Dan Gurney arrived at the Palm Springs airfield circuit in April 1958 knowing that a significant race lay ahead. The youngster had been making quite a name for himself on the ultra-competitive West Coast scene, and the previous November he’d been involved in an epic race at Riverside. Driving Frank Arciero’s unique 4.9-litre Ferrari—chassis number 0478 AM—he’d gone toe-to-toe with a group that included Masten Gregory, Walt Hansgen, and Carroll Shelby, who was driving a Maserati 450S owned by John Edgar.

Despite being clocked at 163 mph in the big Ferrari on Riverside’s long straight, Gurney had to give best to Shelby, who came through to take victory after an earlier spin. Palm Springs would therefore be a rematch between the two rivals, and Gurney—once again at the wheel of 0478 AM—was determined to beat the tall Texan, who this time would be driving Edgar’s Ferrari 410 Sport. The cars’ respective owners were just as keen to see battle rejoined, and Arciero bet Edgar $1,000 that Gurney would get the better of Shelby.

"I had to avoid getting the tail out too much exiting a corner, but it was a lot of car to rein in and do what you were asking it to do," Gurney later recalled to Edgar’s son William. Shelby led the early stages, but Gurney reeled him in, got past and took a momentous win. "With Shelby being in a good car," he continued, "the victory that I got with Frank’s car was something that the Ferrari farm system’s Luigi Chinetti realised. That was the beginning of the stepping stones up to being invited to Europe for the Le Mans 24 Hours race."

From his earliest days, the cosmopolitan Gurney had always set his sights on road racing rather than Indianapolis-style ovals. A couple of months after that Palm Springs victory, he travelled to Europe for his first outing at Le Mans, where he drove a Chinetti-entered Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa. Then, in late 1958, he was invited to Italy to test a range of Maranello’s finest and was duly offered a Works contract with the Scuderia for the following year. ‘Handsome Dan’ was on his way, and 0478 AM had played a key role in his success.

The origin story of the Ferrari in which he’d vanquished Shelby was forged in the white heat of top-level international sports car racing, a discipline in which Ferrari was under threat from numerous rivals during the first half of the 1950s. Having built its reputation in the late 1940s around a V-12 engine that had been designed by Gioacchino Colombo, the company felt the need to add to its arsenal a new, larger-capacity, naturally aspirated V-12 that was the work of Aurelio Lampredi. First seen in 3.3-litre form during 1950, this engine would do service in Formula One and sports car racing alike, plus a limited number of road cars, and grew rapidly to keep pace with the demands of competition use.

In 1953, Ferrari pipped Jaguar to claim the inaugural World Sportscar Championship with its 340 MM and 375 MM models, which were powered by, respectively, 4.1-litre and 4.5-litre variants of the Lampredi V-12. With the British company set to race its new D-Type the following year, and Mercedes-Benz preparing to enter the sports car arena in 1955, Ferrari kept pushing forward and developed the 375 Plus, which boasted a de Dion rear end and a 4.9-litre version of the Lampredi engine. Producing as much as 370 brake-horsepower and known as 'the fearsome four-nine,' it won not only the blue-riband 24 Hours of Le Mans, but also the gruelling Carrera Panamericana road race, helping Ferrari to retain its World Championship crown in 1954. 

Although Lampredi left Maranello during 1955, Ferrari’s engineering team had great strength and depth and the horsepower 'arms race' continued unabated. The likes of Vittorio Jano—whose relationship with Enzo Ferrari dated back to the 1920s—Vittorio Bellentani, Alberto Massimino, and young Andrea Fraschetti set to work on a new series of engines. This culminated in the four-cam V-12s that were installed in the 315 S and 335 S during 1957—a year in which Ferrari and Maserati staged a no-holds-barred battle for the World Sportscar Championship, from which Maranello emerged victorious.

But that season marked the end of an era in more ways than one. Alarmed by rising speeds, the FIA introduced new regulations for 1958 that limited engine size to 3 litres. Ferrari therefore switched its focus back to the Colombo line of V-12s, and the 250 Testa Rossa carried on where the Lampredi- and Jano-engined big guns—now obsolete at World Championship level—had left off. It won four out of 1958’s six Championship-counting races and once again secured the title for Ferrari.

Throughout that frenetic decade, many of Maranello’s sports racing cars found their way to America, and in particular to the West Coast. Supported by entrants such as John von Neumann and Texan oil magnate Allen Guiberson, emerging talents of the calibre of Gurney, Phil Hill, and Richie Ginther were able to race the best European cars at venues across California and beyond. As all three would discover, their efforts did not go unnoticed thousands of miles away in Italy…

It was into this extremely competitive and fast-moving environment that 0478 AM would be delivered in early 1955. Ferrari built this one-off car around a Tipo 102 Plus chassis, and gave it a Tipo 102 gearbox and rear axle—and then it installed a full-fat 375 Plus engine (numero interno 234). This Tipo 113 unit had an 84-mm bore and a 74.5-mm stroke, to give a total displacement of 4,954 cc, and it breathed through a trio of four-barrel Weber carburettors.    

After receiving Scaglietti-built spider bodywork, the car was signed off at the factory in December 1954 and sold to one of the most influential and colourful players on the Californian motorsport scene. Born in Italy in 1917, Antonio Parravano had emigrated to the US when he was 17 and made his fortune in the construction business. Through the 1950s, he ran a number of Ferraris and Maseratis for top-line drivers such as Carroll Shelby, who got to know him well during that time.

