Junkyard Find: 1971 Fiat 850 Sport Spider
Imagine, this tiny Italian sports car hanging on long enough to evade the junkyard until the second decade of the 21st century! We have no way of knowing how many of its 40 years were spent as a “get to it someday” project car, under a tarp in a side yard, but it doesn’t have the weeds-and-mouse-poop look of a car that spent many years outdoors. I found this little jewel in the same Denver self-serve yard that gave us this ’79 Alfa Romeo Sport Sedan.
The Spring ’74 Fresno State parking sticker indicates that this car spent at least some of its early years in California.
This rear-quarter metal repair uses an innovative-yet-puzzling technique.
In ’71, car shoppers could pick up an 850 Sport Spider, complete with 58-horsepower engine, for $2,294. 58 horsepower doesn’t sound like much, but keep in mind that this thing only weighed 1,590 pounds. Compare that to the ’71 VW Karmann Ghia convertible, which weighed 300 pounds more yet packed only two additional horsepower (not to mention the price tag of $2,750). Keeping in mind the VW’s far superior reliability, perhaps a better comparison would be with the ’71 Triumph Spitfire, which dragged its 1,620 pounds about with a miserable 48 horses and cost $2,649. The 850 looks like a pretty good deal.
Look, it even has a Bertone body. Why, you’d have been crazy to take the Spitfire over the 850!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Oh boy, one of the first of my many cars I had.. Pueblo CO in 1975 for this one... (ended up smashed under the rear tandems of a fuel tanker truck when my brother borrowed the damn thing).. These things were a blast to drive.. We set up a little street track out in Pubelo West and ran the wheels off this thing.. Would love to find another..
I remember these cars having a centrifugal "oil filter" which was built in to the crank pulley. You separated the pulley and all the non oil matter was packed to the outside of the pulley into a sought of grey thick paste. Neat little car though, wish I had one now. Probably gets great mileage!