Real Deal: The Scarab

Scarab was an all-American open-wheel race car and sports car builder featuring cars designed and built by Tom Barnes and Dick Troutman for Reventlow Automobiles Inc.

The chevrolet engines were built by Traco Engineering. Nicknamed "The Rich Kids", Traco were the builders of the famous and consecutive winning Indianapolis 500 race cars driven by famed driver Bill Vukovich, as well as the highly publicized winning Ford T-birds at Daytona in the late fifties.

Troutman and Barnes was most successful building sports cars for amateur road racing in the USA in the 1950s. Chuck Daigh drove the Scarab sports car to victory in the 1958 Riverside International Grand Prix, beating a field of international factory teams including famous race car driver Phil Hill and the Scuderia Ferrari Team. Carroll Shelby drove the Scarab sports car to victory at the Continental Divide raceway in Castle Rock Colorado setting a new course record.

Scarab made an ill-fated entry into Formula One during the 1960 season with front-engined cars, which by then, were nearly obsolete. The engines in these front engine cars were 4 cylinder units similar in layout to the Offenhauser, but entirely of Scarab's own design.
They featured Desmodromic valve gear similar in design to that found on the Mercedes engine of the period and were built and maintained by Chuck Daigh.

The engines were the achilles heel of the team as the Desmo gear could not cope with the large amount of movement in the engine block and would reliably pull the valves closed too far resulting in failure. Scarab participated in five Grands Prix, entering a total of nine cars. Reventlow was joined by his engineer Chuck Daigh in piloting the blue and white liveried cars. Both Scarabs were entered in the Grands Prix of Monaco, Holland, Belgium, and France, while only Daigh's car was entered in the American Grand Prix. It should be noted that Daigh, while entered in the Dutch Grand Prix, did not race due to payment issues.

The following year Chuck Daigh went on to pilot one of the Scarabs in International Formula racing in Europe where he finished eighth, at Goodwood vying for the Lavant Cup, and finished seventh in a bid for the International Trophy. A rear-engined single-seater car was built, but never raced in a Formula One event, it ran once in Formula Libre race at Sandown Park in Australia with a Buick V8 engine.

The Scarab was first popularized in slot car racing by Monogram models and continues, in many forms, to be an iconic image from the early days of the Grand Prix.

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