Mefistofele: The Fiat from Hell

Few, if any, people would associate the name Fiat with speed. Yet the Italian brand boasts a motorsport heritage that stretches back to the dawn of the motoring age, and includes a record-breaker so fearsome it was named after the devil itself.

The mighty Fiat Mefistofele is a spectacular one-off that, on July 12, 1924, set a speed record of 234.98 km/h (146 mph) and is now the pride of the brand’s heritage collection in Turin. But while that’s right and proper, it’s also somewhat ironic, given that the Mefistofele actually isn’t a Fiat creation.

The Mefistofele was the brainchild of the British gentleman racer Ernest Eldridge, who built it in 1923 by marrying the chassis of an old Fiat racing car with a massive WWI aero engine. The donor car was the Fiat SB4, a one-off racer built in 1908 by the Turinese firm to beat Napier on Brooklands’ banked circuit. Powered by a massive 18-liter inline-four-cylinder engine, the SB4 driven by Felice Nazzaro won the race at an average speed of 193 Km/h (120 mph). After that, the unique Fiat remained on British soil and, in 1921, ended up in the hands of the amateur racer John Duff.

Of course, by then, a Fiat from 1908 was quite far from the cutting edge of automobile performance. Undeterred, Duff tried to improve his competitive odds by fitting a new set of aluminum pistons to increase the compression ratio, only for the engine to blow itself to pieces at the very next race. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Duff decided he would be better off driving something else and sold the broken Fiat to Eldridge.

Eldridge retained the SB4’s rear end, brakes, and transmission, but had the frame cut up and stretched to accommodate the Fiat A12 Bis aero engine he had recovered from a retired WWI aircraft. Widely used on reconnaissance planes during the conflict, the Fiat A12 engine produced around 250 HP. Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly a featherweight. With a displacement of 21.7 liters, the inline-six with four valves per cylinder was about 70 inches long and weighed over 900 pounds dry. Shoehorning it into the modified SB4’s chassis required several modifications, particularly the relocation of the water pump and the rerouting of several cooling ducts. At the same time, the engine’s single carburetor gave way to a new set of four, fed via a beautiful brass intake manifold. The engine is said to produce up to 320 hp in this setup, but given that the Mefistofele has never been near a test bench, that should be considered as nothing more than an educated guess.

After giving his creation a fresh coat of black paint, Eldridge took it to France for his record attempt, which was held on Route d’Orleans, a long stretch of road near the town of Arpajon, on July 6, 1924. However, Eldridge wasn’t alone: The Frenchman René Thomas was also after the record, at the wheel of a Delage packing a 350 hp V-12 engine.

The two vehicles proved closely matched in terms of performance, but there’s no doubt over which one struck the public’s imagination. During his runs, Eldridge wrestled for control as the massive engine overwhelmed his car’s woefully inadequate chassis and tires. The sight of the large, imposing vehicle skidding from left to right as it thundered down the road, shooting flames out of the deafeningly loud exhaust, made a huge impression on the crowd and led the press to dub Eldridge’s car “Mefistofele.”

But Eldridge’s monster didn’t just look like it came from hell; it went like it, too. The Mefistofele was clocked at over 140 mph, beating Thomas’ Delage to a new world record… Only for it to be invalidated once the rival team pointed out that Eldridge’s Fiat had no reverse gear, which the regulations required. Determined not to let Thomas have it, Eldridge cobbled together a reverse mechanism and, six days later, snatched the record away from him. Still, that glory proved fleeting: on September 25, 1924, Malcolm Campbell set the first of his long series of speed records, and Eldridge and his Mefistofele fell off the radar.

The old record-breaker resurfaced decades later at the Coppa Monza, an event held on the Italian circuit in 1962. There, it caught the attention of Fiat’s top brass, and after years of negotiations with Ernest Eldridge’s heirs, the Mefistofele finally joined Fiat’s heritage collection in 1969.

Now resprayed in Italy’s traditional racing red, the Mefistofele sat quietly in Fiat’s corporate museum until the late 1990s, when its management decided to spruce up the heritage fleet as the firm was approaching its centenary year. A decision was made to restore the Mefistofele to driving condition, but the sheer magnitude of the task became apparent the moment Fiat’s engineers began looking under the old beast’s bonnet.

The original engine, bought used by Eldridge and bodged several times over the years, was thought to be worn beyond repair. It could eventually be rebuilt only thanks to the parts cannibalized from another A12 Bis engine, a display unit in Fiat’s museum. Yet perhaps the most intriguing detail that emerged during the restoration process, which took the best part of two years, was the lack of space for a reverse gear in the car’s original gearbox casing. The system Eldridge invented to enable the Mefistofele to drive in reverse thus remains a mystery, as there was no trace of it on the car.

The world finally heard the roar of the Mefistofele again in 2001, when Fiat’s press office organized a media event at its Balocco test track before sending the car off to Goodwood for that year’s Festival Of Speed. The car has since made a few more public appearances over the years, including a return to Goodwood in 2011, but it now seems to have once again been confined to static display in Fiat’s Centro Storico in Turin.

Still, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of its record-breaking run, let’s hope Stellantis’ heritage division will once again decide to unleash the fury of Mefistofele, the mighty Fiat from hell.