Overview

A 1953 Siata 300BC raced by Robert T. Keller and Paul Farago at Sebring and a string of USAF-base SCCA meets, whose true chassis identity was lost for decades under a mistaken “ST430BC” number until a fragment of its original stamping turned up welded inside a rear fender well.

History

ST404BC’s early life is not documented with certainty, but researcher John de Boer believes it is “very probably” the car raced in 1953 by Robert T. Keller (Wilmington, DE, and later Detroit, MI) and Paul Farago (MI), initially fitted with a 1100cc Fiat engine. Farago and Keller are believed to have owned and raced a Fiat 1100S beforehand, possibly the source of the “500160” engine number that later stood in for the car’s VIN. The car is a spider/spyder that was sometimes raced with a hardtop fitted, which made it look like a coupe: as John de Boer puts it, “ST404BC masqueraded for a time as a coupe but had a hard-top fitted to a spider/spyder body” — it is not one of the three 300BCs (ST417BC, ST434BC and ST437BC) actually completed in closed berlinetta form. It is also the only known 300BC with evidence of a second, since-removed fuel filler, likely added for the extra range needed at Sebring.

The car then disappears from the record for some years before resurfacing in California during the 1980s as an unnumbered “Spider” with small brakes, associated with the names Charles “Chuck” Betz / Fred E. Peters and Ron Cameron (San Diego). A confusing decade followed in the 1990s: the car passed through Truck & Equipment Leasing Corp. (New Jersey, tied to Harvey Siegel) and Thoroughbred Cars, Inc. (Arizona), and was sold at the Kruse International auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, in January 1994 — at which point auction paperwork mistakenly recorded the chassis as “ST430BC,” a number that in fact belonged to a different, genuine 300BC. Buyer Herbert C. Pell (Tucson) and subsequent owner Raymond Milo both worked from this incorrect number; Milo eventually found the “ST430BC” mark crudely stamped behind the master-cylinder reservoir and determined it was not an authentic Siata stamping.

The car was later sold to Germany, where it was publicly offered for sale again in 2018, and where it remains with current owner Uwe Wiessmath, who — working with John de Boer — resolved the long-running identity confusion by finding a metal fragment stamped “ST404BC,” almost certainly cut from the original firewall, welded into the driver’s side rear fender well. De Boer’s research concluded this was “very probably the former Robert T. Keller car,” restoring its correct identity.