If either of the two SCG 003s can do just one yard at the Nürburgring on Saturday, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus will make history and American flags can be raised just a little higher all around the globe. But team James Glickenhaus and their gorgeous race cars will do more than just a yard. Much more.
If you think about the journey Glickenhaus has been on in the last decade, from collector to automaker and racer, you realize it all comes down to this weekend. The N24. But either way, it will only mark the proper start of the SCG003 story.
So far, they’ve only built two SCG 003Cs, with Macchinauno being pretty much the development mule and Glickenhaus’ personal car, while Macchinadue in the yellow livery belonging to Chris Ruud. There will be more if the market shows interest to the car despite its steep starting price of $2.4 million.
And the engineering work is already at a progressed state on the SCG003 Stradale, the road-going version which will use different headlamps, another twin-turbo V6 and come with more comfort despite being 330 pounds lighter without having to comply with the FIA’s minimum weight requirement for GT3 cars.
But let’s take a few steps back.
When Glickenhaus commissioned an homage to his Daytona-winner Ferrari race car from Pininfarina based on the latest and greatest at the time, the brand new Enzo, Ferrari went mental and wanted to forbid them from calling the resulting P 4/5 a Ferrari.
The fact is that the P 4/5 was faster and prettier than an Enzo thanks to its sleek carbon body, and that must have hurt the Maranello crowd. Having said that, the Glickenhaus Enzo’s original body panels ended up attached to the fastest Enzo of them all, the twin-turbo Bonneville racer that did 238mph on the salt flats five years ago.
By that time, James Glickenhaus has moved on to building his own race car, the P 4/5 Competizione, which was based on a Ferrari 430 Scuderia and ended up being not only very competitive, but also faster than any Ferrari around the Nürburgring.
But what can a man do when his bank account allows him to do Bruce Wayne-level stuff, 2015 marks his 64th birthday and he’s passionate about cars and honest racing?
Well, Glickenhaus ditched the Ferrari parts and built his own car from the ground up using the most advanced materials and a team of smart Italians who seem to be really good at merging speed with beauty since the dawn of internal combustion.
The SCG003C is so good on the track that their biggest setback so far was getting black flagged for being slightly louder than what the trees of the Nordschleife could tolerate. They got that sorted out in no time.
With its 550 horsepower and 516 toques, the SCG003C is fifteen seconds faster around the Nürburgring than a Porsche 918 Spyder.
Gordon Murray seems to like it as well:
I love it—it’s really interesting, a car based on prototype architecture and aero that you can drive to the track.
He also said this before the F1 GTR gathering at Goodwood:
My only regret is that we didn’t drive the Ueno Clinic car there (to Le Mans) on the road, and then drove it home. That would have been the ultimate.
I secretly hoped Glickenhaus will be able to pull that off as well. After all, the SCG003 was designed so that it can easily be converted from race to road-going spec and back. But I learned that Murray’s ultimate has to wait a bit more due to technical reasons:
On Wednesday, we will drive the race car to the 24 Hour pre-race event in Adenauer, but they want it to be in race form and stickered up for that event.
The weekend after the 24 we will be showing and driving around the cleaned up and road converted SCG 003 at Villa d’Este with PROVA plates. There are only a few days between the Race and Villa d’Este, we have to convert race to road for that and we don’t have time to do it twice.
Racing at the 24 Hours of Nurburgring, road converting and bringing her to Villa d’Este the next weekend is still pretty impressive. Not sure that’s ever been done before...
I’m not sure either. The last time must have been in the sixties. But those guys didn’t have to deal with widebody Lexus LFAs...
Whether it’s a yard, two yards, or 4,412,729 like what last year’s winning Audi R8 managed, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus is already a winner in our books. Now we see how they fare on the track.
Photo credit: Pininfarina and Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus
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