The Etceterini Files Part 16----OSCA Dromos and Jiotto Caspita: Subaru's Distant Cousins

In 1999, Luca Zagato, grandson of legendary coach builder Ugo, teamed with partner Shozo Fujita to build a new car in Italy.  They wanted to build a modern, mid-engined GT under the OSCA name, and with no Maserati brothers around to object (or to participate) they picked Superleggera Touring, a firm revived by the son of company founder Carlo Anderloni, to produce the car, aiming at an initial series of around 300 units.  Body design, however, was delegated to Ercole Spada, who had penned Zagato's 1960s masterpieces such as the Aston Martin DB-4 GTZ and the Alfa Romeo TZ.

Intriguingly, the partners chose a 2.5 liter boxer four from the Subaru Legacy to power the car, rather than the turbocharged 2.0 liter as used in that year's WRX STI, which cranked out 265 horses.  The more lightly stressed engine in the Dromos made 187 hp, but it had good low-end torque and was available at lower cost.  The prototype which appeared in 2001 was a sleek, tidy package, 45 inches high, 161 inches long and just under 1,720 pounds.  Performance was competitive with the contemporary Lotus Elise (155 mph and 0 to 60 under 6 sec.), but price would not have been close. 

It would have taken higher production numbers, or perhaps a production agreement with Subaru, to bring the price down into Lotus Elise territory.  It seems a shame that didn't happen, as the Dromos was a more convincing sports car than the front-engine Subaru BRZ which appeared with its Scion FRS twin eleven years later.  As with that car, there was no option of the Subaru all-wheel drive system, so the car seemed aimed more at weekend racers than rally competitors. The interior, like the rest of the car, seemed purposeful and carefully detailed...

Not surprisingly, the visual form showed a closer relationship to classic Zagato efforts than to anything from Touring.  Note the subtle indent in the roof panel, echoing the twin hump Zagato Lancias and Maseratis.  Also, the rounded and raised center deck form which links rear window to tail seems a modern restatement of Spada's Alfa TZ-1.  Owing to economic conditions, the OSCA Dromos 2500GT never left the prototype stage.  It would have seemed in retrospect a better way for Subaru, which had found great success on the world rally circuit with the WRX, to break into the sports car scene dominated by makes like Porsche.  A less expensive way, certainly, than trying to launch a Formula 1 car...

It's been largely forgotten that Subaru tried to do just that about a decade earlier than their involvement in the OSCA project.  In the late 1980s, they commissioned Carlo Chiti, who had designed the Alfa Type 33 V8 as well as Alfa's flat-12 GP engines, to design a boxer 12 engine for the 3.5 liter formula.  Chiti's firm, Motori Moderni, built the new engine, also known as the Subaru 1235.  Owing to power and weight issues, the engine was not successful when run by the Coloni team, and was withdrawn before the end of the 1990 Formula 1 season.  

It seemed the 60-valve engine might be attractive to power a road-going supercar, however, For one thing, what seems heavy in F1 competition might seem less so in a 2 passenger car.  Also, the boxer layout which had presented problems for the ground-effects aero layout on the GP cars was not a hindrance on a GT.  In 1989, before the Subaru / Motori Moderni GP car had its abortive season, DOME Ltd. from Maihara, Japan showed its supercar prototype, the Jiotto Caspita, powered by a detuned Subaru 1235 engine.  The rounded forms, bubble cockpit, and deep side intakes reflected a move away from the wedge shapes of the mid-70s to mid-80s.  One Mark I Caspita was built with the flat 12.

In the early 90s, this car was joined by the similar-looking Mark II powered by a detuned Judd V10 engine, also 3.5 liters.  For the same reasons that killed the later OSCA project, the two Caspita prototypes were never joined by any production cars.  They remain as museum exhibits in Japan, reminders of ambitious plans made during surging economies and stranded by receding tides of funding.

*Footnote:  For a survey of OSCA history beginning with the founding Maserati brothers, see our post entitled "Almost Famous" in the archives for April 20, 2016.

Photo credits:

OSCA Dromos 2500GT (all exterior views): carsfromitaly.net

OSCA Dromos interior: allsportauto.com

Subaru Motori Moderni engine: subaruidiots.com

Jiotto Caspita Mark I exterior: wikimedia

The Etceterini Files Part 15----Lombardi FL-1 and Sinthesis 2000: Fleet Flavias

Francis Lombardi, a decorated Italian flying ace during World War I, had made a name for himself designing aircraft before World War 2, notably the FL.3 monoplane which was made in over 300 copies. He applied his talents to designing and building limousine and wagon variants on Fiats and the occasional Lancia after that war, and late in his career turned his attention to the problem of high performance sports cars. His first effort to attract notice in Europe was the Fiat 850-based Lombardi Grand Prix in 1968; by 1970 the Abarth Scorpione 1300 with the same body, but larger and hotter engine, appeared in the US.  There were also Giannini and OTAS variants, all late-blooming etceterini before tighter US emissions, bumper and safety standards took hold... 

