Ferrari and Vignale: Happy Together...for a While

This writer was intrigued by Vignale-bodied Ferraris before he knew they were designed by Giovanni Michelotti*, and a dozen years before he encountered a twin of the above car in a parking lot in Southern France in 1974.  Why?  Well, they seemed to hide complexities under their seeming simplicity, and even in a neighborhood where a grade school kid could get hit on his bike by a '54 Corvette (the author did) and drool over an Ace Bristol (the author did), nobody had one.  Also, they were light and fast.  The 166 coupe above, a 2-liter V12, is from 1950.  The simple, inwardly-curving alloy flanks are relieved by a subtle indent linking the front fenders to the rear, and in an era of flat, 2-piece windshields, this one-piece glazing is slightly curved.  Delightful, but rare.  Alfredo Vignale* liked the design enough that he built a similar-looking coupe on an Abarth chassis..

By 1951, Michelotti was experimenting with forms and details that would appear on many Vignale designs on Ferraris and other cars through the Fifties.  On the 212 berlinetta above, chassis #0179EL, headlights have been moved into the grille, now an oval egg crate that would become a trademark, and they are flanked by fog lights and projecting front fender forms.  Barely visible here is the extension of the vertical metal at the window sill into embryonic fins inset from the outer contours of the rear fenders. That effect is more pronounced on chassis #197EL, where the yellow fins contrast with black fenders on the Bumblebee car, a 212 model from 1952.

The Bumblebee also has an indented, contrasting panel echoing the curve of the front wheel well, like the larger Cunningham C3 coupes and convertibles produced by Vignale for American Briggs Cunningham during these same years. Where the Cunningham had conventional headlights, the Bumblebee sticks with the headlights-in-grille theme, with smaller fog lights than #179EL, and those projecting fenders that will soon enough show up in Mexico on some famous racers...

The 225 Sport below shows that Michelotti and Vignale would delete some decorative effects when their assignment was a road racer.  The 225, a one-year model (1952), and marks the steady increase in the displacement of the Colombo-designed SOHC V12, in this case to 2.7 liters. Apparently Buick hadn't patented the idea of cooling portholes, or Vignale didn't care. Road racers, unlike GT cars, usually had sliding windows instead of the roll-up variety.  Ferrari built only 21 of the 225 Sport. 

The coupe below, from the same period, shows how non-standardized Vignale's efforts were. Note the taller greenhouse and recessed grille, and the flanges in the alloy fenders around the wheel openings.  Roll-down windows are a concession to comfort, but steering is still on the right.  Maserati was already offering left-hand drive.

At the rear, the bright trim at the color separation line emphasizes the tidy, rounded contours, along with the recessed tail lights and gently wrapped rear window. Upon first seeing a Vignale coupe in Road & Track during an era of big chrome and bombastic fins, the author and his classmates were thunderstruck...

1952 was a busy year for Ferrari and for Vignale.  The 225S gave way to the 250MM (after the Mille Miglia road race), and the V12 was now at the 3-liter displacement that would help make it famous.  As you may have suspected, Ferrari models were named after their individual cylinder displacements during this period.  Thus, a V12 model 250MM and a 4-cylinder 750 Monza were both 3-liter cars.

This 250MM coupe (or berlinetta, in Italian) has a lower-profile, more forward-slanting air intake than the earlier cars, and this one lacks the portholes.  

Vignale also built some 250MM spiders, and Phil Hill took delivery of one from New York Ferrari distributor Luigi Chinetti in spring of 1953. That's Hill's car on the left, on the way to the Pebble Beach road races, a bit more than 8 years before he became Formula One World Champion in a Ferrari. Note that Michelotti's design emphases the concave, inward-sloping panels below the doors with some bright trim.  Yes, some car makers were still putting trim on road racers.  Mr. Hill might have preferred disc brakes instead.  Despite the drums and the presence of the big 340 Mexico on the right, he won at Pebble Beach anyway. 

That tubular-chassis 340 Mexico above is the only one of the 4 Mexicos built in 1952 as a spider.  The others were coupes like the one shown at dockside below.  Note the projecting front fenders, an idea Michelotti adopted from his earlier work on the 212 chassis, and low-set headlights fronting a trough between those fenders and the hood.  Under that hood was the bigger engine NYC dealer and race driver Luigi Chinetti had requested, a new Lampredi design, still an SOHC V12, but at 4.1 liters, and linked to a 5-speed gearbox.  It would eventually grow to 4.5 and then 4.9 liters...

And it give the 340 Mexico its distinctive proportions, with around half the car's length taken up by the engine bay, as shown below. The cars were named for Mexico's Carrera Panamericana, a long-distance road race, and they competed there.  In 1952, Luigi Chinetti and Jean Lucas took 3rd place in a 340 Mexico coupe.  A small vent behind the door directs air to the rear brakes, and the vertical metal strip behind the door's leading edge may be an early effort at boundary layer air control...

