Roadside Attractions: Charles Sheeler's Cityscapes and Industrial Landscapes

"Church Street El", an oil on canvas from 1920, is an overhead view of Broadway and Wall Street, with the elevated train tracks and towering buildings dramatized by bright colors, sharply-defined shadows, and radically simplified shapes.  It's all about the dynamism of the Machine Age and seems to reflect a kind of optimism, though it was created by Charles Sheeler only two years after the most destructive war in history...

At first, you might think "City Interior", from 1935, is from a different artist.  Here, Sheeler depicts the deep space of the industrial heart of a city in careful detail, with machinery and ductwork casting heavy shadows that contrast with the bright wedge of sky above.  At first it could be mistaken for a photograph.  But Sheeler has used painterly skills to draw us into the train yard, emphasizing its size and power with the shadowed human figures receding into the distance...

Eight years before, an advertising firm had hired Charles Sheeler to photograph Ford's new River Rouge factories.  The integrated facility on 900 acres above the confluence of the River Rouge with the Detroit River had its own steel mill and electric power plant.  Featuring buildings designed by Albert Kahn, the Rouge complex was completed in 1928, the year after Sheeler photographed the criss-crossed conveyors above.  Few human figures appear in Sheeler's photos of River Rouge.  When they do, as in the photo of the giant stamping machine below, they seem overwhelmed by the vast scale and mass of the machines.

By the time Sheeler painted "American Landscape" in 1930, the 1929 Wall Street market crash was sending shock waves through the economy.  In "American Landscape", though, the composition seems serene and orderly, with only a tiny human figure running along the train tracks to remind us that people work here.  This approach is consistent with Sheeler's view that the giant industrial complexes were the Machine Age equivalent of cathedrals in the medieval era.

Sheeler painted "Classic Landscape", below, in 1931, as the Depression deepened and labor unrest spread among workers who still held jobs. The light-filled order of "Classic Landscape" shows us clearly organized geometry with no humans to create conflict.  The diagonal railroad tracks create movement, and underline a sense of power.  When Mexican artist Diego Rivera was commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts to paint 27 frescoes for its building the next year, he took quite another approach, with two murals showing workers at the River Rouge plant.

By the time Sheeler painted "Rolling Power" in 1939, strikes had exploded across the car industry, with walkouts and sitdown strikes affecting Ford, GM and Chrysler, and men from Ford's Service Dept. attacking labor organizers, including Walter Reuther, on a pedestrian overpass at River Rouge. Where Rivera's murals depicted the roots of human conflict in the era of mass production, Sheeler focused on the detached, impersonal mechanism of power itself.  Facing "Rolling Power", you realize it cannot be a photograph, because no functioning locomotive was ever this clean, and everything is in focus, even that puff of steam… Ford's River Rouge plant was the last major Detroit car maker to unionize, in 1941.

By the time Sheeler painted "Incantation" in 1946, critics had labeled his style Precisionism.  In this depiciton of an oil facility, the artist has distilled the forms and their shadows into a kind of essence, and the title seems to imply that these forms are, like cathedrals or pyramids, offered as some kind of tribute to a higher power.  And ominously, that they may have their own power, detached from, and beyond, the human realm.  These implications may resonate as we enter the era of artificial intelligence...

In the painting below from 1949, architectural forms and textures are superimposed and seen from several viewpoints, emphasizing how Sheeler used photography as a tool to advance his grasp of composition.

By "Continuity #2" in 1957, Sheeler was back on the industrial beat, assuming a low vantage point to depict the U.S. Steel blast furnaces in Pittsburgh, assembling the composition of light and shadow by reversing and superimposing photographic negatives to make studies before executing this version in tempera on board.  This painting dates from the era that steel and auto companies were at the pinnacle of industrial might in America.  As with our first example, "Church Street El", there's not a soul in sight.  There is an animating spirit here, but it's all in the geometry...

