Dean’s need for speed saw him trade his Porsche Speedster for one of the new 550 Spyders from Porsche’s US dealer Johnny von Neuman.
He bought the car planning to test it out at the upcoming races at Salinas. Dean was thrilled when he got delivery of his 550 Spyder, chassis number 550-0055 on September 21, 1955. Over the coming weeks, Dean without the experience to handle the car, was involved in a number of incidents leaving the Spyder scarred, as seen in many of the last photos taken of Dean. He had at least two minor shunts on the street resulting in a missing driver’s side turn signal lens, and a sloppy silver cover up spray job across the black rubber gasket around the oil cooler cover. There is also damage to the front hood creasing it diagonally plus also another more noticeable crease in the rear quarter panel where Dean spun out on Mulholland Drive and hit some garbage cans. There was no time to fix the damage before the race weekend at Salinas.
Jimmy took his Spyder to sign writer Dean Jeffries who put on Dean’s provisional race number 130 in washable black paint on the doors and bonnets as Dean did not have his permanent Cal Club license yet. Jeffries also painted “Little Bastard” in script across the real deck lid above the license plate light. “Little Bastard” was a nickname adopted by James Dean after Jack Warner (Warner Bros) once referred to Jimmy as a little bastard after Jimmy refused to vacate his temporary East of Eden trailer on the Warner Bros lot.
