Fiat 500 Scattante: a restomod 150 kg heavier than the original
Max Kindersley's family Fiat 500 left the barn as a 650 kg Scattante
La Cinquecento is a new British studio with one car, and the car is a family heirloom. Founder Max Kindersley's 1973 Fiat 500 spent about 25 years in a barn in West Berkshire before he rebuilt it into the 500 Scattante, shown for the first time at the Tutto Bene Hillclimb on Mottarone on 9 September. It keeps the rear-mounted twin, gains a BorromeodeSilva body and sets a target weight of around 650 kg, roughly 150 kg more than Dante Giacosa's original.
La Cinquecento builds the Scattante in the barn that hid the donor for 25 years
Kindersley is a fashion photographer, and the company began as a personal project to get the family car back on the road. The prototype was assembled in that same barn, and La Cinquecento Ltd intends to build customer cars there as well, individually numbered and developed with each owner. The studio talks about a handful of cars a year and takes registrations of interest through its website, 500.design. Auto Express puts the price of a finished car at around £150,000, a figure the company has not published itself.
An 802 cc Fiat 126 twin replaces the 594 cc engine the 1973 car left Turin with
A 1973 Fiat 500 is a 500 R, the last version, which already used the 594 cc air-cooled twin from the Fiat 126 that replaced it. The Scattante stays in that family: its engine is a Fiat 126-derived block taken out to about 802 cc, with twin-spark ignition, a manual gearbox and the original rear-engined transaxle layout. No factory 126 ever made more than 26 hp, the output of the water-cooled 704 cc 126 BIS built in Poland from 1987, and La Cinquecento has not published a power figure at all. The stated aim is response and torque rather than peak power, with suspension, brakes, steering, cooling and electrics reworked or replaced outright. Of the 4.67 million 126s built between 1972 and 2000, about 3.3 million came from Tychy and Bielsko-Biała, so the block under the Scattante's engine lid is more Polish than Italian by ancestry.
A 650 kg target puts the Scattante above the 1957 car and above a Fiat 126
Fiat quoted 499 kg for the Nuova 500 of 1957, and even the Fiat 126 that succeeded it weighed between 580 and 619 kg. La Cinquecento's own data sheet gives a target of about 650 kg, so the Scattante is heavier than both cars it descends from. Restomods usually go the other way: Analogue Automotive's VHPK took a Lotus Elise to under 600 kg wet. The extra mass is where the engineering went: a proper cooling system, bigger brakes, new wiring and an interior with leather and suede-lined bucket seats and billet pedals. That is a fair trade for a car that has to climb a mountain without boiling, but the word the company chose for it, scattante, means quick on its feet.
BorromeodeSilva drew the body and runs the hillclimb it debuted on
The widened arches, side skirts, rally-style auxiliary lamps and new wheels came from BorromeodeSilva, the Milan studio that styled the Automobili Amos Lancia Delta Futurista, 20 cars at €300,000 that sold out within days, and the Eccentrica Diablo. Tutto Bene Hillclimb is BorromeodeSilva's own event, run with Race Service on the private Borromea road up Mottarone above Lake Maggiore. This year's third edition, on 9 September, sent 85 invited cars up the mountain with no timing, a format the Italian federation ACI classes as a demonstration rather than a race. So the Scattante's first public outing was an untimed climb at its own designer's party.
Inside, the Scattante keeps a speedometer, a rev counter and toggle switches
The cabin stays as spare as a Seventies 500, with a two-spoke wheel, a large rev counter beside the speedometer and a row of toggle switches across the dash. Kindersley's stated brief is to make the car faster, sharper and better engineered without losing the reason anyone wanted a 500. The restomod market has shown customers will pay for that promise: HWA delivered its first 444 hp 190E EVOs this summer. The difference is that HWA printed its numbers before it took deposits.
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Scattante means quick on its feet, and the only figure La Cinquecento has published so far argues with the name. Six hundred and fifty kilograms is 150 kg more than Fiat quoted for the original 500, and more than the Fiat 126 whose engine it borrows, carried by a twin that has never made more than 26 hp in any factory form. Twin-spark ignition and 802 cc will lift that, but until the studio prints a horsepower figure, what a customer is buying is a BorromeodeSilva body, a barn story and a numbered plaque. That is a legitimate product. It is not yet the better-engineered 500 the founder describes.
The first numbered customer car settles it. If it is on the Mottarone start line at Tutto Bene next September with a weighbridge ticket under 650 kg and a power output on the spec sheet, La Cinquecento is an engineering company that happens to love Fiats. If it arrives with the same 'around 650 kg' and the same 'a handful a year', it is a coachbuilder, and Kindersley's promise of faster and sharper will be the line that reads wrongly.
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