*Footnote:  For perspectives of  American landscapes and cityscapes by other artists, you may want to visit these posts on our site:

"Roadside Attraction:  John Register's Abandoned Diners and Sleepy Motels", Feb. 24, 2018.

"Roadside Attraction:  Night in the City by Wayne Jiang", Feb. 28, 2018.

"Roadside Attraction:  The American Gas Station as Visited by Hopper, Evans, Lange, Ruscha and Hitchcock", Nov. 9, 2019.

*Photo Credits:
Top:  De Young Museum website

2nd:  Worcester MA Art Museum

3rd:   Metropolitan Museum of Art

4th:   Boston Museum of Fine Art and Lane Collection

5th:   Museum of Modern Art, New York

6th:   The National Gallery, Washington DC 

7th:   The Philadelphia Museum of Art

8th:   The Brooklyn Museum

9th:   Artsy.net

10th:  Sotheby's 

Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 4: Willys Interlagos (Willys?) Reinvented, Sort of...

After a certain amount of rumor and anticipation about a project that was supposed to launch a revival of Italy's Carrozzeria Viotti just under a decade ago, the mystery was resolved when the wraps were taken off the car in a slickly-produced video, and at the Bologna Motor Show in 2014...

What appeared was a smoothly aerodynamic, mid-engined coupe dreamed up by Emanuele Bomboi, styling chief of the revived Viotti, and something called Fast Design.  A couple of engines were mooted by the makers, including a 3.8 liter twin-turbo flat six (apparently Porsche) and a Chevy LT-1 V8, but it's not clear if any cars beyond the prototype were built, and what powered them.  Despite the car's frontal similarity to the French Alpine A110 rally cars of the Sixties and Seventies, the name was a real surprise: Willys Interlagos AW380 Berlinetta...

"Tribute to a Legend", the video released by Viotti tells us.  This was likely confusing to a modern European audience, who may have never heard of a Willys Interlagos coupe, and may have lacked any recollection of the Willys* name at all, unlike an older generation who may have associated it with the Jeeps that helped win World War II.

But for some reason, the Viotti / Fast Design effort was named after a license-built version of the Alpine Renault A108, the model preceding the more famous A110 and offered from 1962-'66 by Willys in Brazil...

Like the Alpine A108, the Willys Interlagos, named after a race track, was a tidy little rear-engined coupe with Renault Dauphine-based drivetrain and fiberglass bodywork by Giovanni Michelotti.  Like the French A108, it was offered in coupe, convertible and 2+2 versions, though we've never seen examples of the 2+2.  

The steel backbone chassis was shared with the A108, along with double-wishbone front suspension, rack and pinion steering, and disc brakes front and rear.  The original engine offered was the 845cc Dauphine inline four making about 60 hp with Gordini aluminum head, sending power to swing-axle suspended rear wheels through a 4-speed transaxle.  Not the stuff of legends, perhaps, but a sweet little car... 

Sweet enough that Willys of Brazil sold 822 over a 4-year period. It never, however, established anything like the competition record of the more powerful French cousin that came after it, the Alpine Renault A110.  And it's unclear whether any specimens of the Willys Interlagos were sold in Europe during its production life.  So the decision by Viotti to hang the fate of their revival* project on a not-quite-classic car unfamiliar to Europeans seems an odd one.  

There may have been other problems with selecting that name.  Though Viotti had purchased the Willys "W" logo, Fiat Chrysler apparently had rights to the name, and felt confident enough that it reintroduced "Willys" in 2020 on special Jeep models. This practice continued after Stellantis took over in 2021.  And late in 2017, the Renault Group issued its long-rumored 21st century version of the legendary Alpine A110 that had won the French Rally Championship in 1968 and '69, the European Championship in '70, and the World Rally Championship in 1973.  The new mid-engined car is on the left below, with its over-achieving ancestor on the right.  The front-end styling of both cars is a clear sign that the Alpine A110 is really the "legend" that Viotti had in mind for their tribute all along.  They just didn't have rights to the Alpine name... 

