrari F40 V8.
Oh be still, my beating heart. Go away and watch the video now, and when you come back, there’ll be some Dino eye-candy from my personal collection of pics filched from all over Teh Intarwebz. (My only quibble with David Lee’s Dino is the color. Black is beautiful, but not as beautiful as some of the others…)
I have to stop now…
Get a poor man’s Dino, the Opel GT (evil grin). I do agree it was one of the best looking machines on the road in the day and copied by many.
Closest I have been able to afford was a 64 E type FHC, sold it because I did not fit in the space available, hitting my head on the roof at every bump in the road was not healthy given our roads, but it most definitely was a great handling beast having the 3.8 engine and 3 SU feeding 2 cylinders apiece.
“Fiend Darrell”! LOL I’d forgotten all about that Jay Leno video.
There was a Dino kit car available back in the ’70s known as the Kelmark GT. It started out as the usual VW engined kit car, but then Kelmark designed a tubular steel chassis for it, also making a hogshead adapter to mate a Chevy small block V8 to a reversed Corvair transaxle, resulting in a true mid engine car. Since the body originally fit a VW floor pan, well, an enterprising guy could put the chassis with the V8 under a Beetle body to produce one heck of a sleeper hot rod. The engine sat in the back seat area of the Bug, under a van motor dog house.
There are still some Kelmark GTs floating around, for sale on the web, etc. They look like Dinos, but lack the refinements of the genuine Ferraris.
Finally, Wayne Carini’s Chasing Classic Cars show on Motor Trend TV (formerly the Velocity Channel) featured the daddy to the Dino. I forget the car’s designation, but imagine a very Dino-looking XL car with bigger engine, heck, bigger everything. It sold for a ton of money.
Wow, what a beautiful car. Not being a purist, what Lee has done is remarkable. A million? If I had it, why the hell not?
The Dino’s daddy car is a 1966 365 P Berlinetta Speciale by Pininfarina. Here’s a story on the car, sorry for the NY Times source. There are 11 pics of the car in a slide show at the top of the article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/automobiles/collectibles/a-ferrari-for-you-and-two-friends.html
It’s a three seater, with the driver in the center. Elegant looking car! It failed to meet the auction reserve price of $23.5 million back in 2014.
Very well done “resto-mod”. As someone who has worked on both the street, and “SP” Dino’s, it would be a car that I would enjoy.
But (there is always a but, isn’t there), I question saying it has an F40 motor:
1) The F40 is a Twin Turbo V-8;
2) The F40 has the engine/drivetrain mounted “north-south” with the transaxel behind the engine;
3) This car looks to have a bored/(?)stroked(?), V-8 from a 308/328 series (or, it could just be a bored out F40 sans the turbo intake system as the block was similar in dimensions to the 308 it was based upon) using a racing-type injection system, and the transverse trans-axel of those cars to deal with the higher output, and to truly make it a “bolt-in conversion”.
I’ll take 3.) for $200, Alex.
Or 3b.) (F40 minus the turbo).
A red targa Dino (never saw the top on) parked at the local tennis club when I was a boy. Loved it more than the Magnum PI 308 that was on TV at the time. It even attracted me more than the Jaguar E-Type convertible also usually parked there. Jaguar sounded better.
I’ll be in my bunk.