Barn find. It's the phrase that conjures up the notion of that wonderful treasure you sniffed out, heard about on the grapevine, that car that has been sitting at the back of a barn for years, covered with dust, and the original owner who's now in her 80s wants to get rid of it.

Ideally, that creaky old Packard or Alfa-Romeo will be sold for a song and you will gleefully haul the tatty but intact treasure back home, lovingly clean it up and then, fingers crossed, see if she fires up.

The story of Manny Del Arroz's Ferrari is a variation on the barn find -- one important variation is that the seller was extremely savvy and Del Arroz did not get this car for a song. Nonetheless, it's fair to call this story an authentic under-the-carpets-languishing-in-the-Arizona-desert find.

The car is a 1950 Ferrari 166MM Barchetta. According to Michael T. Lynch, a Monterey automotive historian who specializes in Ferraris, only 25 of these cars with the 2-liter V12 motors were built. Most of them still exist.

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"This was the car that made Ferrari," Lynch said recently. "It was the car that really gave a face to Ferrari. It was absolutely timeless from the day it was made." When the car was produced, Ferrari had only been in business three years and yet this car, Lynch said, "has a lot of styling cues that are still there today, such as the egg crate grill."

The car is scheduled to be featured in this year's Palo Alto Concours, to be held June 24. Every year around this time, collectors all over California are primping their cars (and motorcycles, too) for the annual season of showing them off at a concours d'elegance. The major event -- indeed, it is considered the premier concours in the world -- is the annual fest of moneyed gearheads at Pebble Beach in late August. But the other concours are just as interesting and, in their way, less stratified than Pebble Beach.

Back to the 166MM Barchetta. Nearly 50 years ago, according to Lynch, a guy living in Europe, possibly serving in the U.S. armed forces in Germany, found the 166MM at a used car showroom in Lausanne, Switzerland. He contacted his friend, Reg Lee Litton, in Scottsdale, Ariz., who knew something about Ferraris and, Lynch recalled, "Litton said buy it for me and ship it to California. The car probably went for somewhere between $5,000 and $8,000."

Litton met the car at the port of Long Beach, "gets it running and drives it home. In Arizona, he has some friends with some old Maseratis, one with a Chevy motor, and they would race all over the valley and then they'd go home, have a few beers and talk about it," Lynch said. Eventually, something in the Ferrari broke and "Litton puts it in the backyard, covered up with some rugs and black plastic held down with two-by-fours. Then somebody used the rugs for something else and the car was left open to the sky. The car was just sitting out in the yard until he died."

The owner's children apparently put out the word about the rare car. They wafted the perfume of this Holy of Holies under the noses of Ferrari seekers worldwide, and the car was eventually sold to Del Arroz through a series of intermediaries. It may have originally been a barn find (tattered as the barn was), but it certainly didn't go for a barn price. Del Arroz said he paid more than $1 million for the Ferrari. Lynch said the cars, if you can find them, are probably worth about $1.5 million.

Del Arroz said that he was first tipped off about the car's availability by a Swiss Ferrari historian named Marcel Massini.

"I saw photographs of the car, and I was very intrigued because of its originality," Del Arroz said. "You just don't see these things." Del Arroz said he had seen his share of "over-restored race cars that don't look real." That was not what he was looking for.

The Barchetta, with its worn paint, really did look as if it had been sitting outdoors for nearly half a century and to Del Arroz, "this looked beautiful."

"They told me the price -- over $1 million -- and I said, 'I'll take it.' Sight unseen," Del Arroz said.

But the story got a lot more exciting when Del Arroz and Massini did more research on the car's history, enlarging photos of it and comparing them with historic photos of Ferraris racing.

"We found out the car had run at (such famous races as) Le Mans, Silverstone, Targa Florio," Del Arroz said. "We're still discovering the races it's been in."

Del Arroz had the car shipped to him and then took it to Berkeley Ferrari expert Patrick Ottis, who, during the course of a complete mechanical rebuild (the car's body was left in its worn and wind-whipped desert cloak), found a hand-chiseled date on the motor of "6/9/49," which enabled them to figure out that the car had been raced by Juan Manuel Fangio. Yes, that Fangio.

So if you want to see an authentic and unspoiled piece of Ferrari racing history, hie thee to Palo Alto on June 24. There aren't many of these cars around.