*Footnote:  For a look at other Willys cars produced in Brazil, see "Willys Aero Saga: An Afterlife in Rio"  posted here on August 29, 2019.  A photo essay on the Alpine Renault A310 and its predecessor A110 appeared here on January 9, 2021, entitled "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310."  Before we knew this business of attempting to revive mostly (or completely) forgotten makes of car was going to be a trend, we posted an essay on the ATS revival.  Then it got to be a trend, and we did a numbered series.  Here are the makes, the titles and the dates:

ATS:  "Forgotten Classic Revival Show: ATS 2500 & 2500GTS", Nov. 11, 2018.

Connaught:   "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 1: The Connaught", March 31, 2021.

Spyker:   "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 2: The Spyker Saga", April 8, 2021.

Frazer Nash:  "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 3:  Frazer Nash, the 3rd Time Around", 

April 30, 2021.

*Photo Credits:
Top thru 4th from top:  Carrozzeria Viotti official video

5th:  Wikimedia

6th: pinterest.com

7th & 8th:  bringatrailer.com

9th:  Renault Group

Annals of Design: Why So Many SUVs & Pickups, and Why So Dumb-Looking?

Remember modern cars?  You know, in that brief period when everything was getting sleeker and closer to the road, when American manufacturers were finally abandoning pushrods for overhead cams, and live rear axles for independent suspension. A time when Ford outsold the competition from Japan, and all other cars too, with the Taurus. And those other cars were getting more aerodynamic and weight-conscious as well, reflecting a seemingly universal concern for fuel efficiency... 

  

In 1993, Ford celebrated its success with their 2nd generation Taurus.  Wonder what the top selling vehicle was that year?  It was Ford's F150 pickup.  The not-so-aero styling was a holdover from the 80s, but popularity of pickups was on the rise, spurred by the success of the compact Japanese imported pickups and also by advertising...

By 1997, when Ford went for the aero look for their new F Series, advertising of pickups and SUVs was in the midst of a boom. Car manufacturers claimed they were just giving customers what they wanted, but between 1990 and 2000, SUV advertising jumped ninefold.  When you spend 1.5 billion bucks telling people what they should want, it's not surprising that hordes of them decide they want that very thing...  

Pickups ads and commercials were mostly aimed at men, but SUV ads aimed appeals to women based on the faulty notion that bigger, heavier vehicles were Inevitably safer. In fact, because of their high center of gravity and slower transitional response, SUVs were involved in more single car accidents during this period than any other types of car. Those ads worked anyway; by 1999 about 40% of SUV sales were to women.  Recent data indicates that pedestrians experience more fatalities in accidents involving SUVs. Then there's the fact that SUVs average 20% higher fuel consumption than cars.  Early in the boom, Nissan advertised its SUVs with the tagline "You may run out of planet."  Well, yeah...

It all seemed to start with the move of urbanites to the suburbs, a trend that was evident when Chevrolet offered its first Carryall Suburban in 1934; the one below is a '37 all-steel model. You may also recall a Plymouth Suburban, a conventional wagon based on a car. The "Suburban" name was trademarked by U.S. Body & Forging of Indiana, a company that built wagon bodies for GM, Chrysler, Nash and Studebaker, all of whom used the name at one time or another.  After the end of World War 2, the steady flow of city dwellers to suburbia became a flood, and truck-based wagons began to sell to customers who didn't own farms, hotels or inns.  (By the way, that's what Chevy called a "diamond crown speedline grille" on that '37.  My dad had a '37 sedan for awhile.)

Well, late in 1962 the Kaiser Jeep people did something original; they combined a new body designed by Brooks Stevens with their new single overhead cam inline six and added four-wheel drive, with options like independent front suspension and even automatic transmission.  We didn't know it then, but we were looking at the first SUV, and by the late 70s this long-serving replacement for the humble Willys Jeep wagon was the car to have among country club types in Denver suburbs.  

