The Italian Line: Piero Drogo and Carrozzeria Sports Cars

The Iso Grifo* A3C road racer appeared in bare, burnished aluminum along with its sister car, the A3L grand touring coupe (which wore paint) in October 1963 at the Turin Show.  It was a product of Giotto Bizzarrini's chassis design (like Ferrari's GTO) and Giorgetto Giugiaro's body design, like the Grifo A3L (luxe) coupe.  While the A3L bodies were built by Bertone, the A3C featured bodies in riveted alloy by ex-GP pilot Piero Drogo's Carrozzeria Sports Cars, founded in 1960 with coachbuilders Lino Marchesini and Celso Cavalieri.  The shorter A3C shared its chassis with the A3L, but the 5.3 liter Chevy V8 was set back farther for a kind of "front mid-engine" effect. The apparently worked pretty well, as the Iso A3C (for Corsa) won its class at Le Mans in 1964 and '65. Around 20 A3C coupes were bodied by Piero Drogo's workshops before Iso cancelled their Le Mans program, and Bizzarrini went off to build his own similar-looking Strada and 5300 GT coupes, bodied in fiberglass instead of alloy. 

Bizzarrini*, unlike Iso,  remained interested in racing, and created the mid-engined P538* late in 1965 for Le Mans 1966.  A Chevy-powered version went far enough at Le Mans '66 to attract an order for a Lamborghini-powered V12 variant, and this ironically became the first Bizzarrini to be powered by an engine of Bizzarrini's design.  Production numbers are foggy, but most sources claim that 4 were built, and that the chassis became the basis for Giugiaro's Bizzarrini Manta show car, and also influenced the Bizzarrini chassis under the stillborn AMX3 road car...

Piero Drogo and Giotto Bizzarrini had gotten to know each other earlier, when Bizzarrini designed a competition coupe to attract attention to the line of GT cars built by ASA, with SOHC engines that were essentially 4 inline cylinders from Ferrari's Colombo V12.  Drogo's firm supplied bodies in alloy.  The car below, with Drogo standing on the left and Bizzarrini on the right, is a 1000 GTC from 1962, with displacement just below the 1 liter class limit; there was also an 1100 GTC and a 1300 GTC.  Few cars were produced, but at least one was delivered to the Silver Helmet racing team; posing with the team in the 2nd photo below, Bizzarrini is 3rd from right.

Chassis #2472 was the last of the Tipo 61, 2.9 liter, 4-cylinder Birdcage Maseratis built, in 1961. It won the Nurburgring 1000 km that year, piloted by Masten Gregory and Lloyd Casner. The original body was damaged in the Rouen 6-hour race, and was replaced by the Drogo body below in 1962, and the car was raced by Casner's Camoradi Team into '63. The designer is not known, as Drogo himself managed and lined up clients, and relied on others at Carrozzeria Sports Cars for design, or on outsiders, as in the case of the Iso A3C.

That Birdcage rebody may have attracted the attention of chief engineer Giulio Alfieri at Maserati, as his team was preparing a Le Mans racer powered by a front-mounted, 4-cam (gear-driven) V8, basically a  450S reduced to 3943cc for the 4 liter prototype class.  No more than 5 of the aerodynamic Tipo 151 coupes were built from 1962 to '65, some bodied by Allegretti, but 151/3, shown below, featured a Kamm-tailed Drogo body. When fitted with a fuel-injected 5-liter, dry-sump engine, it recorded 191 mph on the Mulsanne Straight.  Cars were supplied to Briggs Cunningham and Lloyd Casner, and the latter died testing one.  

The design of the Ferrari P3, which appeared in 1966, was closely related to that of the Dino 166P and 206SP that appeared the previous year.  All were bodied by Drogo's Carrozzeria Sports Cars, as was the Dino 206S below from 1966.  These featured the 65 degree V6, longintudinally-mounted behind the driver and in front of the transmission.  Only 18 of these cars were built, one of which was converted from a 166P.  Though these designs appeared about the same time as Pininfarina's 1965 Dino 206 Berlinetta Speciale, designed by Aldo Brovarone and refined by Leonardo Fioravante, Pininfarina has not claimed credit for the design of the race cars, which look quite different than the Speciale, which carried many features that later appeared on the 206 production car. 

