A V12 Go-Kart That Thrills, and Hooks You for Good.

There are moments you never forget. For me, the start-up of a V12 is one of them, any keen enthusiast knows that sound the instant it turns over. So nobody will be surprised that my anticipation, on the way to the Eccentrica V12, was running rather high.

Before we get to that intoxicating moment, we have to go back a little. The Eccentrica had been catching my eye all year, on Instagram, in concours reports, in press round-ups. Then came the ICE Race 2026 in St. Moritz: as always, an absolute parade of the most beautiful classics and the most ferocious machines against the most beautiful backdrop. The Engadin in January, the lake frozen, the peaks lit pink, woodsmoke and champagne chill in the air. And there, among Bugattis, Ferraris and several Singer 911s, the Eccentrica, the restomod no enthusiast should miss.

It is the eve of ICE 2026, a short walk on a quiet tip-off, and suddenly there it stands, in a shade that at minus ten degrees looks almost like frosted dark brown. Rose Phoenix, they call the colour. A lovely name, and one I could not care less about right now, every sense is busy taking in this masterpiece. Its flat, broad shape stirs me exactly as it did back in the nineties. Eroticism worked in metal, I think to myself, and keep staring.

I fall into conversation with the team, who are putting the final touches to a stand. Preparations for a stage, an ordinary exhibitor’s booth perhaps? Nice idea, but not at Eccentrica. What this boutique marque rolls out tells you a great deal about how the team and the company around Emanuel Colombini tick. SAMIGO Fuel, a pop-up event space styled like an old filling station, already standing in St. Moritz for the ICE Race, is promptly turned into Eccentrica’s unofficial headquarters: their events run here, the car sits out front, countless details are tailored to the brand. By now I sense a line that has run through my head all my life: they don’t act cool, they are cool.

After a lively, funny, warm and genuinely revealing evening, we sit down to talk. Colombini orders an espresso and tells the story as if to an old friend, not a journalist. „The Diablo was my dream car as a kid”, he says, his eyes somewhere between 1990 and today. „I remember it shiny and red on the cover of Quattroruote.” He laughs. Ten years later, he says, he saw a Diablo again in a showroom, half-forgotten, but still „charming and gritty”. The line that follows I write down later in my hotel notebook, because it captures the thesis of the whole project in a single breath: „I called it, and still call it, a 600-hp go-kart.”

Anyone who applies that to a mid-engined V12 supercar has a very clear idea of what the car should become. Colombini, born in 1978, was CEO of his family’s furniture group, Colombini Group, seven brands, 1,250 employees, until 2019; today he is its president, runs a parallel season in Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe (Pro-Am class, third in the 2023 European championship, Team Iron Lynx with co-driver Emanuele Zonzini), and on the side runs a workshop that makes the best of everything northern Italy still does well. „We like 19 because it’s a prime number and it appears in the Fibonacci sequence”, he says somewhere between two sips of espresso, and I nod as if that were a perfectly normal answer to why one builds nineteen cars and not twenty. „The most beautiful forms in nature emerge through the Fibonacci sequence. That’s why 19 and not 20. It’s a philosophy.” It is exactly this kind of answer that separates Eccentrica from Singer Vehicle Design (California, from 1.8 million Dollar) and Eagle E-Type (UK, from 600,000 Pounds): none of those builders would ever have said „Fibonacci” without a PR team having to issue a correction afterwards.

I called it, and still call it, a 600-hp go-kart.Emanuel Colombini · Founder, Eccentrica

At some point I tell Colombini about my own Diablo summer of 2003, drove an SV through Tuscany, and after three hours the gearbox jammed on a climb near Volterra; my day ended in a workshop in Pisa. He nods slowly. „That’s exactly what we wanted to fix”, he says. Then he explains what his co-founder Andrea Colombo summed up for Britain’s Car magazine in one line: „The car is already a beast, we wanted to find a way to master it.”

Built by hand, in an old carpentry

In concrete terms: new camshafts, electronic throttle bodies, a new flywheel, a completely reworked Capristo exhaust, a modern ECU architecture that finally lets the 5.7-litre block breathe cleanly. The six-speed gearbox is newly built with its own ratios, reverse moves to a button, so the open gate is reserved for the six forward gears. On the brakes Colombo is blunt: „The first-generation brakes simply didn’t work.” Brembo, newly developed, in the track variant with extra cooling channels. Power steering as standard, but tuned with restraint, so the car still feels like a Diablo, not a Tesla. Active dampers by TracTive. Pirelli P Zero Trofeo R. The design was handled by the Milanese studio Borromeo de Silva, which I have rated as one of Italy’s most exciting design houses since the Lancia Delta Futurista by Automobili Amos, the Nardone Porsche 928 comes from this studio too. „For those of us who grew up in the nineties”, the studio said at the unveiling, „the Diablo is not just a car, it’s a real icon.” In San Marino, everyone signs that sentence.

