Grand Prix Rejects

Good noon everyone

It wouldn't be a proper GPR relaunch without some new content, and boy have we got something for you lovely people today. It's effectively a driver and team profile combined. Lance Stroll isn't the only North American driver in F1's history called Lance. Some 60 years previously, a minted young man from Colorado decided to build his own cars to embarrass those European fairies in their own back yard...with typically disastrous results. This is the story of Lance Reventlow and his Scarab project.

We received this lovely profile from a mysterious benefactor, for the sake of privacy let's call them 'Ataxi A'...No, that's too obvious...uhh. Let's say 'A. Taxia'. Anyway, for your weekend pleasure, read away!

Profile: Lance Reventlow

Short but sweet, nice to see this forgotten car maker get some attention, and an interesting character to boot. Well done!

Rather appropriately, there is also an article on the 8w site that goes into the development of the engine that the team used. http://8w.forix.com/scarab-grandprix-engine.html

If only I'd seen that before! When I was writing the original piece on the Scarab for Autosport, I spoke to Julian Bronson - who raced them in historic events - about his car. He'd fitted it with a standard Offenhauser engine rather than the desmodromic version, and says that given time, the car could have been pretty competitive.

Another side note - Scarab got Colin Chapman to design the rear suspension, and in lieu of payment Reventlow gave him a transporter which Lotus used for years!

But the bottom line: it was a really pretty car. It's a shame it was on the wrong side of the obsolescence line...

I guess this counts as that Scarab profile that was promised for so long on the old site?