Drogo built even fewer bodies for the 1966 4-liter prototype P3, shown below: a total of 3 cars, one of which crashed and two of which were converted by Ferrari to P4 specification...

While we are looking at Drogo's work on Ferraris, we would be missing one of the best examples by ignoring a re-body of a Series 1 250 GTO.  Swedish driver Ulf Norinder raced his example until the body began to fall apart, and commissioned a new body by Carrozzeria Sports Cars, which was finished in 1966.  The nose and the steeply curved windshield follow the profile of the Series 2 GTO64...

…while the tail avoids that car's notchback and recessed backlight, instead substituting a gracefully-sloped rear window with hinged hatch, in a long tail with subtly-upturned spoiler.  The converging lines of the C-pillar seem to frame the rear wheel.  Overall, one of the prettiest re-bodies ever, and it happens to be on a GTO.

The year after that GTO rebody, Drogo produced the body for the Serenissima* Agena below.  The mid-engined coupe, powered by Serenissima's own 3.5 liter 4-cam V8, was one of a handful of road cars produced by Count Volpi's firm, which also built sports racers and supplied 3 liter V8s for McLaren's early F1 efforts, gaining them their first GP point. The Agena, intended as a prototype of a potential production car, shows signs of the previous year's De Tomaso Mangusta in its creased, flush sides, and a bit like the first Ford GT40 in the treatment of the nose design.  Like Renzo Rivolta and Bizzarrini, Count Volpi eventually decided that making exotic cars was a great way to have money vanish into a dark tunnel, and stopped a couple years before Drogo's Carrozzeria Sports Cars closed its doors.  That was in 1971; sadly, Piero Drogo died in 1973 at age 46, when his Ferrari California was involved in an accident with a truck inside a dark tunnel...

*Footnote:  

We've featured posts on car makers who got into the business because they had bones to pick with Enzo Ferrari, and these include a trifecta of makes with Drogo bodies.  If you're curious about how this happened, you might visit "Born from Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta", posted  Sept. 20, 2018, "The Etceterini Files Part 18: Bizzarrini P538", posted Feb. 27, 2019,  and "Forgotten Classic:  Serenissima—The Winged Lion is the Rarest Beast of All", posted March 20, 2019. 

Photo Credits:  

Top:  Bob Jecmen 

2nd:  the author

3rd:  Carrozzeria Sports Cars, on Wikimedia

4th & 5th:  Wikimedia

6th:  carrozzieri-italiani.com

7th:  historicmotorsportcentral.com

8th:  youtube.com

9th & 10th:  ferrari.com

11th & 12th: The Klementaski Collection

13th:  artcurial.com

Roadside Attraction + Forgotten Classic: The Moto Guzzi Museum and the Moto Guzzi V8

Lucky visitors to the Moto Guzzi Museum in Mandello del Lario (on Lake Como, in case you need another enticement) are greeted by a marble sculpture and side elevation of a motorcycle headed for the checkered flag in Plaza Leonardo da Vinci. Engineer Carlo Guzzi had built a motorcycle shortly after World War I, and founded the oldest surviving European motorcycle maker in continuous production, Moto Guzzi, with partners Giorgio and Angelo Parodi early in 1921. Racing was important from the beginning; Moto Guzzi won its first European title at Monza in 1924. Back to that racer headed for the checkered flag up there; that looks like an engine with four overhead cams, doesn't it?

