Lance Reventlow and The Scarab Racecar
I am surprised that the story of Lance Reventlow has not been made into a Hollywood movie. It has all of the elements of a blockbuster: Rich mother, one race car driving stepfather, and another stepfather, movie star named Cary Grant. Grant remained friends with Lance after the divorce from Lance's mother, Barbara Hutton, the heiress to the Woolworth fortune, the WalMart of it's day. Reventlow's father was a count, his other stepfather was a prince and Lance inherited the count title.
At the age of 12, Lance’s mother married Prince Igor Troubetzkoy who won the famous Targa Florio car race that year, thus leading to Lance's interest in motor sports.
Reventlow, who turned out to be a handsome fellow, married the famous and beautiful movie star, Jill St. John, and later an ex-Mouseketeer, Cheryl Holdridge, remained interested in pursuing motor sports, eventually deciding to build his own race car..
Lance’s race car is called the Scarab, it was fast and won many of the races it entered. The excetion was the Formula One, where they had a very bad outcome, likely due to the front-engine design car, when most of the other teams were changing to the mid-engine layout. But ignoring the Formula One difficulties, the Scarab sports cars were very successful and dominated United States racing in the late 1950's and early 1960's.
The Scarab was engineered and produced by a Who’s Who of the United States racing world in the late 1950's – even the pinstripe was done by the famous Von Dutch. Lance used many of the same people who would later work with Carroll Shelby. Carroll Shelby also won at least one race driving a Scarab.
Road & Track Magazine wrote about the Scarab Mark II in the February 1959 issue where they reported that it went from 0-60 MPH in 4.2 seconds; reached 161 MPH in one car and 174 MPH in another car on the straight at the Riverside race track. They called the Scarab “the most potent sports racing cars in the world”.
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