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What kind of car can you get for $617,000?

Let’s see… The incomparable Lexus LFA, a few Merc SLS AMGs, a gently used Porsche Carrera GT, perhaps a beat-on secondhand McLaren F1, a nice Ferrari 599, or…

A Bertone Spicup, which looks like a refugee from a mashup of A Clockwork Orange and Mad Max. After languishing in the styling house’s vaults for years and undergoing a complete restoration, the concept car recently sold at auction for the princely sum of £400,000, or $617 grand at the current exchange rate.

Built on a BMW 2000 CS chassis, the one-off Spicup seems to have been essentially an attempt to prove to Bertone’s designers that a car featuring a retractable metal roof panel could be made and driven. To that end, instead of building the car as a static car show sculpture, the Spicup retained all the BMW running gear and can be flung into the corners if not quite as vigorously as the car it’s based on, then certainly more than most of its brethren at the ’69 Geneva car show, where it was unveiled.

The styling, needless to say, is impossibly campy, sporting a variety of vents, bumps and surfaces textures. If a tornado ripped through the BMW parts warehouse and the scattered wreckage reassembled itself on its own, the result could hardly look more haphazard. The interior, by contrast, is actually fairly forward-looking and coherent, except for the day-glo green color, and in spite of the fact that it features possibly the most uncomfortable-looking seats ever fitted to a car. The whole project is probably one that BMW and perhaps even Bertone would rather forget, and judging by the fact that I’d never heard of the car until today, I’d say they did a good job in letting the Spicup slide into oblivion. $617 large has a way of shining a spotlight on dark corners of automotive history and proves, perhaps, that obscurity itself can be a lucrative quality.