Well, it's a water-cooled 500cc V8 designed for GP racing by Giulio Carcano, and it was raced by the Moto Guzzi team from 1955 to 1957.  One way to think about this engine with its 4 overhead cams is that it resembles the Maserati Ghibli V8 of a decade later, except that its entire displacement would fit into one of the Maserati's cylinders, with space left over.  The Otto, as it was also called, set an official speed record of 171 mph 2 decades before that speed was again achieved in a motorcycle GP.  The engine featured a Dell'Orto carburetor for each cylinder, weighed 99 lb. in a 326 lb. bike, and made 78 hp at 12,000 rpm. The Moto Guzzi V8 below is one of 80 vehicles on display at the museum, and one of only two V8 racers built. 

About that checkered flag part of the mural, though, we have to report that while blindingly fast, the Otto never won a GP race. There were reliability problems, and because chassis design had not caught up to that advanced engine (brakes were still drums, for example), some racers declined to ride it in GP races.  Still, when it retired from decades of racing at the end of 1957, Moto Guzzi had collected over 3,300 race wins, and 14 world titles. By 1963, Stanguellini* decided that a mid-engined, four-wheeled speed record car would be a more stable format for the Guzzi V8, and Franco Scaglioni designed an aerodynamic shell over the tubular Stanguellini chassis for the Colibri (Italian for hummingbird) below. The body was built by Carrozzeria Gransport, of later Cobra Daytona fame. Somehow the Otto engine never arrived for installation, and the car made do with a 250cc Moto Guzzi single that made 29hp at 8,400 rpm.  That was enough, though, for the little streamliner with its 5-speed chain drive and front disc brakes to set half a dozen international speed records at Monza in fall of 1963. To see it, though, you'll need to visit the Stanguellini Museum...

There are plenty of other exhibits to take in at the Moto Guzzi Museum, including the landmark V7 Record below.  A V7 Record set 19 speed records at Monza back in 1969.  The V7 engine tooks its name from its displacement.  It originally appeared in 1966 as an air-cooled 700 cc V-twin with 90 degrees between cylinders and shaft drive, and starting in 1967 engineer Lino Tonti developed performance versions, with the 748cc V7 Sport capable of 125 mph.  The V-twins had a good reputation for handling, and Moto Guzzi sold ten V7 Police models to the Los Angeles Police Force in 1969; these were reputedly the first motorcycles not of American origin to go to Stateside police forces, and led to other Moto Guzzi police sales in the US.

The collection also highlights many of the models powered for over four decades by Carlo Guzzi's first engine design, with a single horizontal cylinder, single overhead cam, 4-stroke air-cooled configuration, at first in 500cc displacement.  That title-winning 1924 racer had 4 valves for its thumping single cylinder.  Until 1934, each engine carried the signature of the mechanic who had assembled it...

The museum collection includes an early, streamlined speed record bike, as well as a vast trove of scale models and miniatures... 

…along with photos, literature, and other memorabilia.

Carlo Guzzi was born in 1889, died in 1964 and lived long enough to see a Moto Guzzi be the first motorcycle to reach the Arctic Circle (1928), to become Italy's largest motorcycle maker (1934), build the first wind tunnel for motorcycle design (1954), and to see its host city call itself La Citta Della Moto Guzzi (ages ago).  The stone sculpture in our first image* came later, in 2011, and was produced by sculptor Ettore Gambioli and architect Paolo Gambelli.  Three years later, the Discovery Channel named the Moto Guzzi V8 one of the ten greatest motorcycles of all time.

*Footnote:  For a look at Stanguellini cars not powered by Moto Guzzi, see "The Etceterini Files Part 5—Chasing a Mirage: the Last Stanguellini", posted here on March 21, 2016.

*Photo Credits:
All photos were generously supplied by longtime reader and contributor Keith Carlson, except for the 2nd, 3rd & 4th from the top (Wikimedia), and the 5th & 6th (piaggiogroup.com).  For Keith's shots of Monterey Car Week, see "Monterey Car Week 2023:  Auctions, Pebble Beach Concours, and a Day at the Races", posted here on August 31, 2023.

