From Baja Touareg to Half-11: Joe Scarbo's Five Wildest Motors
Joe Scarbo is the name behind the Defender Trophy Truck, but the race engineer's portfolio runs much wider. A round-up of his work shows five very different machines, from a desert-racing Volkswagen to a pair of Porsche 911-based specials and a race car weighing less than 600kg.
The most serious motorsport pedigree belongs to the VW Baja Touareg. In 2008 it became the first turbodiesel to compete in Baja's Trophy Truck class, producing 550bhp, and Scarbo was its race engineer — his first job out of college. He also worked on the Radford Type 62-2, a modern take on Lotus's abandoned 1960s Le Mans idea, where he handled suspension development for the car's Pikes Peak programme.
The rest of the list is more eccentric. Scarbo has built several SV F1s — steel-tube single-seaters, typically powered by a GM V8 for maximum torque and noise. Then there is the Hoonapigasus, a project that began as Scarbo's idea for the ultimate race-retro Porsche 911 and ended with Ken Block racing it up Pikes Peak in 2022, where it suffered an engine failure. Finally, the OilstainLab Half-11 uses the front half of a 1960s 911 and a custom spaceframe rear built around a V8; Scarbo contributed the chassis development.
Big Powertrains, Retro Shells and Pikes Peak: The Scarbo Formula
Big Powertrains, Retro Shells: The Scarbo Recipe
Read across the five projects, a consistent engineering signature emerges. Three of the builds pair a familiar base — a VW Touareg or a Porsche 911 — with an outsized powertrain it never shipped with: the 550bhp turbodiesel in the Baja Touareg, the GM V8s in the SV F1 and the Half-11. The SV F1 also shows a fixation on low mass, weighing under 600kg. That pattern is visible in the verified details; the interpretation is that Scarbo's value to partners lies in making improbable combinations work — race engineering on the Touareg, suspension development on the Radford Type 62-2, chassis development on the Half-11 and the original idea behind the Hoonapigasus.
Why Pikes Peak Keeps Appearing
Two of the five projects — the Radford Type 62-2 and the Hoonapigasus — were aimed at Pikes Peak, and Ken Block's 2022 run gave Scarbo's 911 project its widest audience before ending in engine failure. The hillclimb is one of the few events where one-off machines can race without production-car homologation, which makes it a natural stage for builders like Scarbo. This suggests his work will stay visible at the annual event rather than in any production-car programme, although that is an inference rather than a stated plan.
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