The legendary Bizzarrini brand has finally built a car from a sketch that spent six decades gathering dust in a drawer. That’s the headline everyone will run with. The more interesting story is what the company had to do underneath the pretty bodywork to make a 1962 idea legal, drivable, and repairable in 2026.
The car is the 5300 Aperta Lusso, an open-top interpretation of the 5300 GT that Giorgetto Giugiaro drew while working at Bertone and that Giotto Bizzarrini shelved because he was too busy building race cars to worry about a roadster. Bizzarrini dug out those drawings and turned them into a run of ten hand-built cars, each commissioned to order, with the first already finished and named La Dolce Vita. More build slots open after the initial ten, with those cars arriving in 2027. Nobody at Bizzarrini will quote a price in public, which is corporate shorthand for “if you have to ask.”
Related Articles
- Dream Giveaway Offers Chance to Win a Frame-Off Restored 1970 Oldsmobile 442 W30
- A Few Nice Shelbys Headed to GAA Classic Car Auction
Rather than a folding soft top, the Aperta Lusso uses two removable carbon-fiber roof panels and a structural arch. That was Giugiaro’s original concept, chosen because a rigid panel and an arch weigh less and look cleaner than a canvas hood and its folding mechanism. Nice idea in 1962. A packaging headache in practice, which is where the engineering gets worth your attention.
The disguised engine is the clever bit
Under the long hood sits a 5.3-liter V8 that Bizzarrini describes only as the same small-block Giotto used in the ’60s. That’s a meaningful tell. The original Bizzarrini didn’t run a temperamental Italian V12; he ran an American Chevrolet small-block because it was cheap, strong, and could be fixed with a socket set anywhere on Earth. The new car keeps that philosophy, and it’s the whole reason this thing can exist as a road car.
Here’s the part enthusiasts should appreciate: the engine breathes through port fuel injection, not the Weber 40DCOE carburetors of the earlier GT Corsa Revival, but the intake has been styled to look like carbs are still bolted on. This is not cosmetic vanity. Anyone who has owned a Weber-fed classic knows the ritual: synchronizing throttle bodies, rejetting for altitude and temperature, coaxing it to idle when cold, and smelling like raw fuel afterward. Port injection deletes all of that. It means cold starts that work, a stable idle, and, critically, an engine that can meet modern emissions rules. The car also gets catalytic converters as standard and a hand-made exhaust in Inconel, a high-nickel superalloy used in motorsport and jet turbines because it shrugs off the brutal temperatures near an exhaust valve without cracking or scaling. It’s expensive and it’s not there for the badge value; it’s there because thin-wall Inconel headers survive heat that would eventually cook ordinary stainless.
The engine sits entirely behind the front axle line, the front-mid layout that gave the original its balance and its famous party trick of routing the distributor up through a cover in the dash. Power goes through a Tremec TKX five-speed manual and a limited-slip diff, with an optional six-speed for owners who’d rather cruise at lower revs. Top speed is quoted past 175 mph, which is plenty for a car explicitly built, in Bizzarrini’s words, for rivieras rather than race tracks.
One-piece carbon means you don’t want to crash it
The body is a single-piece carbon-fiber composite shell over a semi-monocoque bonded chassis. That’s different from the carbon-tub-plus-bolted-subframe approach most modern exotics use, and it’s a double-edged sword. It’s beautiful and stiff, but a large bonded composite structure is a nightmare to repair after a heavy hit. You can’t unbolt a damaged section and swap in a new one; serious damage means specialist composite work or, realistically, a very awkward conversation with the factory. Anyone insuring one of these should be thinking agreed-value collector policy with the builder named as the approved repairer, not a standard performance-car policy.
Chopping the roof off any car wrecks its torsional rigidity, so Bizzarrini added an aerospace-grade steel reinforcement to the transmission tunnel plus a cross-body bar, tuned with finite-element analysis until, they claim, the open car is stiffer than the original coupe. The frameless drop-glass windows and removable panels also demanded an entirely new sealing system, because targa-style panels sealing against frameless glass is one of the hardest problems in automotive body engineering to get watertight and quiet. Practical note for future owners: bespoke seals are wear items, and bespoke seals for a ten-car production run could become a genuine parts-supply problem a decade out.
Related Articles
- Sold for $12,855: What a Pink Z3 Tells Us About the Price of Fame
- Clark Gable Drew His Own Duesenberg. Now the Market Gets to Price It.
The rest is old-school on purpose. Double wishbones all around with Koni adjustable dampers, magnesium Campagnolo center-lock wheels, and brakes that use four-piston Alcon calipers up front and two-piston Brembos on inboard rear discs, with no servo assistance. Inboard rear brakes reduce unsprung weight and echo ’60s racing practice, at the cost of being harder to service and dumping more heat toward the driveline. Unassisted brakes give you a firm, honest pedal but demand more leg than boosted modern setups. The steering is rack-and-pinion with electrohydraulic assist that fades out above 40 mph, light for parking and properly weighted once you’re moving.
How a car like this actually reaches the road
This is the context nobody in the glossy coverage will give you. A ten-off, hand-built car resembling a design from the 1960s is exactly the kind of vehicle the United States created a legal pathway for. NHTSA’s replica vehicle rule, finalized in 2022 under the 2015 Low Volume Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Act, lets a qualifying small manufacturer sell up to 325 cars a year that resemble models at least 25 years old, exempt from many federal safety standards but not from emissions. The catch is that the engine has to be an EPA- and CARB-certified package. Look again at the Aperta Lusso’s spec sheet: port injection and standard catalytic converters on a certified-family small-block. Those aren’t just driveability choices; they’re the price of admission to markets with real emissions enforcement.
Where this sits in the brand’s arc matters too. Bizzarrini, founded in 1964 and shuttered in 1969, was revived in 2020 and cut its modern teeth on a 24-car 5300 GT Corsa continuation series built around the 1965 Le Mans class-winner, chassis 0222. The Aperta Lusso is the pivot from that track-focused continuation toward luxury road cars, and a warm-up act before the promised Giotto Hyper GT. It also slots neatly into the continuation-and-tribute boom that Aston Martin, Jaguar, and others have been mining, betting that the ultra-wealthy will pay supercar money for old shapes built with new materials.
The practical takeaway for the handful of buyers who can play in this sandbox: you’re getting a car engineered to look sixty years old and behave like it left the factory yesterday, which is genuinely the hard version of this exercise. Just go in clear-eyed about the ownership reality. The single-piece carbon body, the bespoke seals, and the inboard rear brakes all mean this is a car to enjoy and store carefully, not one you fix in your own garage on a Saturday. Giotto picked a Chevy small-block precisely so he could. Sixty years later, the mechanicals kept that spirit; the bodywork did not.
Images Via: Bizzarrini
