Surprise: Cizeta Is Coming Back With A New V16-Powered Supercar

The market for high-end, ultra-exclusive and ludicrously expensive supercars has never been stronger. It’s how Lamborghini got away with reskinning an existing car to make it look like a Countach and then sell all 112 units at £1.7 million a pop. The world’s rich are richer than ever before, and if you wave something with a big price tag and a low production cap under their noses, they’ll bite.

It’s this boom that has drawn one of the most bonkers names of the last supercar bubble out of the woodwork: Cizeta.

According to a new report in Car Sales, Germany-based Italian businessman Antonio Mandelli has bought what’s left of Cizeta Automobili SRL with plans to bring it back from the dead. He’ll be doing so with €40 million backing from Deutsche Bank, and intends to make an official announcement after obtaining the blessing of Cizeta V16T designer Marcello Gandini.

Gandini is perhaps best known for designing the original Countach. Recently, he felt the need to put out a statement distancing himself from the aforementioned new ‘Countach’. His work on the V16T drew elements from a prototype version of the Countach’s successor, the Diablo.

Gandini is far from Cizeta’s only Lamborghini connection. The company was founded by Claudio Zampolli, a former Lamborghini test driver and engineer, with Italian electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder helping bankroll the operation. Meanwhile, its engine was made up of Lamborghini bits, using two Uracco 90-degree V8s joined to create a thoroughly weird 6.0-litre V16 with four cylinder heads and eight camshafts.

The strangest thing about Cizeta’s revival in the 2020s is the company will use a modernised version of this highly unconventional powerplant, even though it’d be far easier to follow the all-electric hypercar masses. The engine will slot into a modern carbon fibre tub structure, rather than a tubular spaceframe like the original.

There’s said to already be a prototype that’s covered around 30 miles. We’ll have to wait and see if such a complex project can be brought to a production-ready standard, and if the reborn V16T can be made in greater numbers than the original.

See also: Feeling Brave? Buy This Cizeta-Moroder V16T Prototype

Only 10 of those were made, one of which was a prototype. The latter is, as it happens, up for auction today via RM Sotheby’s with an upper estimate of $1.2 million. It still carries the original ‘Cizeta-Moroder’ branding, which was simplified to ‘Cizeta’ for the production cars after Giorgio Moroder washed his hands of the endeavour.