"What Tony Parravano did for racing was that he helped form the sports car movement in the United States in the mid-1950s," Shelby later told William Edgar, "and he did it with the flair of a folk hero."

Early outings for the Scuderia Parravano-entered 0478 AM came in the hands of ex-pat Englishman Ken Miles and Jack McAfee, the latter managing to score a 3rd place at Santa Barbara in May 1955. Then, in late July that year, the team headed north to the Sports Car Club of America’s Seattle Seafair meeting. The event attracted a strong field, including Phil Hill in George Tilp’s Ferrari 750 Monza and Miles in Allen Guiberson’s 375 MM, but Shelby nonetheless took 0478 AM to its maiden victory around the Kitsap County Airport circuit. He led 31 of the 32 laps, but Hill kept him honest in the closing stages and was only four seconds behind at the chequered flag.

Unfortunately, that 1955 season ended on a less positive note when Shelby crashed the Ferrari on the first lap of a race at Palm Springs in early December. It would be a key moment in the car’s history—and its final outing with Parravano, whose own story had a sad ending. By the end of the 1950s, he was firmly in the sights of the IRS and tried to get a number of Ferraris and Maseratis across the border into Mexico. He succeeded with some of them but others were stopped and seized, and in April 1960—three days before a court hearing into charges of tax evasion—Parravano himself disappeared, never to be seen again.

As for 0478 AM, it was sent in 1956 to Jack Sutton’s workshop in Los Angeles. Sutton had moved to the US from England, where he’d worked in the aircraft industry and had helped to build Malcolm Campbell’s Blue Bird record-breakers, and set up Sutton Engineering Co. on Oxnard Street in North Hollywood. There, this master craftsman hand-built a number of bodies for West Coast racers, including a new one for 0478 AM to replace its damaged Scaglietti original.

Having been sold to Frank Arciero—like Parravano, another serial Ferrari owner who’d made his money in construction—the revised car was raced in 1956 and into 1957 by Jack McAfee, Bob Drake, and Ken Miles. It was in the hands of Drake that 0478 AM had perhaps its most unusual competition outing, when it reached 176.913 mph during the Bonneville Speed Week in August 1957.

It would be later that year that Dan Gurney entered the story. Born on Long Island on the East Coast, Gurney was 17 when his family moved all the way across the US to California. His father—who had been a singer with the Metropolitan Opera—started an avocado farm near where the Riverside circuit would later be built. After serving in the Korean War, young Dan started racing while working for an engineering company—first in his own cars, and then for others. It soon became a full-time occupation thanks to entrants such as Cal Bailey and Frank Arciero, and it was his relationship with Arciero that led to him racing 0478 AM.

Gurney quickly got the hang of the big, powerful Ferrari. Shortly after being pipped by Shelby at the Riverside meeting in November 1957, he drove it to victory at the shortlived Paramount Ranch circuit, which featured a distinctive figure-of-eight layout. Then came the successful rematch against Shelby at Palm Springs in early 1958, and Gurney continued to sporadically race 0478 AM into 1959, winning a preliminary race at Pomona in January. His final outing with it came at Riverside in October that year when, frustratingly, the Ferrari was hit at the start by Jack Graham’s Chevrolet-engined Aston Martin.

Dick Wallen described the melee in his book Riverside Raceway – Palace of Speed: "Daigh’s Maserati was reluctant to start on the grid, but when the flag fell, he was first into turn one. Behind him was chaos as Gurney stalled his engine. Jack Graham, flat-out in bottom gear, came from deep in the grid to bury itself deep into the Ferrari’s fuel tank. Ricocheting to one side, the Aston was then T-boned by Ward. Gurney suffered whiplash, Graham a broken arm, and Ward merely disappointment. The race was red-flagged and a crew from nearby March Air Force Base set to work on the gas, oil, coolant, and debris."

The following year, 0478 AM was retired from frontline competition and sold to Bill Harrah in Reno, Nevada; it stayed in his renowned collection until 1984. In 1987, it was sold to Erich Traber in Switzerland and was regularly seen on the Mille Miglia during the early 1990s. Then, in October 1996, the Ferrari returned to the US where it has remained to this day in a highly curated collection. That enabled it to be reunited with Dan Gurney during a vintage race meeting at Sears Point in May 2000, and he was reported to be all smiles after he’d driven it. No doubt the memories of those Californian dust-ups in the late 1950s came flooding back to a man who went on to have one of the great motorsport careers, in which he won everywhere from Spa-Francorchamps and Le Mans to Riverside and Donnybrooke.    

And yet perhaps the last word should go not to Gurney, but to Carroll Shelby—a man who knew a thing or two about 0478 AM, having driven it in its original form, then raced against it in later years. He was unequivocal in his assessment of this historic car. "That Ferrari turned into being one of the best," he said. "It was the lightest, fastest Ferrari I ever knew."

The legendary 1955 Ferrari 375 Plus Spyder by Sutton chassis no. 0478 AM will cross the auction block at our flagship Monterey auction at the Monterey Conference Center on 15–16 August 2025.

It is estimated at $5,500,000 – $7,500,000.