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
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