Hilton Head Ferrari guru goes from the shop floor to the driver’s seat

The white Fiat Abarth pulled onto the road and began its climb toward the mountains.

Mario Grande, not yet a teenager in the mid-1950s, watched the car’s ascent from the balcony of his home in Nicastro, Italy.

He knew the boy who drove the Abarth, knew the boy’s father had money — the man owned a local bus company.

Behind Grande, on the second floor of the modest row house in the southern part of the country, his mother, sister and aunt sewed. They were seamstresses, his father a laborer. His parents weren’t poor, but they couldn’t afford a sporty Fiat coupe.

And Grande, who was born just as World War II was wrapping up, wouldn’t be able to drive one. He was young, yes, but age wasn’t the issue.

He sat on the balcony and looked at the cast on his left leg. He’d missed almost a whole year of school because of surgeries. His friends would gather in the street below and yell up to him, ask him why he couldn’t come down.

“I said, ‘Someday I’m gonna drive one of those cars,’ ” Grande, said, his thoughts still in Italy as he sat at the dining room table of his Indigo Run home on Hilton Head Island.

“You know what?” he said, in a thick Italian accent. “Then I could tell people God gave me this” — he gestured to his skinny, scarred leg and club foot, wrapped in a sneaker with a thick sole — “for a reason.”

“And He gave me a brain and a heart.”

To Grande’s right, through the kitchen, past the laundry room and into the garage, sat his light blue Ferrari 456 GT.

‘Godfather of Ferrari’

The Ferrari sitting in Grande’s garage isn’t one he restored.

He’s tinkered with it, but he didn’t have to gut and reassemble it like he did the 1958 Alfa Romeo Sprint, 1968 Ferrari 330 GTC and 1969 Ferrari Dino GP. Those are the three cars the retired mechanic and dealer has restored since moving to Hilton Head in 1999.

Grande left Italy in 1966 and came to the United States to work at his older brother’s car repair shop in Pittsburgh. During the next 30 years, he worked his way up from mechanic to owner, and he sold high-end cars to high-profile folks, such as Steelers quarterback Kordell Stewart.

Now he’s a member of the Lowcountry Oyster & Motorcar Driving Society and a regular at the annual Hilton Head Island Motoring Festival & Concours d’Elegance.

“He’s sort of the godfather of Ferrari,” said Carolyn Vanagel, the festival’s president, who explained Grande’s been instrumental in attracting cars from the Ferrari Club of America to the annual showcase.

‘I want to be a mechanic’

“It’s a car for older people,” Grande said, gesturing to the 456 GT with the automatic transmission.

He walked with an uneven gait past the Ferrari into his house and sat at the dining room table.

When it was dinner time back in Nicastro, where he apprenticed as a teenage mechanic, he and his three older brothers would hear their mother call from one street over that it was time to eat.

Even though his brothers were mechanics, his parents tried to steer him away from the trade. Stay in school, they said. But Grande, who had to repeat a couple grade levels, wasn’t interested in school.

On a middle school field trip, his teacher took his class up the road heading into the mountains. The road was narrow and curvy, its edges bound by a three-foot stone wall that snaked up the hills. He heard the car before he saw it.

A Lancia Appia accelerating through its gears. The car his brother had been fixing. Elvidio Grande at the wheel, on a road test.

That same day his teacher gave him an assignment: What do you want to be when you grow up?

“I said, ‘Some day, when I grow up, I want to be a mechanic, so I can drive and road-test every possible car I can,’ ” Mario Grande said.

‘A piece of jewelry’

Bill Neidhardt had parked his Triumph TR3 along the curb, standard procedure if you drove your show car to a Lowcountry Oyster and Motorcar luncheon at the golf club.

He watched as a short man with an Italian accent inspected the white roadster, which had taken Neidhardt 25 years to restore.

“He made some comments and picked out a couple of flaws” — a few bolt heads that were tarnished — “in the engine compartment,” Neidhardt said.

“And that was the start of our relationship.”

Neidhardt, who’s known Grande since 2008, watched — and helped — as the Italian restored the 1968 Ferrari 330 GTC over two-plus years. At first the car’s guts were all over Grande’s garage. Grande had to rebuild the engine.

“It looked like a piece of jewelry,” Neidhardt said. “It was immaculate.”

When the car was ready, the men took it out for a road test. The friends made sure they were obeying the speed limit as they came off the Cross Island Bridge.

The Ferrari had a manual transmission, so Neidhardt drove.

‘I knew the language’

Grande remembers the Argentine engineer who wheeled the Jaguar XKE into a Pittsburgh repair shop; it was another of the cars Grande wanted to own.

But he was just mechanic then. That was 1966.

In 1974, he and Elvidio, who’d moved to the United States in the late 1950s, opened Auto Palace.

They specialized in fixing European cars. During the winters, when business was slow, they would import Italian cars, restore them and sell them to make some money on the side.

Grande took over Auto Palace in 1981. He got a $50,000 line of credit from a bank to purchase four Alfa Romeos. He sold more than 20 the following year. He added Maserati to his line in 1984, Lamborghini two years later.

He was able to find Alfa Romeo “lemons” — still under warranty — that the manufacturer had given up on, fix them and resell them for a profit.

“I knew the language,” he said, explaining he was able to deal with his fellow Italians across the Atlantic Ocean, who helped him find rare tools and parts.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the January 2000 sale of Auto Palace to David Scaife, who’s connected with the city’s well-known and wealthy Mellon family.

Since moving to Hilton Head, Grande has entered two cars in the annual car competition Concours d’Elegance. He jokes that the festival always holds a spot for him.

“We know he’s gonna bring a good car, let’s just say that,” Vanagel said.

He’s got his eye on a 1979 Ferrari 308 GTB Dry Sump for this year’s festival. A special car, he says. Rare.

He won’t be able to drive it, though. It has a manual transmission. His left leg doesn’t bend enough for him to operate the clutch.

As he sat at his dining room table, he recalled how his gym teacher back in Italy used to give him passing marks. “Just do what you can,” he remembers the teacher saying.

He said his childhood experience — his club foot — taught him not to be embarrassed.

It helped him relate to people.

And motivated him to rebuild rare cars.

It drove him to be better.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 4:51 PM with the headline "Hilton Head Ferrari guru goes from the shop floor to the driver’s seat."