A Fiat 500 that sat rotting in a barn for 25 years has emerged as a rally-tinged restomod from a British outfit called La Cinquecento, making its public debut at the Tutto Bene hillclimb in Italy. The car looks like it belongs on a 1970s Monte Carlo stage, not in a dusty shed.
The project is the brainchild of Max Kindersley, who supplied the donor car himself and enlisted Milan-based design studio BorromeodeSilva to rethink its proportions. That studio has serious form. They shaped the Lamborghini Diablo-based Eccentrica and the Lancia Delta-based Automobili Atmos Futurista and Safarista, two projects that proved you can radically rework Italian legends without stripping them of their soul.
The restomod keeps the original silhouette but swells it with wider fenders, deeper side skirts, and rally-spec auxiliary lights mounted on the front bumper. Matte-finish disc wheels fill the arches. The red paint is offset by creme accents inside, where saddle-colored leather covers the bucket seats and door cards, and vintage carpets line the floor.
Under the rear deck sits a twin-cylinder engine borrowed from the Fiat 126, fitted with a twin-spark ignition system. La Cinquecento is keeping the power figure to itself for now, which either means it is modest enough to invite ridicule or they are saving the number for a proper reveal. The company says response and torque are both improved, which in a car that weighs roughly as much as a large dining table, probably translates into a genuinely different driving experience.
The chassis work sounds more extensive than the engine swap. Suspension, braking, steering, cooling, and electrical systems have all been reworked. That is every system in the car except the body shell, meaning what you are looking at is closer to a bespoke build than a simple restoration with upgrades.
Kindersley framed the philosophy simply: “The idea was never to change that. We wanted to take everything that makes the original so special and see how far we could develop it, to make it faster, sharper and better engineered, without losing the reason you wanted a 500 in the first place.”
The restomod market has become crowded with six-figure reimaginings of classic Porsches, Land Rovers, and Broncos. Most of those projects target wealthy buyers who want nostalgia without compromise and are willing to pay supercar money for it. The original Fiat 500 occupies a very different space. It was a people’s car, a city runabout designed to motorize postwar Italy.
Turning it into a collector’s object requires a lighter touch, and the risk of over-engineering something so inherently simple is real.
La Cinquecento says it will build a limited, numbered series and is accepting expressions of interest through its website. Pricing has not been disclosed, which is becoming a familiar move in this segment. If you have to ask, the theory goes, you are not the customer.
But with a 500 as the starting point, the ceiling for what the market will bear is lower than it would be for a Diablo or a Delta Integrale. Whether the numbers work out depends on how many buyers are willing to pay bespoke money for a car originally built to be disposable. The hillclimb debut suggests La Cinquecento wants to prove the car’s credentials on a road, not just on a concours lawn, and that alone sets it apart from half the restomods on the market right now.
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