In 1967, when Fiat introduced its Fiat Dino with a V6 engine shared with Ferrari, even car enthusiasts had forgotten an earlier 2 liter Fiat, the 8V from 1952-'54. If for some reason you had one of these earlier cars tucked away in your garage, you might have found it hard to sell. Parts of all kinds were hard to find, and the car's obscurity insured low resale value. Now examples in scruffy condition trade in the high six figures. How did this happen? The story starts when engineer Dante Giacosa designed a 70 degree, 2 liter aluminum V8 engine for a stillborn luxury sedan, then obtained permission from the ruling Agnelli family to produce a sports car to showcase this new engine. The car was called 8V ("Otto Vu") because Fiat mistakenly believed that Ford had copyrighted "V8". The chassis design made clever use of the four-wheel independent suspension from a Jeep-like Fiat military vehicle at a time when most cars had live rear axles. The car appeared at the 1952 Geneva show, with a body design by Fabio Luigi Rapi which would've looked advanced in the late Thirties, but not by the early Fifties. The narrow chassis, Art Deco grille design and blistered rear fender skirts evoked prewar streamliners by Paul Jaray for Adler, and by Superleggera Touring for Alfa and BMW.
Soon enough, Zagato decided to offer an extensively remodeled version of this "standard" Otto Vu, and produced a light alloy Elaborata which offered a cleaner grille, glassier greenhouse, and on at least one example, the signature twin-hump roof.
By 1954 Zagato had also produced several of its own design for the Otto Vu, with tighter flanks, curved side glass and the overall impression that the alloy body panels could not be wrapped more tightly around the chassis and mechanicals. The "double bubble" roof remained an option which appears on the red example below, but not on the otherwise similar green one. These cars did well in road racing, despite the somewhat fragile nature of the new engine.
Ghia got into the act as well, when Giovanni Savonuzzi designed his Supersonic coupe, the first of which was fitted to an Alfa Romeo 1900 chassis. The Alfa attracted attention, but the body was wrecked in the 1953 Mille Miglia. So Ghia turned to Fiat as a chassis supplier, and built eight more Supersonics on the 8V. The Supersonic style, with its low, tight greenhouse, rocket-like brow linking the front and rear wheels, and nascent tail fins emerging from an indented line spiraling around the circular tail lights, was repeated on 2 or 3 Jaguar XK120 chassis and on one Aston Martin. None of these cars featured the plexiglass roof which had appeared on that first Supersonic.*
There was also at least one Otto Vu by Pinin Farina. This coupe lacked the futuristic exuberance of the Ghia Supersonic, instead borrowing the tunnel roof with fins from the rear of PF's one-off Ingrid Bergman Ferrari*, while at the front presaged PF's Ferrari 250GT SWB by a few years. Overall, the sober, elegant PF Otto Vu resembled nothing so much as a scaled-down Ferrari, which may have been the point...
Vignale bodied several Fiat 8Vs in a variety of styles by Giovanni Michelotti, including the rather wild 1954 coupe below, with a paint scheme seemingly inspired by Fiat's Turbino jet car*, which appeared the same year.
By 1957 this car had been remodeled by Vignale with a revised nose and tail, and a look more related to the Ferraris of that era. Fiat built 114 examples of the Otto Vu, and the specialist firm Siata built an additional 35 cars using the same chassis and engine design. These were known as the 208S; Rocco Motto built the open spider version shown below...
The coupe body style shown below was provided by Stablimenti Farina as well as Balbo; the concealed headlights and hunkered-down profile are unlike the Zagato Fiats. Like the Zagato cars, some of these 208 S coupes went racing. As with the Fiat 8V, high prices ($5,300 and up) doomed the sales effort. Fiat, working with Ghia, would have better luck with its 2300 inline 6 in the early Sixties, and with the 1967 release of the Fiat Dino. But those cars are another story, for another day.
*Footnotes: The first Ghia Supersonic is pictured in our essay for May 9, 2016 entitled "Lovely Rita: Cadillac Ghia." Fiat's Turbino jet car is shown in our post for May 21, 2016 entitled "Jet Cars, Part 1: Real & Not So Real." Finally, a visit to the archives for September 7, 2015 will reward readers with a discussion of the Ingrid Bergman Ferrari in "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars."
Photo credits:
Top two: wikimedia
3rd: wheelsage.org
4th & 5th: wikimedia
6th: wikimedia
7th: hemmings.com
8th & 9th: carstyling.ru
10th: wikimedia
11th: conceptcarz.com
12th 13th & Bottom: the author
No comments:
Post a Comment