1953 Pegaso Z102 Roadster
The Pegaso was a great project, despite being problematic..
"Pegaso was a Spanish truck-making company, and the sports car was Franco's statement after the war. This is one of four built for Le Mans, and the only supercharged one left. On paper it's a world-beater. Three liters, double overhead cam, supercharged, five-speed transaxle... a lot of the stuff is beautifully made, but it just doesn't work very well. You read the old race reports, and they never finished a race. We've got to try to correct all the design flaws in this one, and we're enjoying the detective work. We've never had an owner who's more involved. He's in here as much as I am."*
In fact, the engine development was quite troublesome. A failure would occur, which would necessitate determining the problem that caused it, then implementing a fix. Which would then lead to a different failure as a component that hadn't been "fixed" would fail. Phil Reilly would later comment, "We chased that problem all around the engine before we got it running right."
The truth is that the original car never had the amount of development time on the track that the restored car has. Phil sometimes says, "A lot of our work is repairing the damage from previous restorations," -- but in this case the goal was to make the original design drivable.
But the effort paid off. The engine was made reliable and the new owner was able to return the car to the Mille Miglia -- where it finished in style.
It was quite a triumph for all.