Later in 1953, Michelotti sketched out a more aerodynamic approach to the competition spider. Overhangs were minimal front and rear, and on several of the cars the headlights were covered by plexiglass shrouds.  Vignale built this body style on the 166 Series II chassis, on the 250MM (the car below) and also on the 340MM.  

Note how the air outlets (to cool Ferrari's soon-outmoded drum brakes) visually elongate the stubby, rounded tail. This new, pared-down look might have foretold more work for Vignale and his designer Michelotti, but Scaglietti produced sleeker, lower-profile Ferrari competition cars based on Farina designs in '54. That year Pinin Farina's share of Ferrari's production increased, foreshadowing Ferrari's order for 30 Farina-bodied 250GT cabriolets in 1957, and the 250GT coupe the following year. The latter was the first series-produced Ferrari, with over 350 finding buyers before production ended in 1960.

Footnote: 

Michelotti's designs for Vignale on other chassis, including Maserati, Lancia, Cunningham and Triumph, are surveyed in "Michelotti and Vignale in the 50s & 60s: Pioneers of the Italian Line", in our archives for June 14, 2020.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  The Jensen Museum

2nd:  carrozzieri-italiani.com

3rd & 4th:  bonhams.com  

5th thru 9th:  the author

10th:  The Phil Hill Collection

11th:  youtube.com

12th:  George Havelka

13th & 14th:  youtube.com

 

Book Review: "The Formula" by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg

The Formula, a  book about Formula One during the period when it was essentially taken over by a British car salesman named Bernie Ecclestone*, appeared in 2024, when Ecclestone, who had divested himself of his ownership and management role,  announced that he was auctioning off his collection of F1 racers. The timing was just about perfect, and the authors, both of whom write for the Wall Street Journal, are well-suited to the task of focusing on the financial aspects of a sports story, as J. Robinson is the European sports correspondent and J. Clegg the sports editor.  Early on, the authors highlight the irony of Formula 1 being the only sport named after its rulebook, when, unlike in the worlds of soccer or baseball, Formula 1 rules are deliberately and drastically changed every few years.  Chapters are devoted to the efforts of teams to seek temporary advantage by meticulous and sometimes devious intepretation of those rules in engineering drivetrains, aerodynamics and tires.  And, against a background involving big corporate suppliers and sponsors, this effort involves lots of money...

Luckily for the reader, the financial story is far from a dry, statistical slog, because Ecclestone (at right above), who sold his Formula One Group to Liberty Media in 2017 at age 86, became famous during his 40 years of running F1 as a cunning, sometimes shifty deal maker who was one of the first to grasp the importance of TV contracts, deals between teams and corporate sponsors (especially the tobacco industry), and celebrity promotions. The Ecclestone era became known as a time when teams began to see bigger profits (though nothing like Ecclestone's), when costs of designing and building race cars snowballed, and when the control of the sport was essentially ceded by millionaires to billionaires...

It wasn't at all like that in the era when Ecclestone got interested in Grand Prix racing.  That period, covered in Robert Daley's The Cruel Sport*, was a time when driver fatalities were frequent, when teams often lost money shipping their cars from race to race, and when the cars themselves were painted in national or team colors, not with graphics or logos demanded by corporate sponsors. The first sponsorship logos appeared on a Brabham and a Lotus in 1968, a year after the last covered in Daley's book.  And it's kind of shocking to realize that seatbelts were not required by the FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) until 1972, the year that Ecclestone bought the Brabham team for 100,000 pounds. As a team owner, Ecclestone was a founder of FOCA (the Formula One Constructors Association) in 1974, and kept ownership of the Brabham team until 1988, after Nelson Picquet had won World Championships twice with it.  The drama surrounding the World Championship plays as big a part in the book as the high-level deal-making, with chapters on Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton's move from McLaren to Mercedes, and a gripping chapter on the Abu Dhabi GP in 2021, when Hamilton saw his hopes of a record 8th World Championship dashed by F1 race director Michael Masi's failure to follow the correct restart procedure after an accident. The authors are effective at highlighting the interpersonal conflict and professional discord that have escalated along with the financial stakes in F1. It all reminds this writer of a brief conversation he watched at Road America decades ago, when a boy of grade school age looked at the big wing on the back of a Can-Am racer and asked his dad, "Does that thing keep the car on the track?"  The dad replied, "No, son, it's money that keeps the car on the track."

 

*Footnote:  Our  brief review of "The Cruel Sport" was posted here on October 29, 2024 in "Book Reviews in Brief: Source Material for Car Wonks and Historians."  Our first mention of Bernie Ecclestone was in connection with his 1957 purchase of two historic Formula 1 cars, in "Celtic Rainmaker:  Connaught Ended the Longest Drought in Grand Prix Racing", posted on July 24, 2016.

Photo Credits:  

Book photos are by the publishers.  Photo of Bernie Ecclestone with Brabham BT44 is posted on youtube.com, from an interview by Tom Hartley Jr.  Photo of Lewis Hamilton is from motorcities.org.