One of the rarest, most bizarre and most sought after Vespa scooters of all time is for sale ... at around half the price it usually sells for.
Created specifically for French Special Forces and French Foreign Legion paratroopers fighting the second IndoChina War during the 1950s, the Vespa TAP ("Troupes Aéro Portées") carried a massive M20 75mm light anti-armour cannon and was designed to be dropped into a theatre of war by parachute on a palette, protected by hay-bales, fully assembled and ready for immediate action.
As such, the Vespa TAP offered a potent and highly mobile weapon system as the M20 Recoilless Rifle it incorporated was designed as an anti-tank weapon late in WW2 and using a HEAT (a shaped-charge High Explosive Anti-Tank) warhead, it was capable of penetrating 100mm (just shy of four inches) of armour up to 7,000 yards (6.4 km) away.
In the late 1950s, French Vespa licensee ACMA (Ateliers de Construction de Motocycles et Automobiles) produced 500 (perhaps more) examples of this military Vespa with integrated M20 recoilless rifle, across two production runs in 1956 and 1959.
The Vespa's then normal 125 cc engine was increased in size to 150cc to pull the extra weight of two paratroopers, trailer, ammunition and rack mounts, and the frame was strengthened to cope with the regular off-road usage it encountered, and the gearing was lowered, giving it a top speed of just 40 mph (64 km/h).
Ironically, the Vespa TAP never saw action in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia because by the time it had been designed and tested and subjected to a three-way shoot-out with other motorcycles vying to meet the French military’s requirements, the Vietnamese had defeated and banished the French from Indo-China at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
This was somewhat fortuitous as the new Soviet T-34 tanks acquired by Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were impervious to the M20 Recoilless Rifle and the Vespa TAP would not have fared well in the jungles of Vietnam.
France had no shortage of wars to fight as it was trying to reestablish its empire in the immediate post-WW2 years and the military Vespa soon saw action in the decolonisation war being fought by Algeria, where its original design parameters proved incredibly useful. While it couldn't defeat a Russian T-34, there weren't any T-34s in Algeria so it stepped back to a time when it could be used as a tank buster.
In Algeria, the French used the Vespa TAPs as tank hunters, with the lethal scooters operating in pairs - one would carry the M20 and six rounds of ammunition while the other scooter carried ten additional rounds of ammunition and no gun.
Each round of M20 ammunition weighed approximately ten kilos as it fired a variety of 75 mm rounds: High-Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT), High-Explosive (HE), High-Explosive Plastic/Plasticized (HEP) and White Phosphorous (WP).
With two soldiers able to wrestle the ungainly seven foot long M20 into position on its tripod, the mobility of such a lethal system proved to be a game changer. In Algeria it also flourished as infantry support, being particularly useful at destroying enemy trenches, pillboxes and bunkers. Algeria eventually prevailed, but the Vespa TAP acquitted itself well on the battlefield.
Remarkably, the oddball Vespa TAP is now so rare and so sought after, that its auction price borders on the ridiculous.
The world record price for a Vespa was achieved in 2017 when Catawiki sold the Vespa that Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck rode in the 1953 movie Roman Holiday (1953) for EUR €191,000 ($US195,750). Other than Vespa 150 TAPs, the only Vespa to have sold publicly for more than $40,000 was used in the 1979 movie Quadrophenia and fetched $47,174 (GBP£36,000).
Though more than 500 units were originally made, only a handful of the Vespa TAPs have survived because of the near total attrition rate for military vehicles fielded in losing wars on foreign soil.
The above image is of the Vespa TAP for sale at Objetmarcant.com. Though previous sales are hard to find, we have never found a TAP to have sold for less than USD$40,000 with most prices near USD$50,000, Marc-Antoine at Objetmarcant.com is selling his Vespa TAP for EUR €25,000 (USD$27,400) including the M20 Recoilless Rifle, or for EUR €22,000 (USD$24,00) without it.
"I think it would probably suit everyone to proceed with a sale without the cannon, as we're anticipating that the M20 could create some thorny export issues", said Marc-Antoine Marcant about the TAP.
Finally, so rare was the Vespa TAP that despite a lifetime of writing about, hanging about and doing silly things on motorcycles, I'd never heard of the Vespa TAP until I stumbled across it in a Vespa Museum in Australia one day - that's where the lead image for this story was taken and I was able to get some good pics of a perfectly restored example.
Source: Objetmarcant.com
Marc-Antoine can be contacted via instagram