Readers of a certain age may remember the comic exaggerations of 60s car ad illustrations, where Wide Track Pontiacs looked a whole lane wide, and front seats looked as wide and flat as Nebraska wheat fields.  Well, have you looked at a Suburban lately?  No wonder it needs a 42 gallon fuel tank and only gets 16 mpg.  Not all SUVs and pickups are huge, but in the first 4 months of 2022 they took almost 73% of the US car market.  Why are they so popular?  Well, the profit incentive behind those commercials is one answer.  According to Automotive News*,  SUVs and crossovers averaged around 50% higher in price than standard cars.  And owing to the way the fuel economy standards are written, vehicles classed as SUVs (including crossovers with unitized bodies like cars, rather than separate truck frames) also get a break on their mileage standards.  And the more SUVs a car maker sells, the lower the bar is for their corporate average mileage.    

The EV tax credits that are part of the Inflation Reduction act also favor SUVs.  If you buy an electric car, you're eligible for a tax credit on purchases up to $55,000. For SUVs, though, you can get a tax credit on vehicles costing up to $80,000.  And of course, a big electric SUV will be using around 20% more energy than an electric car, which may be of concern if that electricity is coming from a coal or gas-fired power plant.  And most big SUVs, like the gas-powered Yukon XL below, seem designed to flaunt the whole idea of consumption, with no recognition that every vehicle, no matter how it's powered, needs to slice through the air...

Stellantis now offers the bloated Jeep Grand Wagoneer L below as competition for the Suburban and Yukon XL. With a 6,700 lb. curb weight (50% more than the original) and on a 130" wheelbase (20" longer than the original), it probably wouldn't exist without those SUV-friendly fuel economy standards.  Fuel consumption is the same as the Suburban, here owing to the use of a 510 hp twin-turbo inline six.

Rivian, which began with an exclusive contract to make electric vans for Amazon, first offered the R1T 4-door electric pickup, and now offers the R1S SUV below in various configurations ranging in price from $78k to $90k.  Styling is not as adventurous as the all-electric premise, except for those cartoonish headlights.  Unlike driving a Grand Wagoneer though, you'll never need to stop at a gas station except to use the bathroom...

In 2015 Ford moved to bodying all its F150s in aluminum to save weight.  Starting in spring of 2022 they offered their all-electric Lightning pickup, and that has an aluminum chassis in addition to the alloy body panels.  Base price was about $23k less than the Rivian truck, and sales were good.  The concern for weight-saving didn't carry across to aerodynamics; the style is standard-issue truck, outlined with some zappy lighting.  Judged against other pickups, though, the Lightning looks like progress.

*Footnote:  

For facts and perspectives, we consulted David Goewey's 1999 article "Careful, You May Run Out of Planet", then "The Real Reason Americans Keep Buying SUVs", by Arian Horbovetz at Streetsblog USA (usa.streetsblog.org) from Nov. 15, 2022, and Elizabeth Kolbert's essay, "Why SUVs Are Still a Huge Environmental Problem", from the March 3, 2023 issue of the New Yorker.  Kolbert points out that France has introduced a purchase tax of ten Euros per kilogram for every vehicle over 4,000 pounds, and Washington, D.C. now has escalating purchase taxes for vehicles over 3,500 pounds.

Photo Credits:  

Top thru 3rd from top:  Ford Motor Company

4th & 5th:  Wikimedia

6th:  Kaiser Jeep Corporation

7th & 8th:  General Motors

9th:  Stellantis N.V.

11th:  Wikimedia

12th:  Ford Motor Company

Forgotten Classics: Cars Named After Dogs, and the Goodwoof Festival

A car culture website that should know better recently posted an article about how there are no cars named after dogs, and then invented some funny names as suggestions for future products. Of course, they'd missed Rover somehow, and cruised right past the AC Greyhound and the Aston Martin Bulldog.  We'll get to those, but first we're going to start with the Willys-Overland Whippet, introduced late in 1926 as a 1927 model and produced into 1931. The examples above and below (righthand drive for Australia) are from 1929. Until the Great Depression prompted by the stock market crash of that year, the Toledo firm founded by John Willys in 1908 (the year Henry Ford introduced the Model T) had been doing pretty well producing cars using Knight's patented sleeve-valve system; Daimler and Minerva were other users.  At their peak popularity, Willys was selling around a quarter million Whippets a year...

