If you're a fan of the diverse, delightful and often tiny Italian sports cars nicknamed etceterini, you've probably guessed the red coupe below is one of the handful of Zagato-bodied Fiat Abarth 500 GT coupes built starting in 1957, shortly after Fiat introduced its first air-cooled car. That would be a good guess, but wrong, even though the chassis of our mystery car was based, like that of Zagato's coupe, on the Fiat 500 floor pan. The rear-mounted engine, however, was from Austria's Stey-Daimler-Puch* combine, and its 2 cylinders were horizontally opposed rather than in line as on the Fiat. It was the brainchild of Hungarian enthusiast Frank Reisner, who had moved to Italy from Canada, and founded a company called Intermeccanica to make performance accessories. To Reisner, SDP's version of the Nuova 500 sedan, built under Fiat license but with Austrian-designed engines, may have seemed a better candidate for a high-performance variant. He christened the result the Steyr Puch IMP 700 GT coupe, and launched it in 1959.
The body design, built in alloy by Corna in Italy, closely followed the rounded forms of the Zagato, down to the the wraparound rear window. The engine made 40 hp from its 643 cc, and this put it into a different performance league than the 23 hp Abarth 500 Zagato, and approached the power of the Fiat Abarth 750. Carlo Abarth didn't appreciate the competition from across the border in his native country, and perhaps for this reason only 21 of the diminutive IMP 700 GTs were assembled by Intermeccanica by 1962.
In autumn of that year Intermeccanica had another project in the pages of the car mags. This was the Apollo GT, which had its origins in a friendship between engineer Milt Brown and stylist Ron Plescia, then a recent grad of the Art Center College in Pasadena. Their idea was to build a European style GT around a mass-produced American engine. Brown designed a conventional chassis with drum brakes and a live rear axle; the most modern feature was the lightweight Buick 215 cubic inch V8 with its aluminum block. Plescia drew a svelte coupe body with Italian design cues, and this was translated into an alloy Apollo 3500GT prototype by Corna in Italy. Franco Scaglione* added rear quarter windows to the fastback, sketched a convertible, and switched the divided air intake for a Ferrari-like oval before Intermeccanica began production of bodies in steel...
These were then shipped to International Motor Co. in Oakland, California for installation on the Apollo chassis. IMC reported plenty of orders, and the automotive press generally liked the car, but the company soon realized they were losing money on each car they completed, with the price set at around $6,000. Perhaps Brown and his partners had not checked out the history of previous international projects like Nash Healey and the Dual Ghia. By 1965 the original enterprise had foundered for lack of financing, and then a Texas operation took over production of the same car in 1966 under the name Vetta Ventura. Those cars featured a cast iron Buick of 300 cubic inches, as fitted to the last Apollo 5000GTs. By this time GM had discontinued the alloy V8 and sold the rights to Rover.
Tail lights appeared to be production units turned 90 degrees. We'd thought maybe Lucas units for BMC, but we were wrong. These Italian lights are identical to the ones on the Ferrari California from the same era, and they cost over $2,000 a set today. The metal work around the recess shows careful craftsmanship...
The total production of these cars is usually quoted as 76 fastback coupes, 11 convertibles, and one prototype 2+2. The Apollo failed to generate profits for International Motor Company, but it gave Intermeccanica a foothold in the world of small-volume specialists in Europe.
In 1966 Jack Griffith, a Long Island car dealer who had been mounting Ford V8 engines in the fiberglass-bodied English TVR chassis, was looking someone to build steel bodies for his new GT project. Styling of the prototype was handled by Robert Cumberford, later the design editor of Automobile Magazine, and Intermeccanica used its recent experience with the Apollo to get the new car ready for the '66 New York Auto Show. On a 101.5" wheelbase, it was in a different world than the stubby, crude-looking TVR-based Grifiths..
Cumberford's design begins with a simple curved bumper surmounting a shallow air intake, with tight fender curves setting off the wheels. Chassis design was of square steel tubing, with a live rear exle borrowed from Ford's Mustang, while Griffith's engine choice was the 235 hp 273 V8 offered in Plymouth's Barracuda; disc brakes like those on Shelby's Cobra rounded out the package. The car attracted favorable attention, but Griffith was only able to deliver 14 cars to customers before exhausting his funds in 1967.
Engineer and automotive writer Steve Wilder then persuaded Holman and Moody, who had prepared NASCAR and GT40 Mk.II racers for Ford, to get involved with the Griffith project. Switching to Ford power and the Omega nameplate, with light styling changes (twin front bumpers, open headlights), Holman & Moody assembled another 33 of the Intermeccanica- bodied cars as the Omega GT. The familiar pattern of specialist builders exhausting their funds struck again, and then Intermeccanica found funding to build the complete cars in Italy, adopting the US-certified Ford 302 in spring of 1968, and offering cars through a distributor in New Jersey, first under the Torino name, and then when Ford protested (they were making a glorified Fairlane called Torino) under the Italia nameplate. By the end of production in 1972 around 400 cars had been built.
