In the handwritten will of Mrs. West insisted that her brother-in-law Sol West, after her husband died earlier, would bury the car. If he did not, he would be largely disinherited. Mr. West “had other ideas for the Ferrari,” wrote Mr. Orth, but in the end the box went into the hole and a couple of cement trucks went to work and encased it.
“The story is true,” said David Williams, editor-in-chief of Prancing Horse. “She was buried with her Ferrari.” The Ferrari registry Barchetta.cc confirms that Sandra West, the owner of chassis number 5055 left-hand drive, was “buried in a car in San Antonio”.
Jim Dossey, a lawyer with Dossey & Jones in The Woodlands, Texas, said being buried with your car is “clearly allowed in Texas.”
He added: “You don’t have to be buried in a coffin – there is no law against an alternative container. Although cemeteries may have rules about that.”
Mrs. West’s Ferrari had a history of its own. The Ferrari 330 GT Registry reports that the car was purchased in 1964 from Chinetti Motors in Greenwich, Conn., by TV producer Burt Sugarman, and was originally painted in “Grigio Notte” (midnight gray) with a beige interior. This was one of six or seven Ferraris that Mr. Sugarman claimed to have bought from Chinetti, and he remembers usually having them repainted in apple-red metal flake. Mr. Sugarman was a close friend of famed California customizer George Barris, and it was Richard Korkes, store foreman of the Barris Kustoms store, who repainted it that same year. A photo shows Mr Korkes, who built cars for many celebrities, with Mr Barris – and the now red Ferrari.
Mr. Sugarman can’t remember if he sold the Ferrari directly to Ms. West, but he said he knew her well and that she told him she loved the car and wanted to be buried in it. “Sandy was a piece of work,” he said.
And what about Ms. West’s other Ferraris? A 1974 Scaglietti 246 GTS, chassis number 08454, sold in 2016 at RM Sotheby’s Phoenix for $396,000.