The Lombardi GP I drove once on the foggy Pacific Coast Highway was a responsive little creature, even with the mostly stock 850 engine.  Surprisingly, despite the low roof, it seemed a bit roomier than the Lotus Europa I tried around the same time.  The tall greenhouse meant good visibility, at least to the front and sides.  Fiat would soon phase out the 850 for a series of transverse-engined front drivers, however, so the car's days were numbered by 1970, even in Europe.  Seeking the basis for a new car, Francis Lombardi noticed the Lancia Flavia which had been around for a decade, not because of its front-wheel drive, but because of the low, compact four cylinder boxer engine sitting ahead of a tidy transaxle, perfect for transplanting to a mid-engined format. 

So that's what he did.  As the section drawing and side elevation show, he didn't waste much space, achieving a low center of mass and much better weight distribution than on the rear-engined GP.  The final product, the Lombardi FL-1, has a family resemblance to the Grand Prix / Abarth Scorpione twins, especially at the low, sloping nose with its retractable headlights, and the low, horizontal crease along the flanks aligned with the bumpers. The unsentimental chop to the rear roof allows decent engine access and follows racing car practice.

You may be wondering why a Lancia-powered car would appear in a series of essays on etceterini, which were most often Fiat-powered.  The short answer is that by 1969, Fiat had taken over Lancia, though all Lancia engines offered for 1972, the year FL-1 appeared, were still of Lancia design. A better answer is that etceterini is a convenient and flexible description, and would still apply to the higher-performance version Lombardi planned to offer with a 3 liter Ford V6. In 1991cc Flavia-engined form, the car was good for 125 mph.

It turned out that the compact 2 liter Flavia engine had already attracted the attention of Peter Giacobbi, an automotive engineer working in Italy, who approached Tom Tjaarda, an established designer (Fiat 124 Pininfarina spider) about designing a mid-engined GT. Tjaarda was then working on the De Tomaso Pantera project at Ghia, and agreed to draw something up.  The final result resembled the Pantera in the low-penetration nose and the dropped window sill line, and also in the angled sail panel aft of the side windows acting as the C pillar...

The low nose forced a nearly-horizontal radiator with twin fans, and the use of the Flavia's transverse leaf-spring front suspension meant no front luggage space. The lines, though, were the better for it.  The car appeared on the show circuit in 1970, a good two years before the Flavia-powered Lombardi effort.

The interior layout emphasized passenger and storage space at the expense of engine access. The engine could be glimpsed through some removable panels, but the main idea was to allow easy removal of the engine (downward) by removing six bolts.  The thinking on engine access was not unlike Porsche's on the 914, which appeared in the same year.  The flat panel connecting the tail lights dropped down for access to the spare tire.  All cars still had spare tires back then...

The flat plank of the dash, with its row of guages and switches, recalled other Italian designs, especially from Ghia; the Mangusta and Ghibli come to mind. The Sinthesis 2000 was not built at Ghia, though; it was a case of Tjaarda doing a bit of moonlighting.  Engineer Giacobbi and Tjaarda, pleased with their handiwork, hoped to get Lancia (by 1970, that meant Fiat) interested in producing the car in series.

Neither the Sinthesis 2000 nor the FL-1 made it into production, owing to the apparent lack of interest from Fiat, and each car would remain a singular example. Fiat management had a change of heart pretty soon afterwards, though, and the result was the Dino-engined Lancia Stratos* which became available in 1973, and which won the World Rally Championship three years running beginning the next year. The Stratos production  overlapped that of the Fiat X1-9 based Lancia Montecarlo (Scorpion in the US) which offered mid-engined motoring at a more affordable price, starting in 1975.  The next time a boxer engine would appear in a member of the etceterini clan, however, it would be a Subaru engine.  But that's a story for the next episode of The Etceterini Files...

*Footnote: The Lancia Stratos is featured in "Lost Cause Lancias", our post for February 15, 2018. 

Photo credits: 
Top (Lombardi GP):  wikimedia
2nd: (Lombardi GP):  the author

3rd:  Francis Lombardi, reproduced in viennaautoshow2018.com
4th & 6th:  archivioprototipi.it
5th:  Francis Lombardi, reproduced in carstyling.ru
7th: Tom Tjaarda Studio, reprroduced in carstyling.ru
8th thru 10th from top:  youtube.com

The B.R.M. Saga: Learning From History, Or Not

This is a racing car named Old Faithful.  She logged over 20,000 racing miles from 1962, when she helped Graham Hill win the Formula 1 World Championship, through 1965, when she finished her career with a team of Italian privateers. That's a long life for any racer, especially one with a highly-tuned 4-cam V8 engine designed to run routinely at 10,000 rpm. Her record of running, winning and generally not falling apart makes her the Volvo station wagon of Formula 1 cars...

Surprisingly, Old Faithful is a BRM (British Racing Motors) product, a P578 designed for the 1.5 liter Formula 1 and racing a first full season in 1962. The choice of a V8 for a normally-aspirated engine of only around 90 cubic inches displacement looked a bit risky at the time; Ferrari had won the Championship the previous year with a V6.  The Lucas fuel injected engine was good for 11,000 rpm and sent its 193 hp through a 6-speed Colotti transaxle, eventually replaced with a more reliable BRM-designed 5 speed.

