Am I the only one who doesn't like this 308 GT4?

Not my cup of tea either, but it's really more of a custom (doorless) Roadster using a 308GT4 chassis than a 308GT4 IMO. The current bid of $512 is a nice touch .

 

Kit car-

 

I had the first comment there and I think it's incredibly cool. I might bid on it

 

Looks well executed. Not a fan of the styling. Too much of a blend of elements from different 60s sports racers. 312p body style would have suited the mid-engine cab forward design more IMO.


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On a a regular GT-4 the “4” means four seaters so what is the “4” means on this car?

 

Reminds me of someting that might on a circus ride for kids.


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Not a fan. Curious what shape the donor GT4 was in for them to do this to it and feel it’s safe for “track use”

 

The dinos true name is b
Dino308gt4 2+2. The 4 stands for 4 cam, the 2+2 is the seating capacity.

 

Kit car...

 

I like the look and the purpose. What concerns me is a car with Texas plates and a clean Montana title but the car is in New Mexico. Might all be legit but you will want to check all the hidden VIN's before you buy.

I'm also confused as to how much of the car is Ferrari. Clearly the engine is but after that I'm unable to ascertain if the frame is and what modifications have been made to it.

 

It’s neither fish nor fowl. It isn’t really set up for serious tracking and it isn’t really practical…or ever legal in some states….for street use.


I imagine the new owner’s first question will be, “Now what?”

 

I just spent a few years (on and off) in the bowels of a GT4, building a vintage race car. This car seems to be everything the seller is claiming: it is a 308GT4 with the body panels cut out and replaced with a fiberglass sports-racer type body. The parts of the chassis shown seem pure GT4 to me.

But my big question is this: if magazine writers back in the day said there was a noticeable difference in "flexibility" between hard-driving a 308 GTS vs. a GTB, how could this completely "topless" car get through the rather twisty drive-thru lane at my local In & Out without twisting, and resulting in chaos (and at least a couple white uniformed teenagers with those wireless iPads strung around their necks winding up in the hospital?

Several people have wrote into the BAT listing asking this basic question and the answers have all been .... disingenuous... to say the least. (In other words: nothing - nothing - was ever done to the chassis to compensate for this radical design change (i.e., the lack of a roof). It's just a stock GT4 chassis with a different body.

So taking this beyond some '70's magazine writers who frequently quawked about issues no one but them would notice, I take into consideration the fundamental way in which the car was designed and built. What Ferrari did on the GT4/GTB - and yes the targa GTS - was that most of the steel body panels were welded onto frame tubes (both vertical and horizontal positions). Which can make it an aggravating car to work on (ask me how I know), and must have been a real pain for collision shops back in the day.

The 308 was a car not designed to be a body-on-frame car, nor was it built as a 100% unibody structure either. But as it was built, seems to me that this hybrid of those two designs still resulted in a car where the the welded-to-the-frame-tubes body structure of the car resulted in a car that would not react kindly to just lopping the top off.

So in my thinking, for this BaT car, some sort of compensation would be needed to "strengthen" the car's torsional rigidity – 100% necessary for a vintage racing, perhaps a bit less so for even a hard-driven street car. However, in its current guise as a cool-looking, one-off little "Ferrari" to run around town in, I'm sure it would work great as is.

If I were the seller, I'd be pushing the "street legal runabout" angle a bit more, because when he tries to justify the car's existence as a high performance – and especially a Race Car – he's getting the understandable logical push-back from the commenters. (But not enough pushback IMO, unless the actual vintage racers are just dismissing the build outright and not even bothering to ask questions.)
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And as for the car's description as a vintage-spec race car, the car has too many problems/issues in that area to address here, but I will say the issues fall into two categories: stuff that will be required for racing that have not yet been done, and re-doing some of the existing so-called "race spec" stuff that has been improperly done. Not huge things, but it does underscore to me that the seller – and perhaps his builder – did not fully understand some of the vintage racing regulations.

