If you’ve ever driven a car with a dogleg first gear – maybe an old three-speed U.S.-built car, a vintage supercar, or early BMW M machine – you’ll know that you spend the first couple of miles trying to rewire your brain to cope with the different shift layout.
But now imagine trying to jump into a car where the transmission didn’t only have first on a dogleg, but the entire shift pattern was reversed, almost as if you were looking at it in a mirror. The opportunities to wrong-slot and buzz the car’s engine would be colossal, and that’s especially troubling when the car in question is a rare 1950s Pegaso Z-102 coupe worth almost $1m.
Pegaso was a Spanish company that spent the majority of its half century in existence during the latter half of the 20th century building trucks, buses, and tractors. But for a period during the 1950s, it built some incredible sports cars that in several ways were more advanced than anything Ferrari was producing at the time. Z-102s employed double overhead cams on their four-valve, desmodronic, hemi-headed V8 engine and a transaxle layout that Ferrari didn’t adopt on its road cars until the mid-1960s.
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That wasn’t the only reason Enzo Ferrari had for not liking the Z-102 and the man behind it, Pegaso’s chief engineer, Wilfredo Ricart. The two had worked together at Alfa Romeo’s racing arm before the war and by all accounts were far from good friends.
Pegaso built 83 Z-102s between 1951 and 1958 and this is one of 18 bodied by Paris-based Jacques Saoutchik, its striking shape giving the coupe a load more presence than the Touring-bodied versions had. Maybe that’s why it was one of two cars chosen to be displayed on Pegaso’s stand at the 1954 Paris Motor Show. Restored twice since then, it’s a former Pebble Beach competitor, and auction house Broad Arrow is hoping to find it a new home. Interested parties should have between $750-900,000 of cash to hand and, given that shift layout, a first-rate memory and perfect hand-eye coordination.