We couldn’t drive the car in St. Moritz, sadly. No winter tyres, not feasible in deep snow. But Colombini had a consolation prize in the quiver: about a week later I fly to Bologna and drive the 90 minutes to San Marino to see the workshop where these cars are actually built. Eccentrica sits in a former carpentry on the edge of town, Colombini converted it because it belonged to the family, and because his grandmother once cut wood for furniture there. Inside it is smaller than I expected. Three lifts, four final-assembly stations, a store of donor cars, a paint booth. It smells of aluminium shavings, machine oil and a trace of Alcantara. Four mechanics in dark-blue overalls work quietly; one of them plays Italo-pop from an old JBL speaker wedged somewhere between a workbench and the wall. In the middle of the room, on a stand, the Pacchetto Titano in full carbon bodywork, the track-focused variant, also just 19 cars, a separate run. Beside it, half-trimmed, a Heritage Rose Phoenix for a customer in Hong Kong, cream Alcantara, milled gear lever, the shift gate not yet fitted. I’m allowed to pick up a 3D-printed titanium rear diffuser, it is as light as a pizza box and milled in a geometry that would have been technically impossible to make in the nineties. This is not a showroom. It is a workshop. Three cars a year, a workforce of forty-seven, no growth plan in the conventional sense. Whoever does this does not do it for PR. And yet, over the farewell espresso, the real twist arrives. Perhaps because I hid my sadness about not driving in St. Moritz less well than I’d hoped, Colombini threw me a glimmer of hope: „Our team will be at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, and we have a car in Miami.” And what petrolhead could say no to that? Before I could even answer, the appointment was already blocked in my phone.

Miami: the promise, redeemed

Said and done. We meet Max Paulus, he looks after a few of Eccentrica’s exclusive clients and becomes our bringer of joy as he waits for us outside the hotel early in the morning. The car stands there, looking like a bull before the fight. A short walk-around first, where for the first time I see the entire aero package of the Sport Titano variant up close in matte carbon. The forged-carbon wheels. The fine panel gaps, which have nothing to do with what Lamborghini accepted as tolerance in the nineties. Even the fuel cap is new, milled, not moulded. It is a car that, everywhere you touch it, says: we made an effort.

So, into the car. The hands feel the leather of the classic three-spoke wheel. The right hand moves to the cool steel knob of the open-gate gearbox, a quick left-right wiggle out of habit. All free, all firm, all solid. I can’t help thinking just one word: awesome. Not loftily eloquent, but honest. However old you are, a petrolhead stays a petrolhead. Just before the first ecstasy I hold my breath for a second. The starter sounds like every good V12, spins briefly, and after a tenth of a second of silence the V12 wakes vigorously to life.

Instantly. There is no warm-up phase, no courtesy seconds in which the engine sorts itself out, the V12 is simply there, and it fills the cockpit with a sound somewhere between an old Formula 1 car and a bull in the arena. Capristo rebuilt the exhaust from scratch, and you can hear that someone took care who did not come from the marketing department. The sound isn’t tuned for volume but for character, it has resonances a modern ECU would long since have bred out of the V12. Max nods. I grin. We both grin. First gear, gently, the clutch bites, the car is still cold, the V12 not yet at temperature. But even a careful brush of the throttle is enough to sense what will want sorting under the right foot later. The revs climb cleanly, no dead spot, no delay, no software cutting in. At 3,500 rpm I shift unhurriedly to second, the gate catches the lever with a mechanical clack, precise, full, unambiguous. It is a tool, not a design study.

We roll out of Collins Avenue, over the MacArthur Causeway. To the left, the first sun over Biscayne Bay; to the right, the Downtown Miami skyline slowly waking. Then into Brickell, where the towers stand so close that the V12’s note is thrown between them like rolling thunder that can’t decide which way to stay. But even what would be „much too fast” in Miami bores the autobahn-spoiled German editor, or at least leaves him hungry for open road. Eccentrica foresaw this. Max leads us out of the city, north-west, to an unremarkable gate: The Concours Club, a private members’ track in Opa-locka, a good two miles of asphalt, closed, safe, empty. Here, Max says, here we can really drive the car.

First lap, third gear, full pull, the V12 hauls the needle to the stop at 7,500, the Capristo flaps wide open, and suddenly you understand why Eccentrica organised this track. On the road this car is a promise. Here it is the redemption. Braking into the fourth from full speed, the Brembo bite point is harder than anything I know from modern supercars, and exactly what an analog car needs. A lift on turn-in to a double-left, back on the throttle at the apex, the TracTive dampers keep the body calm without swallowing what the track is telling you. The rear works with me, never surprising me. Top Gear summed the whole exercise up in one line I couldn’t have written myself: „Monstrously analog, a wonderful fight to drive fast, but unlikely to fall apart in the driveway or melt in the rain.” That’s exactly it. A modern Ferrari SF90 has almost twice the power and is, of course, faster, yet tamer, and nowhere near as emotionally thrilling as what is working away under me right now. The Eccentrica V12 is a promise from a time when the promise had to be enough.

We drive back towards the hotel, the cockpit filled with the slow, fat rumble of the V12 after the track session. Max sits to my right, silent, grinning. The hour and a half in the Eccentrica fly by, they feel as short as a standing espresso in a Milan café, yet echo longer in my head than most of the liaisons I’ve had with other sports cars. As I get out, I take hold of the steel shift knob one more time, cold, heavy, perfect, and think: this is the car I wasn’t allowed to drive on the ice of St. Moritz. Today I understood why it was worth the wait. If you would like to know more about the build, the remaining allocation or an introduction to the team, Max Paulus will point you the right way, his details are at the end of this article.