James Dean was 24, at the height of everything, with a silver Porsche 550 Spyder he’d named Little Bastard and marked with the number 130 on its doors. The car was light, quick and built for nothing but speed. When Dean died in it in 1955, the Spyder was only getting started.
The insurer wrote the car off, and that should have been the end of it. Instead the wreck was sold on, and the trouble spread outward in pieces. A doctor bought it and stripped it for parts. He dropped the engine into his own race car and lent the transmission and suspension to a friend. At the next race meeting the friend crashed and was killed, and the idea of a curse began to take hold.
What was left went to a customiser named George Barris, who loaned the shell to a road-safety tour. For two years the battered silver Porsche sat in car parks and cinemas as a warning to young drivers. It caught fire in storage and somehow survived with little more than two melted tyres. A pair of tyres sold off the car reportedly blew at the same moment, putting their new owner off the road.
Then, in 1960, the car simply vanished. It disappeared from a sealed boxcar in transit and was never seen again. A million-dollar reward in 2005 turned up nothing, and with Barris now gone too, the trail has long since gone cold.
