The F1 Car Ecclestone Never Let Race Comes to Estoril Classics

The Estoril Classics, taking place from 18–20 September, will host one of the most unusual chapters in Formula 1 history. The Riviera F.1 170 was designed to contest the 1980 Formula 1 World Championship but never made it onto a Grand Prix grid. Now, 45 years after it was conceived, the Italian single-seater will make its appearance at the Autódromo do Estoril, finally giving fans the chance to see a car that spent decades as one of motorsport’s great mysteries.

The Riviera story began in 1979, when Varedo-born Formula 2 driver Alberto Colombo was looking to fulfil his ambition of reaching Formula 1. After spells with ATS and Merzario, Colombo found the backing he needed in his home region to attempt to build an independent Italian team. Financiers from the Brianza area joined forces to create Riviera F.1, a small-scale operation with ambitions that extended far beyond its modest resources.

Technical responsibility was entrusted to engineer Giorgio Valentini, a respected figure in Italian motorsport who had worked for Autodelta and was responsible for the 1979 Merzario A3 project and, later, the Osella FA1C. Over approximately 1,200 hours of work, Valentini and his assistant Savoldelli developed the Riviera F.1 170, a ground-effect single-seater powered by the venerable Ford Cosworth DFV V8. The project was documented in ten substantial folders of drawings, while the monocoque construction was entrusted to British company Thompson and the suspension to Preatoni of Novara.

Behind the initiative was Paolo Barzaghi, a textile industry businessman and the project’s main financial backer, alongside Enrico Bogani, Riccardo Miani and former Inter Milan captain Giacinto Facchetti. Riviera was based in Milan, with its operational headquarters at Alberto Colombo’s Sanremo Racing facility in Varedo. Le Coq Sportif was lined up as the main sponsor, with plans to enter the Riviera in four Grands Prix in 1980: Italy, France, Britain and Germany.

Construction progressed using some of the equipment acquired from Willi Kauhsen’s team, which had meanwhile abandoned its Formula 1 ambitions. The Riviera, however, was not an evolution of the Kauhsen car. It was an entirely new design, built from scratch, with only some components from the acquired equipment being reused, including the nose. The team eventually assembled four Cosworth DFV engines, as the project began to take shape and the prospect of seeing Colombo on a Grand Prix grid appeared increasingly realistic.

But Formula 1 in 1980 was a world in which ambitions could grow much faster than budgets. When the car was completed at the beginning of that year, it was around 20kg over its intended weight. The bigger problem, however, was not the car itself but the cost of putting it on the grid. The initial budget had been set at around 600 million lire — equivalent to approximately €1.75 million today — but had already doubled. To guarantee a competitive presence throughout the World Championship, around 10 billion lire would have been required, equivalent to approximately €29.4 million today.

There was one final attempt to save the project. In early 1980, Bernie Ecclestone examined Riviera’s technical drawings and financial structure during a meeting at Milan’s Hotel Principe di Savoia. There was interest, but also conditions: Ecclestone wanted a commitment to the entire World Championship, guarantees of continuity and a three-year competitive programme. The deal never materialised.

That was the moment Alberto Colombo’s dream came to an end. The Riviera had been built, the engine could be fired up and there was a team ready to attempt the step into Formula 1. What was missing was something no technical solution or engineering drawing could provide: the money required to make the grid. The project died before reaching its first Grand Prix and the Riviera F.1 170 was left standing still, never having completed a single lap.

For decades, the single-seater virtually disappeared. The few surviving photographs kept alive the memory of a project that had come tantalisingly close to Formula 1, but whose true story was difficult to establish. In 2020, a feature in Italian magazine Autosprint revived interest in the story. Five years later, businessman and historic single-seater racer Marco Fumagalli discovered the original bodywork in a warehouse that was about to be demolished. The original drawings by Giorgio Valentini were found alongside it.

Fumagalli joined forces with historic racing car specialist Massimo Pollini and began the painstaking work of restoring the project conceived four and a half decades earlier. Piece by piece, the Riviera was brought back to life, returning it to what Valentini and the Riviera F.1 team had envisaged in 1980.

On 18 November 2025, at the Cremona Circuit near Milan, the moment that had been delayed for 45 years finally arrived. Marco Fumagalli climbed into the cockpit and, accompanied by Massimo Pollini, took the Riviera F.1 170 onto the track. Four sessions and 15 laps followed — the first ever running of a car that had been designed to compete in the Formula 1 World Championship but had never previously turned a wheel in anger.

For Fumagalli, the test also provided the opportunity to discover the behaviour of a car he had never driven before.

“It’s a wing car and I had never driven this type of car before, apart from a few laps in friends’ cars. I used my Riviera for a long test and I can say that it is faster through the corners compared with my Theodore and Ensign cars. The cockpit is smaller, but all these wing cars have that little problem,” he explains.

The test also allowed him, for the first time, to experience the ground-effect performance that Valentini had sought to achieve.

“I felt the ground effect during the first lap of the test at Cremona, in the winter of 2025, at the end of the straight. The car was very close to the ground, whereas in the pits it sits five centimetres higher,” recalls Fumagalli.

They were the first metres of a single-seater that, for 45 years, had existed only as a project, a collection of drawings and a memory before finally displaying the characteristics for which it had been designed.

That is the story the Riviera F.1 170 will now bring to the Estoril Classics. Not as a former Formula 1 car returning to competition — because it never actually raced — but as the surviving evidence of a project that was born to take on the world’s best, was stopped before it could try, and found a second chance 45 years later.

At the Autódromo do Estoril, fans will be able to see at close quarters a car that spent decades waiting for the moment when it would finally cease to be just a project on paper, and meet the driver who ultimately brought it to life: Marco Fumagalli.

Tickets for the 2026 Estoril Classics, taking place from 18–20 September, are already on sale, with more than 50 per cent of the available tickets already sold. Admission is free for children up to the age of 15 when accompanied by an adult, with a maximum of two children or young people per adult. Parking in the unpaved car park is free, subject to availability, while access to the main straight grandstand is free for all spectators.