Lost Roadside Attraction: Racing in the Streets...of Pebble Beach

The first road racing in the Monterey Bay area* after World War 2 was launched under the auspices of the Sports Car Club of America on Nov. 5, 1950.  There were four races starting at noon, and the overall winner was Californian Phil Hill, in one of 240 alloy-bodied Jaguar XK120s. The XK120, launched in 1949, offered performance that had been available pre-war only in cars 2 to 3 times as expensive, like Alfa Romeo and Bugatti.  Hill would show up every year for the Pebble Beach races...

...which wound at first through the Del Monte Forest along a 1.9 mile route.  The organizers did not remove trees along the race route, as Pebble Beach was already an exclusive residential zone linked to a famous golf course.  Many of the ten thousand spectators stood between those trees, separated from the track by a rope and occasional hay bales, and were advised in the brochure: "The public is requested not to cross the highway and to remain at a safe distance during the trials and the running of the race..."  As the photos below show, the concept of "safe distance" turned out to be a pretty subjective one.

For the 1951 running of the Pebble Beach races, Phil Hill acquired a prewar Alfa Romeo 8C2900B, a car powered by a GP engine, and which might offer some performance advantage over the production sports cars in the field, even though they were newer. That theory was derailed when Bill Pollack, driving a crude (by comparison) British Allard J2 powered by a mass-produced Cadillac V8, passed Hill and eventually won the race, with Hill (left in photo below) finishing 4th in the Alfa, with its more temperamental supercharged, aluminum twin-cam straight eight.  

In the photo above, Pollack, in the J2 on the left, makes his move.  In 1951, the 2nd year of the Pebble Beach races, the course was extended to 2.1 miles with a tighter turn replacing a sweeping arc.  That course design remained until the end of racing in the Del Monte Forest...

Bill Pollack won again in '52, and to some people this may have presaged the rise of mass-produced engines.  Not to racer Ernie McAfee, though. By 1953 at his Sunset Boulevard dealership in LA, McAfee (shown with a Siata 208S) offered Ferraris and Alfa Romeos alongside now-forgotten mass-produced English compacts like the Hillman Minx.  The Siata, with its 70-degree Fiat V8 and 4-wheel independent suspension, was briefly popular in the 2 liter class.  Road & Track tested it that year and praised its handling, looks and 12.4 second 0-60 time, but not its $5,300 price. The Triumph TR-2 they tested a year later did 0-60 two-tenths of a second quicker, and was only 2 mph slower (104 mph) at less than half the price ($2,448).  It was the sign of another trend in amateur racing, as the British export drive offered weekend racers MGs, Austin-Healeys and Triumphs at Chevy prices.  

On the other hand, if you really wanted to clean up in the 2 liter class, McAfee could offer you a Ferrari 500 Mondial for over twice the price of that Siata, or if you wanted to go for broke (in all senses) one of the new Ferrari 250MM series, with the Columbo-designed 3-liter SOHC V12 that would eventually become an endurance racing star in the 250GT.  Phil Hill raced his 250MM on the left in the '53 Pebble Beach event, and took the overall win.  He didn't win everything, though.  The lady in the passenger seat eventually married Ernie McAfee.  The car on the right is an even rarer Ferrari 340 Mexico, one of 4 tubular-chassis cars with Lampredi-designed 4.1 liter V12s intended for the Carrera Panamericana, and the only open spider.

Sometime car builder Sterling Edwards frequently competed at Pebble Beach, and in 1954 he recovered from an early spin to take the overall win in his '53 Ferrari 340MM, one of 10 built and bodied by Vignale to a design by Michelotti, like both Ferraris above.  The Edwards Ferrari is the center car below.  Like all other winning cars in the Pebble Beach series, it still exists.

The rainy 1955 event would be won by Phil Hill, his third victory in the Del Monte Forest, in a Ferrari 750 Monza, a twin-cam 4 cylinder, 3-liter car.  During this period, Ferrari named cars after their individual cylinder displacements; thus, a 250 twelve-cylinder was a 3 liter engine, and so was a 750 four-cylinder...

