Actor James Dean gave this car its nickname “Little Bastard” and the Porsche 550 Spyder sure is little. A full bred Sportscar from the days when racecar driver Hans Hermann drove this car underneath a barrier in the 1954 Mille Miglia. Less than a hundred examples were produced and that makes this car very hard to spot. Whether this one from Monaco is a real one? Sadly not, but that doesn’t make it any less special.
The amount of replicas of this car is not that high either. Only a handful of companies are engaged in producing these replicas. Then, how can you recognize a replica? Almost every replica has got a chrome edge around the windshield, while the original 550 Spyder had an extremely small windscreen. The original 550 Spyder was powered by a four cylinder engine with about 110 bhp. During the fifties, this was a serious competitor on the track, weighing only 612 kilos. Nowadays, original copies are easily worth over a million euro’s, if well maintained. Most of them are in museums or private collections and will probably be driven only very occasionally, or not at all. At least one of the 22 examples that were spotted until now, the one that was spotted near the Nürburgring , is an original 550 Spyder. However, coming across a beautiful replica, like spotters Mauske and Manfred did in Monaco, is of course just as cool!