And what about the jerk-off commenter who just had to – just had to – mention that,"even with the different body, I could still tell it was an ugly GT4." (I am paraphrasing). Because EVERY time a GT4 goes up for sale there, with Swiss-watch-certainty, there will be the same old wags complaining about the GT4's styling. Crazy.

But I digress!

My question to you folks is all about the loss of the structural integrity via the loss of the largely welded-on body. How much of a difference would it make?

 

Completely agree that, if they did nothing after cutting the roof off, it would be way too flexible to even be driven on the street -- probably too flexible to not break the fiberglass body. But it does look to me that some structure was added to connect the front of the door jam to the rear of the door jam:

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Now why the Seller wouldn't know this, or be able to communicate about it, is anyone's guess.

PS What they did on the GTS was add a huge rectangular beam section at the bottom, front, and rear of the door jam on both sides to try to connect the front half of the chassis to the rear half -- only partially successful . You can see it here:

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Steve,

You are 100% correct: those two "chassis" rails/tubes are not stock and are definitely - and purposely - there to solve the "convertible problem". They are working, to some degree, the same as a full roll cage does on an open car (or any race car, for that matter). I've got to look at those photos again - totally missed this one. Thank you!.

Could you so kind as to visually outline the places they modified on the GTS?

I think the car is pretty cool myself – the body has a little Frua in it, intentionally or not. And what would I give to have a removable engine cover on my car!

By the way, Mike Sheehan, the Ferrari-expert car dealer has a great article on his website about building a 308 for IMSA GTU or GTO class racing. Besides the funny/sarcastic bits on how often and unpredictable the rule changes were (and the subsequent/constant modifications he needed to do), it is also great piece of education for seeing a 308 (GTB, not GT4) turned into a race car and seeing under the totally custom, fiberglass skin. It was essentially a custom, tube-frame race car with the chassis largely strengthened by a full roll cage. I don't recall if they used the main 308 chassis rails or not. Anyway, interesting take on a 308 race car.

 

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Here's a shot of a bare 308GTB frame that does not have this added structure:

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Thanks, Steve.

I'm surprised they didn't do more, but Ferrari had to balance out light weight vs handling in their planning, and compromises had to be made.

So seeing both these bare frames, I realize I was wrong in my thought that 308's were an odd combination of unibody and body-on-frame designs. It was my first-hand experience that I noticed that some of frame tubes were welded to the bodywork, especially on the vertical planes, so I made some possibly wrong assumptions. So maybe this car for sale could indeed be strengthened up with some additional framing (on top of what was done), my thinking via a roll bar structure, because my thought would be vintage racing.

I wonder where the seller is with regard to price: realistic as to its value: because (1), it's a cut-up 308GT4 that could never be made whole again, and (2) when whole GT4's are a $100K car at their best, (3) does not have a top, (4) is possibly not very street legal in a lot of states (regardless of the "Montana" thing), and on top of all this (5) seems like a "home-garage-built" custom car (the Seller doing himself no favors by downplaying who built it). Point being that it "should" not be a very expensive car.

Or....does he think the seller think he has a "poor-man's 312B" which are worth $5MM, so therefore, this is worth a couple hundred grand?

BaT has a pretty strong hold on asking prices and they will not list a car when the seller is unrealistic about a car's value. But this one is an oddity, so I guess we'll see....

 

I’m a bit surprised BAT didn’t insist on a no reserve auction.

 

The "Montana Title Thing" is an easy one: if you have a car that would be hard be to title in a given state (because of that state's regulations), Montana has very few restrictions on what allows a car be legal – and requires no smog testing or Inspections. The state also allows cars to be titled there via a state-registered LLC, with residency not required (the LLC has a Montana address). Montana also has no state tax, so there's that too.

Why this car has the multiple plates is understandable, but the seller's fuzzy explanation for it all is odd (because the explanation should be easy).

 

Its just got kind of strange proportions. Kind of like its almost 275 looking but the cockpit is too far forward for that and the rear much too long and too tall visually due to the mid engine. Car body design is hard to impossible for me, I know what I like to see but have never been able to actually due it so I void custom body work like the plague and will jump through all kinds of mechanical hoops to leave the body alone.

