Celebrate The V16’s Return With This Ultra-Rare Cizeta V16T

The V16 engine is back. Okay, well it was never really a widespread thing, but the new Bugatti Tourbillon is the first car in decades to come with 16 cylinders arranged in parallel banks of eight. Appropriate, then, that an incredibly rare example of the last car to use such a layout – the Cizeta V16T – has come up for sale.

The V16T has one of the most convoluted backstories of any car in recent memory. Its Marcello Gandini styling was originally destined for what would become the Lamborghini Diablo, before Lambo’s then-new owners Chrysler rejected it.

Gandini took his design to former Lamborghini engineer Claudio Zampolli, who’d left Sant’Agata to establish his own supercar repair company in Los Angeles in the 1980s, with a grander aim of building a car of his own (Cizeta is the Italian pronunciation of Zampolli’s initials).

The other big figure in this car’s story is Giorgio Moroder. He’s best known as a prolific and hugely successful disco and dance music producer, helping set the tone for modern dance music with the synth-driven 1977 masterpiece that was Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. But we digress – Moroder, a customer of Zampolli’s shop, was brought on as an investor for the V16T project, and the first prototype was badged as a Cizeta-Moroder, before the partnership almost immediately fell apart.

That wasn’t even the strangest thing about this car though, nor were its four pop-up headlights – that honour goes to its 6.0-litre V16 engine, which was effectively two Lamborghini Urraco V8s fused together at the ends and mounted transversely across the car’s engine bay. Obviously. Mated to a five-speed manual, it made 540bhp and would take the V16T to a theoretical 199mph top end.

Nobody really knows how many V16Ts were made, but the consensus is that it barely scraped into double figures. One group with a propensity for cars that rare is the Royal Family of Brunei, who ordered three Cizetas, including this blue-on-blue 1993 example.

Acquired through a Singaporean Ferrari dealer, for reasons unknown the car never made it to Brunei, remaining in Singapore right up until 2020. Having been through another couple of owners in the US, it’s now coming up for sale in RM Sotheby’s’ Monterey auction in August.

Part of the wonderfully named ‘Turbollection’ collection that also features (count ‘em) four Vectors, it’s covered barely 600 miles in its life and is expected to go for between £550k and £700k. Whoever snaps it up is getting an ultra-rare snapshot of the madness that pervaded the supercar world in the late ’80s and early ’90s. We wish them the very best of luck with finding parts, though.