1963 Abarth-Simca 1300 GT Coupe by Sibona & Basano
Offered by RM Sotheby’s | Le Castellet, France | November 19, 2021
Abarth used cars from many different manufacturers as base cars for their wild creations. In this case, the base car is a Simca 1000, which was a small, rear-engined sedan produced by the French marque between 1961 and 1978.
Confusingly, there were Simca-Abarth variants of the 1000, which were really just hot sedans. What we have here is an Abarth-Simca. It’s a GT car that Simca wanted Abarth to build that they could take racing.
It’s got a Simca 1000 floor pan, an Abarth-tuned 1.3-liter twin-cam inline-four, and a Simca 1000 four-speed manual gearbox. The cars were eventually homologated for FIA competition, and they were successful in European road racing events.
This car was sold new in Italy, where it was campaigned successfully. From there, it has kind of a complicated ownership history, and frankly it’s too late in the day for me to make much sense of it. You can read more about it here and see more from this sale here. The pre-sale estimate is $405,000-$500,000.
Update: Sold $311,399.