 

That is probably as simple as not wanting to admit to what is likely a (mild) crime in his home state

In most states registering any custom car requires a lot of hoops or a..... "loose" understanding of the words on the forms knowing that the no one will ever actually check, unless you post all over the internet what you've done. Much like the speeding videos people like to post and end up arrested a few months later. I also wouldn't be surprised if it once had a salvage title and part of the multiple states was the path to a clean title, I'm not saying that is what happened as I have no clue but for sure there are good reasons to bounce titles around. As long as the chassis numbers match the paper work it wouldn't concern me any where near as much as the body I don't really care for.

 

Well, a salvage title would be a perfect answer for why the seller is not answering that question very well. I mean, that would be a good reason to chop up a Ferrari, after all. And I personally would still consider a salvage title on a car like this, the seller would just have to be seriously up-front about it. Some cars get salvage titles because they were in a flood. I could care a less if a street car that was being chopped up into some sort of custom had a ruined interior. Of course, if the chassis is bent to hell, maybe not. But chassis can be straightened. It all relates to a seller's honesty, so I would know the whole story, and what price they want for the car.

By the way, here are a couple classic rationales for implementing the "Montana Thing":

(Situation #1) Person can afford a $350K new/vintage/whatever car but somehow cannot afford the $35,862 sales and registration tax that some states have (this example, Cali's sales tax is 7.5%), so they use the "MT" to not pay the taxes.

(Situation #2) Person has a 1982 Lambo - or whatever - but the car is too "new" to be exempt from Cali's smog test requirements (1975 and above must be tested twice a year), but you know that the car cannot pass this test (because of whatever....), so you do the "MT".

Now, IMHO, situation #2 is a bit more of an ethical dodge because, while the car does indeed spew out a bit more feces than is allowed, the car is driven only about 700 miles per year and we, the public, get to see an endangered species car out in the wild. While the "Situation #1) is driven by nothing but greed.

And some of the "Situation #2" folks can cover themselves both legally (and ethically) if the live in a state that allow for this: The ability for legal residents of that state to file an official form at their local DMV that allows the car to housed on the moon as long as they pay the fees for the taxes that would have been paid in their resident state had the owner registered the car there. (But some states/counties/cities have laws that require that all cars belonging to a state/county/city resident be registered in that state, and carry that state's license plate, period.

I have heard the stories (although they may indeed be tall tales) of Cali residents with the "MT" who get into an accident or get their car stolen and discover that their insurance does not cover their car (because the owner is resident in one state and has the car titled in a different state – a state where the car owner cannot even prove a "seasonal vacation house rental" residency. (Because, trust me, insurance companies know about the "MT".)

Other stories include cars sitting innocently at Cars and Coffees getting ticketed - or immediately impounded - by the police due to the owner's combination of a car with a Montana registration and a Cali driver's license. This particular law enforcement angle is driven by "Situation #1" as mentioned above; It's more about zinging people dodging their own state's tax obligations than about someone getting a license plate for their Nissan S-Cargo.

And just in case any of you readers feel I'm snitching out in "public" about a well-kept secret among the small car enthusiast world, the whole "MT" has been around a long time and every state and insurance company knows all about it. (Because I myself was pissed when the "Vermont Thing" was killed because an auto website carried a story about how a writer got some long-abandoned, rusted-out shell of an old school bus titled there because they allowed vehicles with no title to get a title – that could then be transferred to another state. Personally, I had a motorcycle that did not have a title or a 17-digit VIN # and was going to use the "VT", but it was shut down before I could reverse my years-long procrastination and actually get it done. Seems that the majority of the people using this "allowance" were indeed legitimate car people just trying to right a wrong with no ill will whatsoever, but at some point professional car theft rings also began using the "VT", so ....no more "VT". But... the "MT" is different and is not going anywhere, although the way in which some states welcome an influx of Montana plates will evolve here and there. And it is far from a secret.)