James Glickenhaus: “My vision is to build race cars for the road”

James Glickenhaus’ love of cars is well documented. The avid car collector owns some of the rarest and most unique vehicles ever made. But for the past few years, the aficionado has been working on his own road car and racing company, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus. As the company prepares for record sales and a busy motorsport season ahead, we speak to James about the new lubricant and technical partnership with Motul.

We’re a car company. We manufacture and sell road vehicles, from the SCG004 sportscar to the Glickenhaus Boot. This year we are hoping to deliver 30 to 40 road-legal vehicles, and we will look to grow very quickly to about 300 road-legal vehicles a year.

Do you operate internationally or only in North America?

Initially, we only sell them in North America because our cars are homologated and legal in the United States, but we are expanding that homologation, and we have tremendous interest from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and other parts of the world, so I think eventually we will sell worldwide.

We’re at the stage where Ferrari used to be, which is we use racing to develop and improve our cars. And all of that information goes into our road-legal cars, and it is the sole advertising that we do. Racing is very important to us because it allows us to test our cars, to develop them, and learn from them, and everything we learn goes directly into our road vehicles. What we learn at the Baja, the Nürburgring and Le Mans enables us to take a further step forward and to operate at the edge of engineering. This year we will race in the Nürburgring 24 Hours, WEC and Le Mans as well as the Baja 1000.

I have always loved beautiful race cars and I began collecting them when I made money in my film career. I love taking race cars and converting them so they can be driven on the road. And this vision of race cars for the road eventually turned into us designing, building and engineering our own from the ground up. Our first fully hands-on car was the SCG003. It’s the first vehicle that we built, designed and engineered from the ground up. Initially, we envisioned that as a race car only, but then we said “hey, you know this would make a fantastic road car”. So, we engineered a road version of it, and we've sold a number of those to customers and we are going to deliver another one very soon.

Motul has a long and wonderful history. It began in New York and eventually wound up moving to France, and it started out making lubricants for the industrial age before moving into motorsports. And we’re delighted to be a part of it. Motul is also racing at places like the Dakar and Baja. They’re really enthusiastic and they actually send people to these races to make the oil better. This is a great plus for us. I'm especially happy that Motul’s technical experts will be working with our engineers to customise the lubricants where necessary to our vehicles as they drive and race from the Baja to the Nürburgring, to the WEC, to Le Mans and onto Paris to Dakar. Three of our collection cars, our Ford MK-IV, our Ferrari P 3/4 and our Ferrari 412P raced against each other at Le Mans in 1967 and I remember Motul's sponsorship of that race fondly.” 

© Pictures: Glickenhaus Scuderia Racing, Hide Ishiura, Studio Zero

Check out the Baja Boot build movie (© DVL Film House):