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This car deserves the title of 'world's ugliest sports car'
This Ascari FGT is the prototype from which the also horrendous Ascari Ecosse was born. Now, the 'ugly duckling' is looking for a new owner through RM Sotheby's.
Creating your own car brand and lasting over time has its enormous difficulties, which are insurmountable unless you have the talent of Elon Musk. Throughout the history of motorsports, there have been quite a few passionate billionaires who have wanted to make their mark on the automobile industry. Of course, almost all of them making sports cars (the cars they loved), and always with the secret or not-so-secret intention of unseating firms like Ferrari, Porsche or Lamborghini... Almost nothing.
Names like Venturi, Mosler, Lister, Cizeta and Vector come to mind, but on this list there is also a deserved place for Ascari. And since these fledgling brands can't afford to spend big budgets on established design teams, the aesthetic result is often highly questionable, although there are a few cases that deserve the label "horrible."
In this last classification enters the Ascari FGT that Sotheby's is going to put up for auction this November 5 in London. It is a sports car that seems to have been designed by a small child whose painting teacher would hardly give the child a passing grade.
The man who perpetrated that design was Lee Noble and the car was presented to the world in 1992. But although it may seem scary to us, a Dutchman named Klaas Zwart (who created the Ascari circuit in Andalusia) saw it and bought the prototype designs, which was then known as Ascari FGT, and even the Ascari firm itself.
The prototype was used to be tested by the motoring press at the time and served as the basis for the construction of what would be called Ascari Ecosse, the production model, now without retractable headlights but equally difficult to contemplate for design lovers. One of those definitive units would serve to participate in the 1996 British GT Championship with a Ford V8 engine... and its sporting history ended.
The model you see is the authentic Ascari FGT, the prototype that served as the basis for the Ecosse. He remained locked up on a farm for 13 years until someone took pity on him and bought him. And not only that, but its new owner got in touch with Lee Noble to bring the gearbox and the Chevrolet V8 engine itself back to life, which was used to improve the injection system by raising the power, incidentally, up to 420 hp.
At Sotheby's they expect some eccentric collector to pay between 71,000 and 94,600 euros... You never know.
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