Michelotti and Vignale in the 50s & 60s: Pioneers of the Italian Line

In Europe after World War II, the car industry was faced with the task of rebuilding.  In the USA, it began the job of redirecting production to civilian vehicles.  Some car makers took the approach of sprucing up their prewar offerings, while others offered new designs.  In the case of new manufacturers, designers and engineers were given a relatively free hand, and clean sheets of paper...engineers and designers were free of the software-hardware interface back then. Soon enough, designers like Mario Boano, Giovanni Savonuzzi* and Giovanni Michelotti sketched and modeled new shapes to enclose all the new chassis. Before the rubble of war had been cleared away, Pinin Farina showed the startling Cisitalia* coupes in 1946, and the next year Stabilimenti Farina produced three Alfa Romeo 6c 2500 cabriolets to the design of Giovanni Michelotti. Perhaps those Alfas caught the attention of Alfredo Vignale and Enzo Ferrari, because by 1950 Vignale was building a series of lighweight, alloy-bodied Ferrai coupe and spider bodies to Michelotti's designs...

In these first Vignale Ferraris, careful contouring of surfaces and deft use of proportions took the place of surface decoration.  Along with Felice Anderloni at Superleggera Touring, Vignale pioneered the use of the oval eggcrate grille on Ferrari's V12-powered road racers. This one is a 340MM, with the 4.1 liter Lampredi-designed engine that powered it to a victory in the 1951 Mille Miglia.   Note how the oval shapes are repeated in elevation, in section, and in the shapes of windows...

In the same year, Vignale bodied the Maserati A6G shown below to a Michelotti design.  A handful of the just-introduced Lancia Aurelia would be bodied in similar style.  Like the Lancias, this Maserati was intended for practical daily use rather than racing; the bumpers, trim and roll-down windows are clues.  Unlike Lancia and Ferrari, Maserati offered left-hand drive on its cars in the early Fifties.

These cars caught Briggs Cunningham's attention as he planned to offer a limited run of road cars to qualify his American-built, Chrysler powered sports racers as production cars at Le Mans. The first Michelotti-designed bodies for these Cunningham C3* road cars appeared in 1952.  Contours and lines were similar to Vignale's work on Ferrari chassis, but at a larger scale.  Note the lack of decoration, and the tight overhangs front and rear... 

These were busy years for Michelotti and Vignale.  In 1952, they produced four Ferrari 340 Mexicos on a new tubular chassis to compete in the Carrera Panamericana, the race run on public roads across Mexico. 

Three of the cars were coupes with roof lines similar to the Cunningham; in the photo above these coupes, as nearly identical as Vignale could make them, arrive on the dock in New York.  The fourth car was the spider pictured below.  Note that roughly half the car's length is occupied by the engine room housing the 4.1 liter Lampredi V12, and the provision of boundary layer air control devices on the doors ahead of vents which may have been intended to cool the drum brakes.  Another new feature Michelotti introduced on a few Ferraris that year was the Mexico's narrowed, projecting front fender form, with the headlights located inboard of the fenders.  It's uncertain whether this was part of Michelotti's intuitive approach to aerodynamics, or intended as an aid for the driver in aiming the car.

In 1955, Vignale bodied the first Blu Ray show car for Enrico Nardi on a modified Lancia Aurelia chassis.  Blu Ray 1, shown at right below, featured a plexiglass roof and a center-mounted light in the oval air intake.  Michelotti kept the oval air intake and a transparent roof panel in the Nardi Lancia Blu Ray 2 on the left from 1958,  but toned down the original car's wild details to make Blu Ray 2 more adaptable for series production.  It remained the sole example, however...

Also in 1958, Michelotti sketched a proposal for a new GT coupe based upon the Triumph TR3 chassis.  He had already gotten approval for a restyling the Standard Vanguard for the same company, and a new production car called the Triumph Herald was proceeding according to Michelotti designs...

Triumph was impressed enough to commission a prototype, which appeared on the Vignale stand at the Turin show that year.  Eventually it was christened the Italia, and went into limited production.

In the 1959 production version of the Italia, Triumph's conservative management opted for conventional fender forms with an oblong grille in the usual position above the bumper, similar to what appeared in the late Fifties on Michelotti-penned, Vignale-bodied Lancia Appias.  In so doing, they missed an opportunity to offer a fresh, innovative design (at least visually if not mechanically) on the growing American market, a good 4 years before the Lotus Elan and Studebaker Avanti offered aerodynamic faces with integrated lighting and air intakes below the bumpers.  

The glassy, upright greenhouse of the 1958 prototype survived in the production car. The design predicted the TR4, another Michelotti design that would appear in 1962, the same year that the TR3-based Italia passed out of production.  In this case, production amounted to 330 examples.

In 1959, the year Italia production began, Michelotti left Vignale to form his own coachbuilding firm, after consulting with Standard-Triumph on other, larger scale production projects like the Herald economy car.   That same year, Vignale produced this prototype of a spider on the Maserati 3500 GT, the Touring-bodied coupe version of which had appeared in 1957. The 3500GT was produced in over 2226  examples, 245 of which were the Vignale spyder, and it saved the company.  The Michelotti spyder design went into production in 1960, on a 100-inch wheelbase, 2 inches shorter than the Touring coupe.  It shared the coupe's aluminum-block, twin cam inline six with twin spark plugs per cylinder.  

