For 20 years Peter Dietsch has been making supercars really earn their keep
MAN & MACHINE
I WAS ALWAYS going to be a petrolhead. My father Norbert worked for Paul Emery at his Fulham workshops and then joined Paul in the Grand Prix Midget scene, eventually buying and racing an Emery Dastle Mk7. We still have that car, which will get restored this year.
Growing up, we had a lot of Italian cars in the household, as dad’s best friend owned multiple dealerships over the years. A bright pink Lancia Beta Spider looked quite the part in the once-mean streets of Wandsworth where I grew up, whereas a loaned Lancia Y10 put modern-day superminis to shame. Our Touring was loaded with Alcantara and electric windows all round.
Both my sister and I learned to drive in it and I passed my test a few weeks after my birthday. I immediately bought my own Lancia Y10 Turbo. The clutch gave out on the way home, but I was already hooked. I heavily modified it and it eventually ran 200bhp with an ex-RAC Rally engine. At one stage we had six Y10s.
I then bought a Lancia Delta HPE HF Evo 500, the Series 2 Delta that never made it here, LHD-only and the sole example ever in the UK. It was wonderful, but I had lusted after a Ferrari since driving a good friend’s Testarossa when I was just 18. That dream was realised in 2003, aged 26, while working for McLaren Racing. I found a Monospeccio Testarossa in Switzerland. It was very cheap, low £20,000s, as no-one really wanted them, and it was just epic.
Over 12 years I used my Testarossa in every way a typical Testarossa wasn’t: the commute, supermarket, track-days, going to the dump. One day I couldn’t engage gear and a quick call to Elias Elia at Autofficina revealed the diff had exploded… whoops! The guys soon got it fixed.
In 2015 the Testarossa market went so crazy that I felt compelled to sell. The sensible thing was to invest in property, so I bought an S1 Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Again, I used it as a car should be used until I found a genuine dream car for sale in 2019, a RHD Lamborghini Diablo SV. I had fallen in love with the Diablo when the same friend with the Testarossa threw me the keys to h
