The car depicted here is a modern replica of a highly unique Porsche 356 that mysteriously vanished without a trace in 1958. Called the Carrera Zagato Coupé Sanction Lost, it is one out of only two units built, somewhat justifying its recent auction price of £426,875.
Zagato built the first such car for racing driver Claude Storez in the late 1950s. Storez asked the company, which was already famous for its aerodynamic solutions at the time, to design a sleeker body for his Porsche 356 Carrera Speedster. In mid-1958, the car with an elongated body and the tuner’s signature aerodynamic fins shipped from Milan to Stuttgart. Porsche accepted it and proceeded to tweak the chassis, after which it hit the racetrack in September that year.
In February 1959, Storez crashed the car in a racetrack accident that claimed his life. Inexplicably enough, the vehicle managed to disappear from the track before emergency services and tow trucks could arrive to the scene. It was never found.
In the first half of the last decade, Zagato decided to recreate the iconic racer for a U.S. car collector based on some blueprints stored in the archives. The continuation racer was nicknamed Sanction Lost.
A total of 18 Sanction Lost vehicles was produced based on the Porsche 356 chassis and tech, including several coupes and several speedsters. Only two of them were outfitted with special Carrera engines, however, including this one. The engine was built specifically to resemble the original motor of the Carrera Zagato Coupe crashed in 1959.