Details on this prototype differing from the production car include the grille, bumpers, vents below headlights, fender side vents, and tail lights.  

The body form, however, is the same.  Production spyders, unlike the alloy Touring coupes, had steel bodies with alloy hood and deck lids.

Evidence of Michelotti's increasing participation in design for Triumph was his body design for the TRS road racers which appeared at Le Mans in 1959. These cars were promoted as being based upon the TR3, but in fact had a new chassis design and a new, aluminum twin cam engine design.  The photo shows the second-series version of the car racing at Le Mans in 1960. These cars had fiberglass bodies, a first for Triumph and Michelotti, and predicted his design for the TR4, which would appear in 1962... 

In 1961 Michelotti designed the body for the Conrero* Triumph Le Mans coupe, which was intended to be the first of a series of cars for a new effort at Le Mans.  It remained a one-off when Standard Triumph management cancelled the project, concentrating instead on the launch of the new production cars, including the TR4 and Spitfire for 1962.

That same year, Michelotti's design for the new Maserati Sebring went into production, and bodies for this car were produced at Vignale.  It eventually took the place of the 3500GT spyder in the Vignale production schedule, as it was built on the short spyder wheelbase despite offering 2 + 2 seating.  This Series 1 car, twelve-plug twin-cam six that was one of the car's main attractions, and offered on the Sebring in 3.5, 3.7 and eventually 4 liter versions over a 4-year production run.

There was also a standard 5-speed ZF gearbox, a well-instrumented dash and a finely detailed interior...

The flat, recessed tail panel was in line with Sixties trends, and reinforced the rectilinear forms, along with the creases on the flanks.  348 Series 1 cars like this one were built; in 1965 the Series 2 appeared (oval chrome surrounds for the quad headlights are a sign); but only 98 copies left the factory.

By this time most of Michelotti's work was in designing prototypes for production cars. BMW and Alpine Renault used his services, but his most frequent association, in the public mind and in terms of the number of cars that went into production, was with Triumph.  After the TR4 and Spitifire, there were new designs for sedans, and proposals for new sports cars like the Zoom and Zest.  The 1965 Fury prototype below was similar to the Spitfire center body section but had a sleeker nose and tail.  A tamer version went into production as a 6 cylinder fastback coupe version of the Spitfire, in 1967.  Perhaps in deference to Plymouth, it was called GT-6 instead of Fury...

In 1970 Triumph introduced a GT car called the Stag, based around a new 3.0 liter V8, sohc engine and using some chassis components from the Triumph 2000 sedan, which was also a Michelotti design.  Despite initial reliability problems with the engine, and also a conflict caused by a merger with Rover, which had its own V8, over 25,000 Stags were built over an 8 year period.  Styling themes, especially the grille, headlights and tail light panels, were similar to Michelotti's restyle of his 2000 sedan.  The T-shaped rollover bar was incorporated into the design out of concern that convertibles would soon be banned in the US, one of Triumphs main markets. 

The integrated rollover bar on the 1975 Ferrari 365 GTS/4 NART spyder was likely there for practical, rather than legal reasons.  Luigi Chinetti, Ferrari's New York distributor and head of the North American Racing Team, commissioned 5 of these wedge-themed Daytona spyders between 1974 and 1976.  At least one of the cars was raced, one was configured as a conventional convertible, and one was given as a present to Chinetti's wife.  They are among the last cars designed by Michelotti, and among very few to adopt the creased, wedge-profiled body forms popularized by Giorgetto Giugiaro.  Giovanni Michelotti died in 1980, at age 59, after over 4 decades working as an industrial designer.  Most of his designs were for motor vehicles; there were over 1,000 of them.

*Footnote: Cisitalias are profiled in "The Etceterini Files Part Eleven", posted on 4-22-17, and the Cunningham road and race car history is reviewed in "The Cars of Briggs Cunningham" from 4-15-17. The Nardi Lancia Blu Ray 1 was featured in "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars", our post for 9-7-15, and Blu Rays 1 and 2 are pictured in "The Etceterini Files Part 14: Enrico Nardi and His Cars" from 2-26-18.  Cars built by Virgilio Conrero are profiled in "The Etceterini Files Part 12", posted on 11-28-17.  Michelotti designs for Vignale on Ferrari chassis are featured along with the Vignale-built Kelly Corvette in "The Italian Jobs Part 2" from 2-27-16.
Errata:  The description of the Conrero Triumph got mixed up, and the photo of the Nardi Lancias got left out of the first version of this post, and we gave you the wrong numbers on Ferrari 340 Mexico production.  Counting the spider it was 4 cars, not 3.  All these mistakes are possible proof that the writer cannot always be trusted with editing tasks, especially when late for dinner.  Apologies. 

Photo Credits:
All photos by the author except the following:
5th from top:  Luigi Chinetti Motors and RM Sotheby's

6th (Ferrari Mexico spider):  George Havelka
8th & 9th:  Carrozzeria Vignale
15th (1960 Triumph TRS):  pendine.com
16th (Conrero Triumph coupe):  Carrozzeria Michelotti 
20th (Triumph Fury) thru bottom (Ferrari NART):  wikimedia