The Etceterini Files Part 18: Bizzarrini P538

The term etceterini usually calls to mind tiny, lightweight road racers from Italian specialists, often with Fiat-based drivetrains.  Exceptions included a couple of Siatas powered by Ford and DeSoto V8s in the early 1950s, and these may have inspired Giotto Bizzarrini when he decided to design his front-engined chassis for the Iso concern around the small-block Chevy V8.  By the time he had split from Iso to form his own car-building atelier, he had turned his eyes toward a mid-engined racer using the same engine.  Inboard disc brakes, front and rear, provided stopping power...

The P538 (5.3 liters, 8 cylinders) contested the 1966 running of Le Mans with Chevy power, but retired after three hours with cooling problems.  An American customer then ordered a P538 powered by a 3.5 liter Lamborghini V12; this made it, ironically, the first Bizzarrini to be powered by an engine of Bizzarrini's design.  The car pictured above at the San Diego Automotive Museum is the most original P538 remaining, and is one of two extant V12 models and two V8s from the original production run.  As with other Bizzarrini efforts, total production figures are a cloudy subject, made even more obscure by the engineer's subsequent production of "continuation" cars. 

A P538 chassis formed the basis of the Bizzzarrini Manta show car from 1968.  The first concept car designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro for his fledgling Italdesign venture, it failed to have the impact of some of the maestro's subsequent efforts...

The steep windshield slope merges with the hood, echoing the unified form of contemporary show cars like Bertone's Alfa Romeo Carabo. Other details, such as the "drilled for lightness" rocker panels and the red deck vents contrasting with the medicinal green paint, undercut the overall simplicity of form.  

The rear fenders and engine lid could be raised in one piece for easy access to the mid-mounted Chevy V8.  At one point the car was repainted in silver, Giugiaro's favorite color for show cars, and this unified the form visually. The next Bizzarrini project was plagued by problems of a budgetary, rather than visual, nature... 

Bizzarrini's P538 chassis design formed a rigid, sturdy basis for the American Motors AMX 3 shown above, which appeared in spring of 1970 with styling by Richard Teague on a wheelbase 6 inches longer than the 538's 99 inches.  Powered by AMC's 390 V8, it would have provided a somewhat more practical, but also more expensive, alternative to the Ford-sponsored DeTomaso Pantera which appeared a day later.  AMC management cancelled the project after something like half a dozen cars had been built.  As with nearly all Bizzarrini projects, production figures are subject to debate, as record-keeping was sketchy at the Livorno firm. One fact that's not contested is that the 5300GT Strada coupe shown below, with "front mid-engine" placement and De Dion rear suspension, remains their most popular car, with over 130 examples produced.

*Footnotes:  The AMX 3 saga is recounted our post "Italian Jobs from the Heartland, Part 2: AMX Vignale and AMX 3 Bizzarrini" from November 29, 2016. Bizzarrini-designed Iso cars are reviewed in "Born from Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta" from September 20, 2018.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  the author

2nd:  imcdb.org 

3rd:  wikimedia

4th:  en.wheelsage.org

5th & 6th:  wikimedia

Streamliners from Mitteleuropa: Steyr and Steyr Puch

Wandering through the fall concours at the LeMay Museum in Tacoma some years back, I encountered the Glaser-bodied Steyr 220 Sport pictured below.  It was the first Steyr I'd ever seen, despite quite a few years of attending car shows. The Steyr, built in Austria, sometimes gets shoved out of the spotlight by other Mitteleuropean machinery, like the big Austro-Daimlers designed between the wars by Ferdinand Porsche, and the rear-engined Tatras designed by the even more iconoclastic Hans Ledwinka*. The Tatras were generally no bigger than the Steyrs, but it's not easy to ignore a teardrop-shaped car with three headlights and a central dorsal fin.  The charms of the Steyr were a bit more subtle... 

Here was a car with stylistic connections to contemporary work by Graber* in Switzerland, echoing the same restrained approach to streamlining, with none of the chrome-laden excess of the heavier, late-1930s roadsters from Mercedes and Horch... 

The 220 was indeed lighter than those cars, powered by an inline, OHV six of just under 2.3 liters. Front suspension was independent and rear suspension was by swing axles.  The two-passenger Sport Roadster shown was one of six bodied in this style by Glaser in Dresden. There was also a five-passenger cabriolet and a more common sedan. The basic engine made 55 horsepower; the subject car makes 85 with dual carbs and dual exhausts.

Overall, around 5,900 of the 220 series were built.  There was also a 2 liter six called the 120 and a 2.1 liter called the 125, both using the same basic chassis layout.  In addition, there were similar models using four cylinder engines, called (illogically) the 100 and 200.  A 200 series sedan is shown below...

The sedans were not without charm, with fastback lines and center-opening doors without a "B" pillar, as on Lancias from this period. In June 1942, a Steyr 220 sedan was the vehicle used in a harrowing escape from the Auschwitz death camp by four prisoners who had stolen Nazi SS uniforms and weapons. The prisoners had also stolen the Steyr from the camp commandant, and they were never re-captured...

The 220 shown below is a 5-passenger cabriolet; these were somewhat more common than the Sport Roadster.  Various two-tone color schemes were available on all the Steyr models.

In 1934, Steyr merged with Austro-Daimler and Puch. One of the first products to appear after the merger was the 1936 Steyr Type 50, also known as the Baby.  The Baby featured a front-mounted four cylinder boxer engine with thermosiphon water cooling and about 22 hp driving the rear wheels through a 4-speed gearbox. Advantages over the VW prototypes which appeared during this era included hydraulic brakes and greater space efficiency. Production of the Baby, including the Type 55 with longer wheelbase and more power, amounted to about 13,000 units before car fabrication stopped in 1940.  

