Unsung Genius: Rocco Motto, the Closer

As Italy climbed out of the debris of the human and industrial catastrophe of World War II, the cottage industry of machine shops and carrozzeria that had built racers and specialized  road cars prior to the war came back to life.  One of these was the small shop run by Rocco Motto in Torino.  Motto, born 10 years before World War I and orphaned in that war, had started his coach building company in 1932, and subcontracted to bigger coach builders to build bodywork.  After the war, one of his most predictive efforts was for Giaur, a firm founded by the Giannini brothers and Berardo Taraschi, who had previously worked for Urania.  The name was a contraction of the first letters of Giannini and Urania, and engines came from Giannini, while cars exported to America featured Crosley engines. This tidy, tiny 750cc coupe from 1950 managed to predict the form of later efforts by Vignale as well as Frua and others.  Around 4 dozen Giaurs were built, in a wide variety of body styles, but most were more focused on road racing than this San Remo coupe...

Motto welcomed working on foreign chassis, and the one below is a Renault 4CV from 1953 clothed in a spare, deftly detailed shell recalling the earlier Giaur. Attention to detail is shown in the dummy grille housing the fog lights, the air intake forward of the rear wheels for the rear-mounted, water-cooled engine, and the stylish, polished disc wheels, which seem to take the deeply recessed wheels of the stock Renault as a starting point.  

Despite the presence of more-than-competent designers at his own shop, Motto would often be called upon to build bodies styled by others, stepping in when a winning performance had already been given a head start by somebody else, a bit like a good closing pitcher. Sadly, he often got little public credit for these efforts. The 1953 Road & Track test of a Siata 208S spider like the one below mentions neither its designer, Giovanni Michelotti, nor its builder, Rocco Motto.

In the same year, Motto designed and built his second effort on a Talbot Lago T26 Grand Sport chassis.  The tightly controlled, sparsely decorated compound curves kept pace with the Ferrari spiders built by Vignale, Touring and Pinin Farina…something the Talbot chassis, with its heavy Wilson preselector transmission, was finding harder to do on the track. The covered headlights show a concern for air flow, and the forward-leaning oval of the grille is an aggressive take on contemporary Ferrari themes.

1953 was a busy year for the Motto crew. They also built the body for the MG TD shown below, and two others like it.  Two cars were built on tubular frames supplied by Gilco (who also supplied Ferrari and Maserati), and one on a specially-modified chassis supplied by the MG factory.  The alloy body forms reflected the lines of the OSCAs bodied by Morelli, and the cars were competitive in road racing. 

Motto's design for a coupe version of the staid Renault Fregate sedan also appeared in 1953. The front-engined, 2 liter 4 cylinder GTs were built in a small series for French race driver Louis Rosier, who had operated car dealerships during this period.

The Crosley-engined 750cc Nardi spider shown below left Motto's workshops, apparently destined for export to the U.S., in 1954.  The deeply-recessed wheels echo Motto's Renault 4CV.

Race and rally driver Jean Trevoux had won the 1951 Monte Carlo Rallye with a Delahaye 175 bodied in aluminum by Motto, and after admiring the reliability of the Packard 200 he'd driven to 9th place in the 1952 Carrera Panamericana, commissioned Motto to design and build a sleeker alloy body for the Packard he would drive in the '53 and '54 races. Despite the car's familiar, Packard-derived lines, only a few trim pieces would be interchangeable with a stock Packard. 

Trevoux's best performance with the Motto Packard was in 1954, when he finished a respectable 13th in the wild, dangerous road race across Mexico. In the photo below, the Motto Packard is flanked by a Ferrari 340 Mexico and a cheerful mutt of a backyard special. To my knowledge this 300 hp straight 8 was the last Packard road racer ever...

By 1955 the French Salmson firm, trying to revive its fortunes with a line of GT cars based on its fairly advanced twin overhead cam inline four, had asked Motto to design a spider, coupe and sedan.  Though, like its coupe sister, the spider raced at Le Mans, its design was based upon the long wheelbase version of the 2300S* chassis, not the shorter wheelbase Grand Sport. Motto's design cleverly dealt with the long wheelbase by deploying devices like the wraparound windshield, relatively wide door opening (compared with Talbot above), and repetition of the vent details ahead of the door and behind it, just ahead of the curve that announces the rear wheel and relieves the sheer sides...

Back in the 1990s I corresponded with the owner of this 2300S, wondering how many of the cars had been built, as photos showed cars in different colors, and with different bumpers and windshields. It turns out there was only one, and the bumpers, stock windshield and convertible top had been removed for racing.  This car still shows up at club meets...

In the late 50s Porsche approached an old friend and racing rival, Carlo Abarth, who had worked on the Cisitalia Porsche GP car* in the late 40s, with the idea of a lightweight version of the aging 356 Carrera coupe.  Abarth agreed, but failed to tell Porsche he had severed his business relationship with Zagato. That meant that the bodies for the Porsche Abarth Carrera GTL would be subcontracted to Motto and a relatively unknown firm called Viarengo & Filipponi.  The Revs Institutes Collier Collection owns the first car shown below, and they claim it was built by Viarengo & Filipponi.  Porsche was unhappy with the early cars, according to the museum, prompting a change in coach builder. 

.

Other Porschephiles claim the reverse is true, and that the first 3 cars were built by Motto, and 18 by the mostly unknown V & F.  I present pictures of the first car as well as a later one, in the hope that at least one of these is a Motto body, and that maybe someone from the museum or the Porsche Club will clarify.  One thing is certain, and that is the body was designed by Franco Scaglione.*

One of Motto's last performances as a closer was to build Raymond Loewy's dauntingly complex design for the bronze coupe below, a GT car also finished in 1960.  Built on a Lancia Flaminia chassis, the roof, rear and flanks of the Loraymo* predicted forms and details adapted 3 years later to the Studebaker Avanti, while the front explored (or strayed into) new territory with a large, impact absorbing bumper grille and hood assembly that must have been hard for Motto to form. Motto moved away from automobile design and production in 1965, and into commercial vehicle bodies.  He died at 92 in 1996, perhaps demonstrating that only hardy, resourceful souls can thrive in an unpredictable industry.

*Footnotes: For more on the Salmson 2300S, see our post for 6/18/2016. There's a fuller description of the Porsche-Cisitalia collaboration in the archives for 4/22/2017. The Loraymo is explored in "Avanti Antecedents" from 2/18/2016. Finally, we have a look at another unsung genius, Franco Scaglione, in the post for 12/20/2017.

Photo Credits:

Top:  ruoteclassiche.quattroroute.it

2nd:  oldtimer.400.pl

3rd:   wikimedia

4th & 5th:    oldtimer.400.pl

6th:   voitures.renault.free.fr

7th:  oldtimer.400.pl

8th:  ruoteclassiche.quattroroute.it

9th:  hooniverse.com

10th & 11th:  liberallifestyles.com

12th:  amicalesalmson.com

13th:  the author

14th:  wikimedia

15th:  flickr.com