Features from Octane UK：LANCIA ASTURA

Full history of Pebble Beach winner.

A Lancia Astura that was restored from dereliction by creator Pinin Farina in the 1960s is this year’s Pebble Beach champion.

THE ROAD TO OUTRIGHT VICTORY at Pebble Beach for this year’s overall winner - the 1936 Lancia Astura Pinin Farina ’Tipo Bocca’ Cabriolet owned by Richard Ma¬ei of Paradise Valley, Arizona - began, bizarrely enough, in a Surrey shrubbery back in 1962.

Michael Scott, then just 21, had just bought the’Short Astura’ special from his Lancialoving friend and Autocar journalist, Ronald ’Steady’ Barker, for £400. He was about to embark on a journey to the south of France in it to see his French girlfriend.

Thinking it might be a good idea to have a spare wheel, he was taken by Steady to see a derelict Astura lying in a shrubbery on a private estate in Oatlands Village, near Steady’s home in Weybridge.

Recalled Steady: ’Somehow that rusty, dishevelled old forefront poking through the rain-sodden shrubbery seemed to be taking a last despairing look for someone to rescue it from its plight before decay and corrosion could swallow it completely. A broken lance - lancia in Italian; a connoisseur’s piece bearing the tattered remains of a once-magnificent convertible from the proud house of Pinin Farina, circa 1938.