It was commissioned by a Japanese Abarth collector, Shiro Kosaka. He contacted Lorenzo Ramaciotti in 1996 (head of Pininfarina at the time), but as for who actually designed the car, it's a little less clear. Many sources mention *rumours* of it being Lorenzo himself, and in Chris Rees' chat with Lorenzo himself, he brings it up by saying "he'd designed" a car for this Japanese friend ... but as the head of a very prominent design house, I can't see his time being affordable for a private buyer, so I suspect when he uses that sort of language, he means it in some sort of project management or creative director sense.

That's the only way I can fit it with the confident-sounding, and seemingly pretty well-informed comments by Allemano in the Autopuzzles thread that it was "designed by Italian Pierangelo Andreani who was a freelancer".

The narrative that ties it together in my mind is that Shiro Kosaka contacts Pininfarina (or maybe goes directly to Lorenzo himself, since they're supposedly friends) to make an Abarth-inspired kit for his AZ-1, then Pininfarina do the design work through freelancer Pierangelo Andreani, with Lorenzo overseeing the project.

It seems that once the designs were done, Shiro Kosaka had the kit made by Saburo Japan (which makes more sense than shipping the car to Italy and back so they can make it all fit), presumably meaning that the drawings were sent from Italy.

The kit was also offered to sale to the general public, presumably as a way to try to recoup the (undoubtedly pretty significant) costs. The kit was sold for 1 million yen for the kit, plus 1 million yen for fitting and painting, for a total of 2 million yen - that's a third MORE than the entire AZ-1 cost, and that's during the Japanese recession, and on a car that was already considered too expensive. Add in the, err, "polarising" styling, and the fact that the car it's built for was produced with under 5000 units, and it's no surprise they only sold 5.

By the way, the article and sites say that the "Abarth Scorpione" name is not official - it has no official name. In fact, the Japanese sources seem to just refer to it as the "Saburo kit".

Random facts and observations:

Headlights are from a 2nd gen Honda Today

Taillights are from Fiat Coupe (which interestingly means the reverse light is only on the right side, and the rear fog light is only on the left side - this is/was common on European cars)

There seem to be two versions of the rear bumper, with either one or two exhaust cutouts. I'm not sure whether this is a modification - two sources say it was designed for the dual-exit Mazdaspeed muffler, but the car in the article has one.