The Scarab Formula 1 car was designed and built by Reventlow Automobiles Inc. (RAI) in Los Angeles, California, and represents the first genuinely American attempt to build a Formula One car from scratch and compete in the FIA World Championship. It was not a kit car, not a modified European design — it was conceived, engineered, and fabricated in the United States, funded entirely by one man’s fortune and his belief that American engineering could hold its own in Grand Prix racing.

The car used a front-mounted Offenhauser-based four-cylinder engine, a multi-tubular steel space frame chassis, double wishbone front suspension, and disc brakes at all four corners. By the technical standards of 1957–58, when the design was conceived, it was a serious and well-executed racing car. By the time it arrived in Europe in the summer of 1960, the mid-engine revolution had already rendered front-engine Formula 1 cars obsolete. Jack Brabham had won the 1959 and 1960 World Championships in mid-engine Coopers. The Scarab’s architecture was settled before that revolution was complete.

Why It Matters

The Scarab didn’t win. It didn’t qualify. Measured by points and finishes, its record is a blank page. But it matters because it was the first. No American constructor before Reventlow had built a car specifically for Formula One World Championship competition from the ground up. The ambition was real. The execution was serious. The timing was cruel. Understanding the Scarab is understanding something essential about motorsport: being right about everything except one thing — in this case, where to put the engine — can still mean failure.

For museum context on this era of mid-century motorsport, the World of Speed Museum holds exactly the kind of material that puts machines like the Scarab in their proper historical frame.

Lance Reventlow was born in 1936, the son of Barbara Hutton — the Woolworth department store heiress and one of the wealthiest women of her generation. He could have done nothing for his entire life. He chose instead to race cars, and then to build them.

By the mid-1950s Reventlow was competing seriously in American sports car racing, and by 1957 he had assembled a small group of genuinely talented engineers and fabricators — including Warren Olson, who led the chassis work, and Traco Engineering’s Jim Travers and Frank Coon, who prepared the engines — and put them to work on a sports racing car. The Scarab sports car, finished in 1957 and raced through 1958, was legitimately quick on American circuits and earned real victories. Confidence grew.

The Formula 1 project followed as what felt like a natural progression. Reventlow had seen American racing — particularly at Indianapolis — hold its own against European machinery for decades. He believed, reasonably, that with sufficient money and talent, an American constructor could take that step into Grand Prix racing and be competitive. He was not wrong about the money, the talent, or the seriousness of purpose. He was wrong about the moment.

Chuck Daigh: The Racing Driver

Reventlow raced one of the two Scarab F1 cars himself, but the more accomplished racer in the outfit was Chuck Daigh — an experienced American driver who had been involved with the Scarab project from its earliest days and understood the car from the inside out. Daigh was the faster of the two drivers and the one most likely, in any optimistic scenario, to have qualified. That he never managed it either tells you something clear about the car’s fundamental deficit against the field it was facing.

How It Got Its Name

The name Scarab was chosen deliberately and carries symbolic weight that Reventlow understood well. The scarab beetle was sacred in ancient Egypt — a creature associated with the sun, with transformation, and with the image of something small pushing an enormous weight uphill against all odds. Reventlow identified with that image: a small California team rolling their machine against Ferrari and the European establishment. There was also a practical continuity argument — the Scarab sports car had already raced and won under that name, and carrying it into Formula One gave the project a clear brand identity, which was unusual thinking for an independent constructor in 1959.

Chassis and Structure

The Scarab’s chassis was a multi-tubular steel space frame — a structure of small-diameter steel tubes welded together to form a rigid cage around the driver. This was the engineering consensus of the late 1950s, and the Scarab’s execution of it was clean and precise. The bodywork panels were hand-formed aluminium, carefully shaped and beautifully finished. The suspension used double wishbones at the front and a de Dion rear axle arrangement. Disc brakes were fitted at all four corners — technically progressive for an independent constructor at the time.

Two chassis were built. Both were identical in layout. Both were eventually shipped to Europe for the 1960 campaign.

The Engine: Offenhauser Legacy, Wrong Position

The powerplant chosen for the Scarab was a four-cylinder unit developed in collaboration with Traco Engineering, drawing on the Offenhauser lineage. The Offenhauser name was enormous in American motorsport — “Offy” engines had dominated Indianapolis for over a decade and were synonymous with durability, high-revving performance, and torque delivery that drivers trusted. For the Scarab, the engine displaced approximately 2.5 litres — the FIA’s Formula One limit of the period — and produced around 240 to 250 bhp in race trim. That figure was not embarrassing for 1960; some factory teams weren’t far ahead of it.

The problem was not the engine. The problem was where it sat. The engine was mounted in the nose, ahead of the driver, driving through a four-speed gearbox to the rear wheels. That was entirely conventional in 1957 when the drawings were made. But Formula One moved faster than almost anyone anticipated in those years, and by the time the Scarab reached Europe, the best cars on the grid had their engines behind the driver. To understand what that means for a racing car’s balance and behaviour, our engine explainer and the oversteer and understeer glossary cover the dynamics clearly.

