Ferrari 375 MM Coupe Scaglietti

The Scaglietti coupé at a glance

Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman and two Ferraris

Roberto Rossellini, the director of "Rome, Open City", was also an amateur racing driver. According to the coachbuilding archive Carrozzieri Italiani, his wife Ingrid Bergman disliked his racing and is said to have stopped him from starting the 1953 Mille Miglia. In 1954 he bought two 375 MMs: an open car for himself and a closed Pinin Farina berlinetta, chassis 0456AM, as a gift for Bergman.

The spider, 0402AM, had first been meant for the American importer Luigi Chinetti. Ferrari sold it to Rossellini in August 1954. The archive lists the price of the new car as 4,000,000 Italian lire. After he failed to finish a race at Karlskoga in Sweden, Rossellini gave up competition at Bergman's request.

The grey paint of Bergman's berlinetta later entered Ferrari's colour list as "Grigio Ingrid". She reportedly wanted nothing to do with that car either, and called the later coupé a "monster" that could pass 300 km/h. That quote comes from the car's later restorers and should be read as a family anecdote.

From crashed spider to Scaglietti coupé

The accident that created this car is well recorded. Rossellini drove the spider into a palm tree, and the damaged car went to Sergio Scaglietti's workshop in Modena. Velocetoday, which interviewed the car's later owner, reports that Scaglietti's men found palm nuts inside the body.

Rossellini asked for something in the spirit of the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL coupé. The rebuild took almost a year and was finished in 1955. Writers have also compared the tumblehome of the cabin and the way the tail lamps meet the rear deck with Rudolf Uhlenhaut's personal 300 SLR coupé. English Wikipedia's chassis table names one more 375 MM, 0366AM, as rebodied by Scaglietti in 1955, but 0402AM is the car the name "375 MM Coupé Scaglietti" usually means.

Body design: fastback cabin and no bumpers

Scaglietti gave the coupé a high, rounded cabin with a large rear window that wraps around the back. The long bonnet ends in an oval grille, which also frames the auxiliary lamps and the indicators. The tail is smooth and almost free of trim.

There are no bumpers, a choice that reflects the racing chassis underneath. The bonnet carries an air scoop. Some concours watchers argue that details such as this scoop differ from the 1955 original, which shows how hard it is to rebuild a one-off from photographs.

Inside, the cabin is simple and functional. A three-spoke wheel faces the speedometer and rev counter, set side by side. The old version of this page described red leather trim. During the last restoration, however, the leather was replaced with vinyl, because period records showed vinyl, not leather.

Lampredi V12 and racing chassis

Under the coupé body the car is a 375 MM, a sports-racing model that Ferrari built from 1953 to 1955. Its road-going relatives are described in our page on the Ferrari America models. Its V12 was designed by Aurelio Lampredi and derived from Ferrari's 375 Formula One engine. Customer cars used the type 108 version with a bore and stroke of 84 × 68 mm and 4,522 cc.

By our calculation, 250 kW and a 900 kg dry weight give about 3.6 kg per kW for the open racing car. The coupé body adds weight, so the closed car is slower in practice, but it still has the mechanical make-up of a 1953 works racer. You can convert the PS and hp figures with the power converter or check other ratios with the power-to-weight calculator.

Two Rossellini coupés compared

The two closed cars ordered by Rossellini are often mixed up. Both sit on the same 375 MM chassis type, but their stories and bodies are different.

Compared with the ten or so Pinin Farina berlinettas of the series, this coupé has a softer, more touring shape. The series cars are covered on our page about the Ferrari 375 MM Berlinetta.

Later owners and the long restoration

Rossellini kept the coupé for about ten years. His son Gil later recalled that Rossellini's then wife, Sonali Senroy, enjoyed driving it. In July 1964 Rossellini sold it to Mario Savona of Sicily, for 265,000 lire according to the sales record, to raise money for a television film.

About a year later the car was stolen. It turned up in Naples with a crude green repaint. Savona had the engine rebuilt and drove it until 1970. Ferrari declined to buy the car back, and collector Pierre Bardinon also passed. Charles Robert of Paris bought it in 1970 and began a restoration that dragged on for more than two decades.

In 1990 the American dealer Mark Ketcham traced the car through a Ferrari reference book and Italian registration records. Around 1995 Jon Shirley, a former Microsoft president, bought it. The car was silver with black upholstery, and its engine was spread across two workshops. A three-year restoration followed at Pete Lovely Racing, later Dennison International Motorsports, with some parts made new and some lamps sourced from Lancia.

Concours record and value

The restored coupé won Best of Show at the Ferrari Club of America International Concours in Toronto. At Pebble Beach in 1998 it took the Scaglietti coachwork class and the Luigi Chinetti Memorial Award for the best Ferrari, with a perfect 100-point score. Best of Show eluded it that year.

Further wins followed at Villa d'Este in 2007, at Bagatelle and at Ferrari's 60th-anniversary celebration. Before returning to Pebble Beach, Shirley had the car restored again to correct non-original details. In August 2014 it won Best of Show, the first Ferrari ever to do so and the first post-war car to win since 1968.

The car has not been sold in public since, so it has no market price. For scale, another 375 MM, the spider 0364AM, sold for 9 million US dollars in 2013, about €6.8 million at the time.