It's late 1962, and you're Battista Pininfarina. You'd like to get some more design work from the Americans, to follow up on those Nashes (including the Healeys) you did in the early 50s and the Cadillac Broughams you built for GM in '59 and '60. You've just seen previews of the new Corvette Sting Ray, and while you think it's okay, you also think you can do better. So you persuade GM's head of styling, Bill Mitchell, to send you a new Sting Ray chassis and you assign the job to a young American on your staff, Tom Tjaarda. This blue car is what he sketches out for you. It makes its debut at the 1963 Paris show as the Corvette Rondine.
And while the car attracts respectful and sometimes admiring attention on the show circuit (especially after the reverse-slope backlight and raised deck shown below are replaced with the more harmonious window and deck shown above), it does not result in any new jobs from GM for PF...at least, not in the decade we're talking about. So what do you do?
Well, you have an assignment from Fiat to design a body for the upcoming 124 Spider. And you give that project to young Tjaarda as well, and sure enough, when the Spider takes its bow in 1966 it features the same belt line crease kicking up to form a rear fender ridge, the same handling of the volumes formed by the trunk and rear fenders, and also a split rear bumper. This Fiat becomes the longest-lived of any PF design except for the Alfa Romeo Duetto which appears earlier in the same year…
So maybe, you're thinking, it's time for PF to give the big six-cylinder Alfa 2600 a new lease on life as well. So you ask for some fresh thinking from Tjaarda and his co-workers in the studio. And they come up with something sleek and shapely, first as a spider…
And later as a glassy coupe…
But observant types, especially the ones who write for car magazines and maybe also the ones who run Alfa Romeo, notice how this car looks like nothing much more than an elongated and cleaned-up Sting Ray…
…reconfigured for a European tour after hanging out in the World of Tomorrow, with the faux air vents scraped off, the fender-top blisters smoothed and blended back into the fender sections, and with the knock-off alloy wheels replaced by simple perforated Alfa discs. But still with the strong horizontal crease enveloping the whole car, with flip-up headlight doors like the Rondine (on the Sting Ray the whole light units flip) and with split bumpers like the GM design. Because you're Pininfarina you never miss anything, and you've seen that horizontal plane dividing upper and lower body volumes earlier on the original Corvair, a design which Europeans will take even longer to get over than they do this Corvette. But that's a story for another day…
Photo Credits:
Color shots of 1963 Corvette Rondine: wikipedia
Black & white Rondine: Pininfarina
Fiat 124 Spider: imcdb.org
1963 Alfa Romeo 2600 Pininfarina Spider: carbuildindex.com
Alfa Romeo 2600 PF Coupe: Pininfarina
1963 Corvette Sting Ray: General Motors
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