The Whippet competed in price with Ford and Chevy, but the arrival of Ford's Model A in 1929, along with that economic slide, created problems for Willys.  The 4 and 6 cylinder sleeve-valve Whippet engines were more expensive to build than Ford's or GM's, and this meant that profits were slim even in good times.  A couple years after the demise of the Whippet in 1931, Lincoln offered this graceful cantilevered leaping greyhound radiator cap ornament.  But the V12-powered car was just named the KB.  "Greyhound", the bigger and more famous relative of the agile whippet, would've been a more inspired moniker, perhaps, but there was already a bus company named that...

When Lincoln introduced its landmark Continental, based on the Zephyr V12, in 1940, they associated the sleek new car with the greyhound's grace and speed.  The ad below is from 1941... 

In the same era, though, John Lencki built what became a successful race car, and called it The Pup.  Under new regulations issued for 1938 by the AAA for their Championship racing series that included the Indy 500, cars would no longer need to allow room for a rider mechanic next to the driver.  Taking advantage of this, Lencki built a slimmer car, and when comparing it with his previous design, reflected that it looked like a pup.  Driver Jimmy Snyder won the 100-mile race at Syracuse, NY in fall of '38 driving The Pup, and the car competed in the Indy 500 twice.  The best finish was 14th in 1941, when it became one of the first race cars to feature a seat belt, because driver J. Chitwood noticed how the suspension bounced him away from the pedals on Indy's brick paving.   Despite the new-fangled seat belt, The Pup stayed with the twin-cam four-cylinder engine design pioneered by Harry Miller…

Of course, by that time, Rover had been building cars under that doggie-flavored name for over 3 decades, having started with a tricycle in 1883, a Rover Safety Bicycle in 1885, and before that first car in 1904, the Rover Imperial motorcycle in 1902. It is, however, the P4, known affectionately as Auntie Rover, that sticks in the mind for its pooch-like virtues of sturdiness and loyal service.  Auntie was launched in 1949 after Rover brass bought two 1947 Loewy Studebakers and used them as models for their new postwar car. The 1951 version below has special Tickford drophead bodywork; most Auntie Rovers were saloons.  They were so solidly built that Road & Track magazine cited them in 1952 as the best cars in the world, save for Rolls-Royce.  That year, Rover changed the grille to delete the "cyclops eye" fog light.

One feature the P4 shared with Rolls Royce was the "F-head" (also called IOE) engine design, with inlet valves located over the exhausts.  Initially, Rover offered only the 6-cylinder, 2.1 liter 75 model, but later expanded the line to include the 4-cylinder 60 as well as 2.6 liter 90. Gordon Bashford's Loewy-influenced body design, with its notchback and prominent "ducktail" rear deck seemed startling to the conservative British, but it turned out to be popular, and Auntie Rover overlapped the more square-rigged P5 series until 1964, selling over 130,000 cars.

That wasn't the end of innovation at Rover, either.  The more compact P6, with its Citroen DS-influenced body (horizontal crease on flanks, roof line), debuted in 1963 with an overhead-cam, 4 cylinder 2 liter engine and De Dion rear suspension. This Rover 2000 became the Rover 3500 in '68 with the addition of the aluminum V8 based on GM's design for Buick.  Both cars increased Rover's popularity...or is that pupularity?

Meanwhile, over at the Rootes Group, which made Hillmans and Sunbeams, a compact station wagon called the Husky was introduced in 1954.  Initially, the Husky came with a side-valve 1.26 liter four, unlike the OHV unit offered in Hillman Minx sedans.  But this Mark 1 Husky was cute...

The new-styled Husky introduced for 1958 (confusingly called the Series 1, but also the Audax version) expanded the 7 foot wheelbase of the previous Mark 1 to 86 inches, which it would share with the new Sunbeam Alpine when that car appeared in 1960.  Engine was an OHV inline 4 of 1.4 liters.  The side-opening rear door was a Husky feature...