Full Technical Specifications

The Scarab team departed Los Angeles in the spring of 1960 with two cars on a transporter and a great deal of confidence. The plan was a full European campaign — four Grands Prix at minimum — culminating in the United States Grand Prix at Riverside in California, where at least the home crowd would be on their side.

The confidence did not survive first contact with reality. At Spa-Francorchamps for the Belgian Grand Prix in June, both cars failed to qualify. The session was not close. The Scarabs were not within striking distance of the cut-off time. The mid-engine Coopers, Lotuses, and BRMs simply moved through corners differently — with less weight over the front axle, more traction at the rear, and a balance that allowed the drivers to carry speed through the long, fast sweeps that defined Spa. The Scarab pushed. It understeered. Technique could manage it but not eliminate it.

At Reims for the French Grand Prix in July, the result was identical: both cars DNQ. Silverstone for the British Grand Prix brought the same outcome. By this point the team understood, without needing to say it directly, that the front-engine layout was not something they could engineer around on the circuits they were visiting. The problem was architectural, not mechanical.

The United States Grand Prix at Riverside in November — held on American soil, before a crowd that included many people who knew and admired the Scarab project — produced one entry, Daigh in the second car. He too failed to qualify. On home ground, in front of home supporters, the 1960 campaign ended as it had begun.

Full Race Entry Record — 1960 World Championship

To understand what the Scarab was up against in 1960, you need to understand the two cars that made it obsolete before it even arrived.

The Cooper T53 — Jack Brabham’s championship-winning machine — had its engine mounted behind the driver and ahead of the rear axle. The weight distribution was fundamentally better balanced. Under braking, the front end loaded up precisely. Under acceleration, the rear tyres had traction the Scarab’s rear wheels, starved of weight by a heavy engine up front, simply couldn’t match. The Cooper steered with precision where the Scarab pushed wide. It wasn’t a small difference. It was measurable in seconds per lap.

Colin Chapman’s Lotus 18 took the concept further. Chapman had stripped every gram he could find from the design — the car was extraordinarily light, incredibly nimble, and demanded a level of driver skill that few could fully exploit but that paid dividends on any circuit where fast direction changes mattered. Stirling Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix in the Lotus 18 that year. On the tightest, most technical circuit on the calendar, the mid-engine Lotus was faster than anything with an engine in its nose.

The Scarab’s front-mounted engine caused structural understeer — the car wanted to push straight ahead through corners regardless of how much steering lock the driver applied. Reventlow and Daigh could manage it. They couldn’t eliminate it. And at circuits like Spa and Silverstone, where carrying speed through fast corners is a fundamental requirement of a competitive lap time, there was no technique sufficient to close the gap. For the full breakdown of oversteer and understeer in Formula 1, our glossary explains exactly what this means for a driver and a lap time.

The Scarab Formula 1 car started zero championship races. It won nothing. By the cold ledger of sporting results, it is a failure. So why does it appear in serious histories of Formula One? Why do motorsport museums exhibit it with care? Why does it matter to anyone who didn’t see it race — which is everyone, since it never actually raced?

Because it represents the first. Before the Scarab, no American constructor had attempted to build a Formula One World Championship car from scratch and take it to Europe to compete. Not a converted Indianapolis car. Not a modified design. A purpose-built Grand Prix car, conceived and fabricated in the United States, driven to the circuits by an American team. That is a genuinely significant historical fact regardless of what the lap times said.

The quality of the engineering was also real. Both Chuck Daigh and the mechanics who built the car maintained consistently that the Scarab was a well-made, properly engineered racing machine. It handled its front-engine layout as well as that layout could be handled in 1960. The problem was not sloppiness. The problem was that the correct answer to the question “where should the engine go?” had changed between when the drawings were made and when the cars arrived in Europe.

The Bigger Picture: America and Formula One

The Scarab didn’t exist in isolation. It was part of a broader American engagement with Formula One that would eventually produce Mario Andretti’s 1978 World Championship — the first and still only American-born F1 World Champion. It sits at the beginning of that lineage, the first serious attempt, the one that learned the hardest lesson possible about the cost of being one architecture behind.

The World of Speed Museum’s mission is precisely this: to preserve and tell the stories of machines and people that motorsport history might otherwise pass over. The Scarab belongs in that collection. It is physical evidence of courage, craft, and the particular cruelty of being right about everything except one thing. For anyone interested in this era and what came before and after it, the mid-century motorsports exhibit is the place to start. Check hours and admission before you visit.

Further reading: the original Scarab archive piece on World of Speed, the Ferrari through the decades feature for context on the European teams the Scarab was competing against, and the famous race car drivers collection for the full sweep of the personalities that define this era.