A couple of years ago, I called a guy about a Citroen DS-19 he had for sale. We talked about the Citroen for awhile, and it struck me that this guy knew a lot about old cars, so I asked him if he had any other interesting cars."Let's play a game, OK? You name a make of car, and I'll tell you if I have one."
I started naming cars, and we blasted past Abarth ('yep"), Allard ("two"), Jaguar ("you need to ask?"), Lotus ("of course") and then I decided to name my favorite obscure car: OSCA.
"I actually have two OSCAs. Come and have a look at that Citroen and I'll show you the other cars."
So I called on an old friend who also likes cars, and we went over to have a look. When we arrived we saw a pretty standard-looking suburban house with a couple of garages and an outbuilding or two. The Citroen, the object of my quest, shared outdoor space with a few other makes in various stages of repair. Our friend met us at the front door and showed some photos of his SCCA racing career on the walls. But once he opened the garage doors and we wandered inside, I felt much like I had as a high school student, when a gallery owner on Chicago's Michigan Avenue had opened up his storage room to preview a collection of Matisse canvasses he was cataloguing for an exhibit. There they were, one great painting after another, paintings I'd seen in books, just leaning against the walls…
And here, on jack stands, a Morelli-bodied OSCA MT4 (Maserati Tipo, 4 cylinder) with the trademark cheese-grater grille from the mid-50s awaited completion of a long, painstaking rebuild...
And so the time had come to recollect the glories of the OSCA, which was Almost Famous during the Golden Age of American road racing. The Maserati brothers founded their first firm in 1914, an inauspicious year for Italy, Europe and humanity. They began making spark plugs, and after the Great War ended, they made racing cars under contract to Diatto, but when that company quit racing in 1926, the brothers took their last design for Diatto, a 1.5 liter twin cam, and raced it successfully under their own name. It quickly led to orders for more race cars, but staying competitive meant frequent expenditures on new designs and new tooling. By 1937 the brothers were seeking a more reliable source of income, and sold their company to the Orsi family, agreeing to stay on as consultants for 10 years. Racing success in these interwar years included back-to-back wins for Maserati at the Indy 500 in 1939 and 1940. Two years after World War 2, the consulting contract ended and three of the brothers (Ernesto, Ettore and Bindo) began to build racing cars again. Because they'd essentially sold the Maserati name along with their car factory, they showed a real sense of humor by giving the firm the deadpan name Officine Specializzate Costruzione Automobile…translating roughly to "workshop specializing in car construction." The brothers were soon designing, building and testing racing engines. Among the forgotten efforts of their workshop was the 4.5 liter V12 originally developed as a GP engine to be shared with Gordini (see "Etceterini Files Part 6" in these pages), and which led to this brutally focused, Zagato-bodied coupe, essentially a Formula 1 car in a road car suit, built for Clemente Biondetti in 1951...
A spin-off of this engine was an inline 6 for Formula 2; the basic engine architecture was shared with Gordini. Only a handful of the Formula 2 cars were built, along with 3 sports cars using the same engine. These 2000S cars outwardly resembled the 1.5 liter MT4 which Stirling Moss employed to catapult OSCA (and himself) to fame, by winning the 12 Hours of Sebring outright in 1954. Driving Briggs Cunningham's car as prepared by Alfred Momo (see "The Etceterini Files Part 5" in these pages), Moss and co-driver Bill Lloyd blew away opposition that included Jaguars and Ferraris with nearly three times the power. Overnight, lots of name drivers in American road racing wanted OSCAs, and those who could afford the sticker price ($9,000 to $10,000) bought them. Somewhere around 6 dozen of the MT4 series were eventually built; here's Stirling Moss making OSCA famous (well, almost) at the old airfield course in Florida...
As a way of utilizing that name recognition to reach a wider market, the Maserati brothers planned a joint project with Fiat, with the Torinese giant agreeing to manufacture an engine of OSCA design for use in Fiat roadsters as well as in a road-going OSCA GT car. Other than a handful of coupes, most of which wound up on race tracks anyway, OSCA had never made a serious touring car (with heater, bumpers, etc.) before. The first fruits of cooperation with Fiat appeared in 1959 as the Fiat-Osca 1500S, and they gave Fiat a high performance "halo car" to entice Americans and increasingly affluent Europeans (something it later tried with the Ferrari-engined Fiat Dino V6). Fiat soon increased engine size a bit for the 1600S, and the OSCA GT cars, when they appeared in the early Sixties, shared this displacement, though the OSCA version of the engine was a bit different, with forged connecting rods and other tweaks for anticipated race duty. A couple of the resulting OSCA 1600 GTs were bodied by Touring Superleggera (black car below), a handful by Fissore, and most fetchingly, several dozen by Zagato with the signature double-bubble roofline. Note that on the silver gray Zagato, the air extractor vents for the cabin are integrated with the headroom-enhancing bubbles.
Zagato also built a lower, sleeker version of the 1600 GTZ which was more focused on road racing. Go ahead; pretend you don't want one...
Stirling Moss wanted one, and found a rare FS372 with desmodromic valves (mechanically opened and closed, another way for the Maserati bros. to bankrupt themselves on R & D). Here he is in the Bahamas, demonstrating his baby about 57 years after that Sebring win...
In an ideal world, this is where the story would end. Happy collaborations, increased sales, solvent Maserati brothers. Fiat sold thousands of the Fiat-Osca, but the brothers had trouble breaking into three figures with their own version, and as noted above, they couldn't resist spending money on racing car development. So in 1963, they sold their enterprise again, this time to motorcycle manufacturer MV Agusta, which made the odd decision (as evidenced by the photo below) that what the world really wanted was to pay OSCA prices for cars that looked a whole lot like Fiats. It was all over by the end of 1967.
Postscript: Privacy considerations prevent me from sharing the identity of the OSCA owner. If you're lucky, you may meet him at the races someday yourself. He's such a nice guy that he'll be happy to share some of his vast knowledge about rebuilding old machinery, or even offer to give you a Citroen, as long as you'll just tow it out of his life...
1.) Denée Foti
2.) Wikimedia
3.) Denée Foti
4.) racingsportscars.com
5.) carbodydesign.com
6.) media.crash.net
7.) Bonham's Auctions
8.) 2000gt.net
9.) forum.autohoje.com
10.) Wikimedia
11.) classiccarcatalogue.com
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