Sorry for the lack of updates recently. A busy holiday season and a terrible case of the flu took me out of commission for a while there. So, to make it up to you all, we are going to run In the Barn stories every day through the New Year! Today’s tale comes from The Cobra in the Barn and as the title suggests, is about a Ferrari found behind a barn. What more do we need to say? Enjoy. ~Jesse

Bill Locke thought he had uncovered the automotive equivalent of King Tut’s tomb back in 1984. That’s the day his Corvette buddy from Bradenton, Florida, called to say, “You wouldn’t believe what I just saw sitting behind a sports car repair shop!”

Locke has two automotive interests: Corvettes and Ferraris. Since the mid-1970s, the retired banking executive has owned at least one of each and to this day is the event director at the Bloomington Gold Corvette Hall of Fame. But he has always been smitten with the Ferrari mystique. He purchased his first Ferrari in 1975, a 330 GTC, but has owned a number of others—including a 365 GTB 4, a Daytona, two Dino Spyders, a 512 BB, an early ’76 fiberglass 308, and both a short- and long-nose 275 GTB. Like all diehard car collectors, Locke was always looking for the next project.

So when his friend called to tell him of the Ferrari he had discovered, Locke was all ears.

“Is it an open or closed car?” he asked.

“It’s an open car,” his buddy said.

“Does it have covered or exposed headlights?” Locke further asked.

His friend wasn’t sure, so he said he’d go back and check. “I just knew in my heart that it was a California Spyder, and only wondered if it was a short or long wheelbase, and whether it was one of the aluminum racing models,” Locke says.

“I didn’t care what condition it was in, I just had to have it.” His friend called again to tell him it had enclosed headlights. Locke’s heart nearly stopped. “One more question: does it have vent windows?” he asked as he held his breath. “Yes it does,” his friend responded.

Locke’s heart sank. With vent windows, the car couldn’t be a California Spyder, which restored could fetch $2.5 million. It was probably a GT Series II, but a car still worth following up on.

Locke says the price was right, so he negotiated the car’s purchase without ever seeing it. He then hooked up his trailer to his truck and went to retrieve his new acquisition.

Locke’s hunch was correct. The car turned out to be a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT Series II Cabriolet—one of only 202 built—that had been mildly modified by a previous owner to resemble a California. Even though this was one of the few 250 GT Cabriolets actually equipped with covered headlights, the rear fascia had been redesigned by a previous owner, resulting in the added spoiler and the altered taillights.

“Any twelve-cylinder convertible Ferrari has a special place in automotive history,” Locke says. But the car was in rough shape when he found it. It had been parked behind the foreign car repair shop for a number of years.

“The car was sitting outside with a ripped top and no cover,” he says. “I have no idea how long it was sitting, but the car was last titled in 1973, so it could have been a decade.”

The actual owner was a land surveyor, but Locke didn’t ask too many questions, fearing his enthusiasm would raise a red flag and spoil the sale.

Once he brought the car home, he put it in his garage and never touched it. “I’d walk around it every evening and ask myself, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’” he says. The Ferrari’s floors and trunk area were full of rust. He also discovered a rat’s nest in the glove box and evidence that some critter had made its home in the trunk.

Rebuilding it wasn’t going to be cheap, even in 1984. “The mechanical rebuild alone could cost in excess of fifty thousand dollars,” Locke says. “Then you’ve got to buy the Connolly leather, the Wilton carpet, chrome, rubber, and electrical systems; even at just forty dollars per hour, at three thousand hours, that’s one-hundred-twenty thousand dollars in labor alone.

“At the time, we owned three very nice Ferraris, so my wife Pat thought someone else should own this project,” he says. So Locke sold the Ferrari six months after purchasing it, to a friend who was a fellow Ferrari enthusiast. His friend still has that car today, and is finally ready to begin restoration. “I found another Ferrari I wanted more, and sold the first one to produce some cash,” Locke says.

He figures the restored Ferrari would be worth about $225,000 to $300,000 in today’s market, and even in its rough as-is condition, it would probably bring $125,000, a number far more than he sold the car for twenty years ago.

“I wish that I hadn’t sold that car,” he says. “I’d love to have it back. But I’ve noticed that automotive hindsight is always 20/20.”