From Jalopnik:
Watch A 28.5L Fiat Start For The First Time In A Century And Be Afraid
When most people — especially in the US — think of Fiat, they picture small cars. Little tiny baubles with watch-like engines. That, of course, isn't remotely close to the truth. There was a time when Fiat built giants, like the Beast of Turin — a 28.5L racer designed to break a speed record. And it's just been fired up for the first time since 1911.
There were just two Fiat S76 record-breakers built in 1910 and 1911, and this one that has just been rebuilt and restored, appears to be a mix of those two cars. The record the car was designed to break was the land speed record then held by Blitzen-Benz. Fiat attacked that record with not just the sheer, insane scale of that 28.5L engine, but also with some genuinely advanced tech — four valves per cylinder, multi-spark, overhead cam, and all this added up to somewhere near 300 HP — that's astounding for 1910.
To put things into scale, 28.5 liters displacement is 1739.18 cubic inches or a smidge above one cubic foot. This is a monster. I love the way the entire body of the car shudders when it initially fires.