In fact, the hallmark of the P578 was reliability.  During the 1962 racing season, Graham Hill's BRM dueled with Jim Clark's fast but relatively fragile Lotus.  His BRM finished every race, and won 3 out of the last 4.  The result was Hill's first Championship of two, and the only Constructor's Championship for BRM.  Racing fans and journalists amazed themselves by using the words "reliable" and "BRM" in the same sentence, because the BRM had been born under a different sign... 

...when driver Raymond Mays, who had built the ERA (English Racing Automobile) road racers based on Riley engines before the war, teamed with Peter Berthon to dream up a GP car. Inspired by the prewar Mercedes (gearbox, rear suspension) and Auto Union (front suspension) racers, they apparently decided that if some complexity was good, more was better. For the new postwar GP formula, limiting normally-aspirated engines to 4.5 liters and supercharged ones to 1.5, they decided on a supercharged, 4-cam,1.5 liter V16 which was built like tandem V8s with the cam drives in the middle... 

Design started in 1947 and production of parts was outsourced to different firms, with Rolls Royce famously handling the superchargers. This method of production led to breaks in the supply chain, and the stunning complexity of the engine in an era long before electronic engine controls led to broken pistons and connecting rods.  When running, the engine could produce up to 600 hp at 12,000 rpm, but its torque band was so narrow and high in the rev range that drivers broke axles, universal joints and transmissions. These issues were never sorted out in the car's Formula 1 career, and it rarely finished any GP races, winning none. BRM's withdrawal in the early part of the 1952 season left Ferrari unopposed with its big, reliable 4.5 liter V12s, and race organizers ran the rest of that season's Grand Prix events, and also the 1953 season, to Formula 2 rules.

When a new Formula 1 was announced for 1954, limiting unsupercharged engines to 2.5 liters, BRM engineers prioritized simplicity over complexity.  They weren't alone. In fact, while Mercedes-Benz developed a desmodromic-valve straight 8 and Lancia* a V8, BRM, their English competitor Connaught* and even Ferrari pursued the classic engine architecture of an inline 4 cylinder with twin overhead cams.  BRM, however, took this newfound urge to simplify to an extreme, by giving their new P25 only 3 disc brakes.  The third brake was mounted at the rear of the new car's rear-mounted transmission, and drivers, who were suspicious of a racing car with only 3 brakes, called it the "ham slicer." The single rear brake reduced unsprung weight, but gave mixed results at stopping the car. Despite this, Jo Bonnier won the Dutch Grand Prix in 1959, a first for BRM.

By 1960, Cooper had shown the future belonged to mid-engined cars by winning the 1959 Championship with their 4 cylinder Climax-powered car for Jack Brabham.  BRM followed suit by placing their engine between the driver's seat and the transaxle on their new P48. Drivers liked the handling, but were disappointed to see the 'ham slicer" on the back of the transmission. Eventually, the Series 2 P48 would revert to 4 wheel brakes...but only after Dan Gurney broke his arm when the brakes failed on his BRM at Spa in Belgium.*

The year after the P48, Formula 1 changed to a 1.5 liter limit, and BRM went back to the drawing board, hitting the sweet spot with the 1,200 pound P57 which made do with a Climax 4 while the new V8 was being readied which would turn it into the Old Faithful P578. But the world of Grand Prix racing is a world of "never leave well enough alone", and after Old Faithful's final year at the races in 1965, the FIA issued a new Formula One with a 3 liter limit for 1966.

Complexity came back.  Ferrari readied V12s, Jack Brabham an adaptation of the aluminum GM V8 with which he won the first year's title, and Ford financed Cosworth's long-running DFV. Tony Rudd at BRM decided that 16 cylinders was not such a bad idea after all, and came up with the H-16, which was two flat-8s stacked with crankshafts geared together. BRM management had wanted a simpler, V12 design... Power was good but the engine was heavy, so by 1968 a 64-valve version used magnesium castings. 

Was it the most complex racing engine ever?  With its 2 crankshafts, 8 camshafts, 16 cylinders and 64 valves, it's got to be a contender.  It scored one F1 victory, but mounted in the engine bay of a Lotus. BRM management eventually got their V12, and it inspired the engine that powered the French Matra sports racers.  The V12 may have been the greatest-sounding engine ever, but that's a story for another day...

Photo Credits:

Top and 3rd from top:  Ian Avery-DeWitt
2nd from top:  the author

4th:  wikimedia

5th:  thedrive.com

6th &  7th:  wikimedia

8th:  hallandhall.com

9th & 10th:  wikimedia

*Footnotes:

The Connaught saga is recounted in "Celtic Rainmaker" from 7/24/16, while the Lancia D50 is depicted in "Prancing Elephants", our post for 10-8-16.  Finally, Dan Gurney's career, and the effect of that accident in Belgium, is reviewed on 6-20-18 in "Graceful Winners."  Many thanks to the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida for letting us have a look at Old Faithful.