The Baby proved predictive of the path that Steyr would take after World War 2, when postwar austerity and material shortages emphasized the value of small, economical cars. This led to a Steyr-Daimler-Puch alliance with Fiat and eventually to a successful rear-engined Steyr Puch minicar, but first Steyr tried mounting its own 2 liter engine in bodies made by Fiat for their 1400 and 1900 series cars. These conventional front-engined cars, shown below, have been eclipsed in the public memory by the much more successful Steyr-engined versions of Fiat's Nuova 500 from 1957.

With their version of the rear-engined Fiat 500, Steyr Puch hit upon a successful formula. They saved tooling costs for bodywork by using the Fiat body shells, but replaced the inline two-cylinder air-cooled Fiat engine of 500cc (30 cubic inches) with their own horizontally-opposed, air-cooled twin. It was a much smoother engine, and similar power units were employed in the all-wheel drive Steyr Puch Haflinger off-road vehicles.  As with the Fiat version, the early Steyr Puch 500 had rear-hinged "suicide" doors giving access to four seats... 

A 650cc version of this car won the European Rally Championship in 1966, and other rally successes followed. The little car gained enough of a following that Steyr kept it in production from 1957 to 1975.  Note that the faux grille features Steyr and Puch insignia, and even mentions Fiat in tiny script, but fails to mention Daimler, which was still perhaps associated only with large cars in the minds of middle Europeans...

This being basically a Fiat chassis design, there had to be a 2 passenger sports version, and it had a name bigger than the car, as noted on the commemorative Austrian stamp below. It carried a larger version of the trusty Steyr Puch opposed twin, while a 500cc variant won its class at the Nurburgring. That "Imp" business has nothing to do with the British car of the same name.  It refers to the manufacturer who built 21 of these handsome alloy-bodied coupes: Intermeccanica. Really, the car is a Steyr Puch Intermeccanica 700GT, and it qualifies, like Intermeccanica, as a chapter in the etceterini saga involving Americans, Italians and Austrians. But that's a story for another day... 

*Footnotes: Czechoslovakia's Tatra automobiles can be found in our post for November 27, 2016 entitled "Cars & Ethics: A Word or Two on VW", in "Rolling Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art" for December 31, 2016, and in "When Mobile Homes Really Were Mobile" from July 30, 2017.  Bodies by Hermann Graber on Alvis, Duesenberg and Talbot chassis are reviewed in "Forgotten Classic: The Graber Alvis" from January 22, 2016.

Photo Credits:

Top thru 3rd from top: the author

4th thru 7th:  wikimedia

8th:  Steyr Daiimler Puch advertising, reprinted at autoalmanach.ch

9th & 10th:  wikimedia

11th:  onlineshop.post.at

The Etceterini Files Part 17: Bizzarrini 1900GT Europa

The sadly forgotten Bizzarrini Europa qualifies as an etceterini not just because of the suffix to engineer and builder Giotto Bizzarrini's name, but also because it combined parts from a variety of sources to form an appealing, high performance two-seater.  In some cases, the engine was a 1.5 liter Fiat, a standby of the etceterini movement.  For most of the Europas built, though, the engine was a 1.9 liter "cam in head" unit from GM's Opel subsidiary in Germany...thus the 1900GT designation.

The story behind the car is that Bizzarrini, who had designed Lamborghini's V12 engine and then the chassis for the Iso A3C before going off on his own, was seeking a more modestly-priced GT design to produce in larger numbers than the 5300GT Strada, his version of the Iso A3C. The Europa appeared in 1966 with fiberglass body designed by Pietro Vanni, and looked much like a scaled-down version of the Strada GT coupe, with added practical touches like the doors curving into the roof to allow easier access. Note the transparent plexiglass panels in those doors.  The chassis design featured four-wheel independent suspension and four-wheel disc brakes, and persuaded GM, already supplying engines for the 5300GT, to provide the Opel 1.9 liter unit to Bizzarrini.  By the time Opel engines began appearing in completed cars in 1968, Bizzarrini was in financial trouble, and GM was nearly ready to release its own 2 seater GT for Europe and America, the Opel GT with engines up to 1.9 liters.

With the clarity granted by hindsight, many car enthusiasts find the Bizzarrini Europa a more satisfying design than the miniature Corvette theme produced by GM Styling for Opel's GT. The bigger wheels and tires, as well as careful attention to details, complemented the sleek form and made a purposeful impression.  As with many limited production etceterini, however, those details changed from car to car.  Note the difference in front fender vents between the top two photos, the change from the curved door in the car above to the more conventional door with dark filler panel at the roof, shown in the red car below.  The number and shape of tail lights also changed... 

The car below, with doors curved into the roof, and fender vents like the big brother Strada 5300GT, makes a convincing argument that the Europa could've been a winner if produced in sufficient quantities to keep the costs down.  Instead, only 17 Europas were built, 5 with FIat power and 12 with Opel engines, before Bizzarrini faced bankruptcy brought on by an expensive racing program including the ill-fated P538 mid-engined car.  

According to Italian marque experts, as many as 20 additional cars were built after the bankruptcy and reorganization. As with other Italian specialist makers, Bizzarrini was more adept at crafting seductive machinery than he was at record-keeping.  Still, the number of differently detailed survivors which have surfaced at car shows and auctions indicates that there may be as many as two dozen Europas left...

*Footnote:  The efforts of another Italian performance specialist with Opel products is discussed in "The Etceterini Files Part 12" for November 28, 2017, entitled "Virgilio Conrero, Tuner or Hot Rod Maestro?"  The Iso saga is reviewed in "Born From Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta", posted on September 20, 2018.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  Wikimedia

2nd:  flickr.com

3rd:  bringatrailer.com

4th:  speed8classics.com

5th: routevecchie.org