In 1965, Robert Cumberford, the Griffith / Omega / Torino / Italia designer, schemed out a Mustang sport wagon with friends at J. Walter Thompson ad agency, and sent a Mustang notchback to Intermeccanica for transformation from his drawings into the real thing. When completed, the car showed careful attention to details, with a backlight retracting into the tailgate, and tail lights split to accommodate the gate's opening. Cumberford and partners showed the car to Ford executives, but Ford was having trouble keeping up with demand for its existing Mustang lineup in 1966, so the car remained a one-off...
Taking a more expansive view of the sport wagon idea, New York's Murena Motors commissioned Intermeccanica to build a 4-seat luxury wagon on a 118" wheelbase chassis with a live rear axle, but with a disc brake at each corner…a good thing about those brakes as the engine was a 429 Ford. Performance was respectable, but the price was $15,000, and by 1969, when the Murena appeared, there was plenty of competition in the luxo GT class, though luxury SUVs had yet to appear.
The Murena's rear window sill departs from the straight fender line for no reason, and the thick C-pillar and tall, deeply-recessed backlight do not integrate well with the rest of the form. Overall, the Murena seemed too big and heavy to put much "sport" in sport wagon, and prospective customers apparently agreed. Murena Motors folded in 1970 after selling under a dozen cars..
Not long after the Murena appeared, when General Motors Europe chief Bob Lutz met Frank Reisner at the Turin Show, the two discussed a project to spruce up Opel's offerings, which lacked anything like the Mercedes SL or the BMW CS series. Opel had recently introduced the Opel GT as an affordable 2-seater, and Lutz was looking for what would today be called a "halo car" to raise Opel's profile and generate showroom traffic. The resulting Indra, a collaboration between GM's Opel and Reisner's Intermeccanica, went into limited production in 1971.
Franco Scaglione* did the styling for the 3 models offered, which included the convertible above, the blue notchback below, and a fastback 2+2. Reisner convinced Lutz and Opel to go with a new chassis specific to the Indra, and it featured 4-wheel ventilated disc brakes, a De Dion rear suspension from Opel's Diplomat sedan, ZF power steering, and engine choices including the 2.8 liter Opel inline 6 and the Chevy V8 in 327 and 350 versions. The Indra was offered through Opel dealers in Europe, but not in the US.
Scaglione, an adherent of rounded forms and parabolic arcs, had never seemed to warm to the wedges popular in the Seventies. While the rigid angularity of his notchback coupe seems unconvincing, his fastback 2+2 version of the Indra offers more continuity of form to go with the extra interior space. It's the rarest of Indras, with just 27 built before GM pulled the plug on the program, shortly after Bob Lutz GM left for BMW. There were also 60 convertibles and 40 notchback coupes. Indra production ended in mid-1974.
Shortly after the Indra adventure, Frank Reisner schemed out a replica of the 1954-'58 Porsche Speedster, which had already become a sought-after collectible when the Intermeccanica version appeared in 1976. It made clever use of a shortened VW Beetle platform and fiberglass bodywork to convincingly replicate what had been, after all, a very simple car. Eventually, Intermeccanica would sell over 500 Speedster replicas, and inspire others like Beck to make replicas of Porsches.
By 2017 Intermeccanica was offering an all-electric version of its Convertible D replica. Trim details make it hard to distinguish the fiberglass Intermeccanica from its steel-bodied Porsche forebears. Though purists lamented the lack of originality compared to Intermeccanica products of half a century earlier, the Reisner family credited the Porsche replicas with saving Intermeccanica. In the crowded and competitive specialist car market, perhaps the most original idea is not always the winning hand to play...
*Footnote & Errata: Puch and Steyr cars were the subject of a retrospective in "Streamliners from Mitteleuropa: Steyr and Steyr Puch", which appeared on February 16, 2019. Other designs from Franco Scaglione got the retrospective treatment in "Unsung Genius Franco Scaglione: The Arc of Success", posted December 20, 2017. In our first version of this post we noted that Bob Lutz left GM for Ford. Though he did take a management job with Ford eventually, he spent a few years at BMW first, working on the 3 Series.
Photo Credits:
Top: flickr.com
2nd: onlineshoppost.at
3rd thru 5th: the author
6th & 7th: Intermeccanica
8th & 9th: Wikimedia
10th: Intermeccanica
11th: en.wheelsage.org
12th: reddit.com
13th & 15th: Intermeccanica
14th: bringatrailer.com
16th: Wikimedia
17th & 18th: Intermeccanica
No comments:
Post a Comment