Even at Pebble Beach, money can’t buy you everything. There are those who have the wherewithal to hire an entire team to restore their cars. There are those who’ll spend money like water, chasing the trophies and the glory.

Sometimes though, the guy who rolled up his sleeves wins. This is one of those times.

I first saw this car, a 1953 Abarth 1100 Sport Ghia Coupe, in a small garage in a suburb of Calgary. It was surrounded by several small cars belonging to Grant Kinzel, but even next to its blood-red relations, you could tell it was something special, something otherworldly. Instinctively, I reached for my camera.

“Well, I’d really rather you didn’t,” said Grant.

That was last year, and I’ve been sitting on the story (somewhat impatiently) since then. This is a lost car, one that hasn’t been photographed since 1954. It passed through several hands and became a total basket case. It was lost to the world, waiting for someone with the vision to take it on and bring it back. Now it’s dawn, and I’m watching it roll onto the lawn at the most prestigious car show in the world.

Around back, in the staging area for the rollout, Kinzel’s little Fiat is bracketed by high-dollar Ferraris. It’s a tiny thing, smooth-flanked and built with jet-age lines. Instead of a wood-rimmed steering wheel, it looks like it should come with a yoke for slipping the bonds of earth and leaving contrails in the pale blue morning sky.

A friend from Calgary rushes over to congratulate Kinzel on his restoration. It does look utterly fantastic. Every detail is perfect, from the blue upholstery to the red-painted lining of the quad exhausts that protrude from the rear bodywork.

The crowd, who have already seen forty-odd vehicles ranging from Ferrari 250LMs to Zagato-bodied Aston-Martins, gasps. “What is that?” is the most-commonly overheard question.

Before Abarth was the highest trim level you could get on your turbocharged Fiat, he was a man. Carl Abarth (born the Austrian Karl) had a fantastical career, including creating a Formula One car with Porsche‘s design studio on a recommendation from Tazio Nuvolari – the fee for the project would be used to ransom Dr. Porsche from post-war imprisonment. Later, he moved into tuning Fiats, and had great success selling tuning parts to would-be racers.

To create greater publicity for Abarth exhausts and performance parts, a series of show cars were commissioned. This one was bodied by Ghia and featured at the 1953 Turin autoshow, cushioned on a bed of scarlet satin.

Talk to Kinzel about the hand-formed sheetmetal of the golden age of Italian design, and he comes alive. Many of the craftsmen who hammered out these beautiful designs came to work on bicycles, unable to afford to buy their own machines. Drafting was rudimentary: often skilled hands were struggling to understand what the designer had locked in his mind.

This particular car was built by the Ghia design studio, likely the handiwork of Giovanni Michelotti. It sits on one of the last Abarth 205 competition chassis, making it essentially a racing machine draped in silk. The mechanicals are from the Fiat 1100, also introduced at the same show.

After making the rounds at the autoshows, the Abarth-Ghia was sold to William Vaughn in New York. The plan, so it is said, was to shoehorn a V8 under that hood and sell copies of them, something Vaughn had done in the past.

Either the shoehorning was too tricky or the plan deemed unprofitable, but eventually the car ended up in the hands of a researcher named Pete Sherman. Sherman died, crashing his privately-owned P-38 Lightning fighter plane, and the car was sold off in an estate sale.

It would have several owners over the years, getting gradually more and more decrepit. By the time Kinzel became aware of it, the car was a wreck.

“If I showed you the before pictures, you’d throw up,” he says to a fellow Abarth enthusiast.

On the field, there’s much to do before the judges arrive. The morning is already heating up, little cloud cover in the sky, so any smudge or fingerprint will stand out like a sore thumb. Kinzel produces a jack and the team sets about cleaning the grass from the tires, which generates some discussion – looks like a brush was forgotten.

“Nobody panic,” Kinzel says. “It’s only the Olympics.”

Three others are here to help Kinzel: Peter Gale, a fellow Italian car fan who owns a couple of Iso Grifos; Jim Crittenden, who owns the trailer the Alfa travelled in; and Mike Pittman, who owns the truck that hauled everything down from Calgary. Collectively, they fuss over the Abarth until it gleams.

“I knew as soon as I wrote that cheque,” Kinzel laughs. It wasn’t a small check either, and almost everything had gone missing from the little Abarth, including all of the glass.

While Kinzel scratched his head over the need of some custom autoclave work, a friend who bought a couple of Alfas from the same collection noticed a box full of oddly-shaped glass in one of his cars. He called Calgary. It was the same glass.

That was one happy accident, but the rest of the five year journey to bring this car back from the dead involved perseverance and skill. More than that – because so much was missing, it took vision to see the thing through.

There was help along the way too. Kinzel knew the taillights were the same as another Fiat; one now locked up in the Walton collection – that’s the Wal in Walmart. Driving’s own Nigel Matthews, who’s apparently on first-name basis with every single gearhead in the known universe, helped put Grant in touch with the man who manages the Walton cars and a laser-scan of the missing light was made and emailed over. He built a mould, cast the light, and one more piece of the puzzle fit.

You have to have a methodical mind to finish a restoration like this, but you also have to have something of a kinship with the first hands that made it. Kinzel has restored many of these little Italian cars over the years, studying the craftsmen of the time as he does so. It’s given him a sort of muscle memory for the body shaping, a mindset that honours the original masters.

Obviously, the judges thought so. Three cars in the Alfa’s class proceeded to the paddock just in front of the famous ramp across which all winners are paraded. It’s an honour to just be on the lawn, but to place in-class? The announcer calls out the order. Kinzel’s Abarth Ghia is last to be named. It’s awarded Best in Class.

There’s even a heady moment where best in show seems like it might be within reach, but let’s not be too greedy – a 1923 Isotta Fraschini Tipo 8A takes top honours.

Still, there were plenty of folks rooting for the little Ghia. From bucket of parts to a Pebble Beach class win, with a fully self-restored car, in his very first Pebble Beach entry. Think Kinzel will be back? Silly question.