Sixteen cylinders.
That is not engineering. It is madness.
Usually twelve is the ceiling. Elegance. But this Italian madman decided to go further.
Wildly further.
Hollywood Dreams in Iron
Claudio Zampolli didn’t just fix Lamborghinis. He obsessed over them.
Back in the day, he worked under Bob Wallace at Sant’Agata, sorting out the P400s and dreaming of his own creation. Then he moved to Los Angeles.
Things changed there.
Zampolli imported serious machines. Heavy ones. The Miura that revved in Van Halen’s “Panama”? That was Eddie Van Halen’s. Zampolli knew it. Zampolli touched it. He even helped Sammy Hagar get a 512 BB. When the band needed a singer, Eddie called Sammy straight from Zampolli’s garage.
Connection. Clout.
But he needed capital.
He pitched it to Sylvester Stallone once. An engine cover survives with the name Cizeta-Stallone on it. Imagine Rambo III with pop-up lights and eight camshafts. It would have fit.
Stallone passed.
Giorgio Moroder did not.
The man behind “I Feel Love” had the money. He also had three Oscars. Zampolli had the idea. Marcello Gandini—the guy who gave us the Countach and the Miura—had the pen.
The result was ugly. Beautiful. Terrifying.
It was the only car of its type. A prototype meant for nine production runs that never happened. They called it the Cizeta-Morder V16T. A hyphenated ego trip.
“Sixteen cylinders mean something else entirely. They mean no one was thinking about resale value.”
The Beast Itself
It arrives now.
RM Sotheby’s is putting it up for auction in Monterey. California sun on chrome insanity.
Look at it.
Four pop-up headlights.
It sits three inches wider than a Ferrari Testarossa. That is wide. That is aggressive.
Inside the belly is a 6.0-liter V-16. Mounted transversely like the Miura’s V-12 (hence the ‘T’ at the end of the name).
Eight camshafts. Four extra pistons compared to anything Maranello ever tried.
The claim is 540 horsepower at eight thousand rpm.
Forget the peak power. The torque is what kills you. It spins from bottom to top without breaking stride. It feels like two Ferraris stacked in a chassis that barely holds together.
Zampolli and Moroder parted ways eventually. Business things. But the car existed. It sat.
Bruce Canepa finally took it near Santa Cruz. He was used to fixing Porches like the 959. Complex mechanical nightmares. His team fixed the unfinished details on Zampolli’s dream.
They made it road ready.
Did it drive well? Probably loud.
Not a Mass Producer
Zampolli never became a volume manufacturer.
He couldn’t scale it. Who buys a sixteen-cylinder street legal car?
Maybe nobody.
Maybe someone like you.
The prototype has been in storage for too long. Now it is coming out. It has the story. It has Gandini’s wild lines. It has the smell of burnt oil and disco music.
David Lee Roth probably liked it.
He might have sung about it.
Do you think he would have?
Or is that too much to ask from a car that barely drove past the factory gates in Italy before heading to LA?
The hammer will drop in Monterey soon.
Who knows what happens after.