Phil Hill also won Best of Show at that year's Pebble Beach Concours, the first time the event had been won by something other than a new (or almost new) car.  The winning car was the 1931 Pierce-Arrow in which he'd learned to drive.  This trophy for a Thirties car was likely a sign of a trend; maybe it was not coincidental that several books on classic cars were published around this time.

By the next year, Ernie McAfee's Sunset Boulevard dealership had become "the largest dealer in Italian cars in the United States", and offered the Maserati brothers' OSCA (trendy in the SCCA after Stirling Moss won the '54 Sebring) as well as Alfa, Siata and Ferrari.  By  1956, fins were trendy too, but not many copies of the Boano-designed Ferrari coupe body below found buyers.  More Ferraris would be sold after Enzo introduced his "production car", the 250GT, in 1957.  By then, however, McAfee would not be around to reap any profits.

One of the newcomers at the 1956 race was driven by an old hand, Bill Pollack, who'd won in 1951 and '52 with an Allard.  This time he showed up in an even more obscure British road rocket, the HWM* "Stovebolt Special", a former Formula 2 car with cycle fenders added for sports car events, and 2 significant upgrades by Tom Carsten: a new Chevy V8 replaced the 2-liter Alta four, and there were disc brakes at all four wheels.  Making use of these amenities, Pollack was able to lead a field including #276, Ernie McAfee in a Ferrari 735LM, a brute powered by a 4.4 liter inline DOHC six, Phil Hill in a Ferrari 860 Monza powered by a 3.4 liter inline DOHC four, Carroll Shelby in the Ferrari 750 Monza Hill had driven to victory in '55, Pete Woods (D-Type Jaguar) and Bob Wittke (Austin-Healey).  Eventually, differential trouble in the HWM dropped Pollack out of contention for the lead, but by that time those looming trees had intervened in a more fateful way...

Bill Pollack had dropped down to 4th when Ernie McAfee missed a shift and locked up the drum brakes on Ferrari #276, which led to his fatal collision with a tree, the only fatality in the seven years of races at Pebble Beach.  Carroll Shelby in the Ferrari Monza that Hill had piloted in '55 took a somber win after the race was restarted. McAfee's fatal accident was enough to end motor racing in the Del Monte Forest, and to prompt the SCCA and local promoters to seek a suitable location for a safer course design.  They found one at nearby Laguna Seca and started a road racing series there in 1957, but the story of how that happened is one we'll save for another day...

*History Notes:
Frequent contributor, vintage racer, and historian Keith Carlson notes that motor racing really started on Monterey Peninsula in 1903, when the owners of the Hotel Del Monte built a one-mile oval for racing.  The original 1880 hotel burned down in 1924, and was replaced by the current building, designed by Lewis Hobart and Clarence Tantau, in 1926-'27. Guests eventually included the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway.  The Del Monte Hotel built Seventeen Mile Drive as a sightseeing route for clients, and the sights included what soon enough became Pebble Beach.  In 1942 the hotel was leased to the US Navy for training technicians, later housed the Naval Postgraduate School, and was renamed Herrmann Hall.  Seventeen Mile Drive now hosts classic car tours during Monterey Car Week, coming back full circle to its original purpose as an excursion route.

*Footnotes:
The saga of Britain's HWM was retold here in "Forgotten Classic: HWM---Racing Into Obscurity on Alta, Jaguar and Chevy Power", posted on November 23, 2020.

Photo Credits: 

Top:  San Francisco Chronicle 

2nd:  Pebble Beach Concours Archive

3rd:  Pebble Beach Resorts 

4th & 5th:  Dr. John Skivington, on tamsoldracecarsite.net

6th:  North American Motortsports Pages

7th:  Bart Jonkers on pinterest.com

8th:  Collection of Phil Hill 

9th:  Del Monte Trophy Race Group

10th:  K500.com

11th:  Pebble Beach Concours Archive

12th:  Ernie McAfee Importer & Distributor

13th:  Don Meacham, on tamsoldracecarsite.net

14th:  Don Palmer, on tamsoldracecarsite.net