Also in 1958, Polish manufacturer WFM Fafik produced the Puppy prototype, in the then-growing microcar class, powered by a 148cc engine. The wraparound windshield and backlight fit the period perfectly.  The door hinges seem to have come from a much larger car.  It seems odd that nobody in the industry has since picked Puppy or Pup as names for minicars or city runabouts...

But AC Cars, better known for their Ace and Cobra products, called their new 2+2 fastback coupe Greyhound when they introduced it at the Earls Court show in fall of '59, the same show where the BMC Mini first appeared.  The alloy-bodied Greyhounds, on a wheelbase 10 inches longer than the sleeker 90-inch Ace roadster and Aceca coupe, were offered with Bristol engines in 2 and 2.2 liter versions.  Eleven of the 83 Greyhounds built from '59 to '63 were fitted with Ford Zephyr 2.6 liter sixes.  Discontinuing the Greyhound and Aceca perhaps allowed AC to better keep up with demand for the then-new Cobra...

Chassis designer Len Terry, later famous for mid-engined Formula 1 cars such as the Lotus 33 and 38, and the Eagle Mk. 1, produced some front-engined Formula Junior cars under the Terrier name starting in 1960.  These were Ford Anglia powered, meeting the requirements for production engines of under 1,100 cc, and were briefly competitve until eclipsed by mid-engined cars.  The Terrier name was clever though, especially as applied to a racer.  There have since been Terrier military vehicles, and there was a Ford Greyhound armored vehicle, but these weren't cars, so we're ignoring them.

In 1979 Aston Martin Lagonda showed the prototype Bulldog, a mid-engined, very wedge-shaped supercar designed by William Towns, who had done the wedge on the Lagonda saloon three years earlier.  The ruler-straight parallel window lines are at odds with the tapering wedge idea, but may have made hinging easier for the gullwing doors.  That curved indent at the door sill may indicate that Towns had second thoughts, though.  AML management had second thoughts when they considered production costs for the twin-turbocharged Bulldog, and then cancelled the project, meaning that this is the only one.  Why, however, current Aston Martin management decided not to use the Bulldog name for their new SUV (forgettably named the DBX 707) is a mystery.  

The motor sports enthusiasts at Goodwood, though, have not lost their enthusiasm for dogs, and in 2022 they instituted Goodwoof, a weekend-long doggie festival held in May in front of the Kennels.  It was such a success (the English do love their dogs) that it was held again on May 18 and 19 of this year, and was expanded to include an architects' design competition for something called Barkitecture...

It has not been reported, however, whether the pooch below was dissuaded by the shape of the topiary sculpture from doing what male dogs usually do on shrubbery...

Watson Sherman, the Activities Manager at the Bone Lounge where all these posts are written, seems a little miffed that he was never notified of, let alone invited to, these Goodwoof events. Well, I tell him; there's always next year...

*Footnote:  

Gary Axon, on Axon's Automotive Anorak at the excellent goodwood.com website, came up with 8 cars named after dogs, admitted he cheated a bit by including the Ferrari Boxer (named for its engine configuration, not a pooch), and identified those Terriers as well as a Whippet made by designer Luigi Colani, but he never found the Pup or the Puppy.  But we'd be cheating if we didn't admit he got us onto this trail, and that we're envious that he lives so close to the Goodwoof Festival...

Photo Credits:  

Top:  Bonhams Auctions

2nd:  BGS Classic Cars

3rd:  Steve Brown on flickr.com

4th:  Ford Motor Company

5th:  Museum of American Speed

6th thru 9th:  Wikipedia

10th:  Rootes Group

11th:  Wikipedia

12th:  reddit.com

13th:  Amberley's Museum

14th:  racecarsdirect.com

15th:  flickr.com

16th:  La Escuderia

17th & 18th:  goodwood.com

Bottom:  the author

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