Lines of Influence: The Avanti and How It Grew

An architect friend who's about 15 years my junior recently saw a car like one pictured below on a street here in Boulder and e-mailed, asking "What's an Avanti?"  A good question.  In the spring of 1962, when pre-production prototypes were shown to the press, it seemed like a fresh new idea, a break with the over-chromed, bloated and finned barges common up until right about then.  To industry insiders, it was a last-ditch effort to save Studebaker, initiated by company president Sherwood Egbert and designed by Raymond Loewy's team in secret at a secluded studio in Palm Springs.  That's Loewy in the foreground, with Egbert sitting on the car.  The Avanti project went from approval of the clay model in April 1961 to display of the first cars at the New York Auto Show exactly one year later, with the first production cars rolling off the line in June 1962.  Despite the insane schedule, the team managed to hang onto the goals from the original program.  These included the first caliper disc brakes on an American production car*, the first integrated rollover protection, and engine options which included supercharging.  Perhaps the car still looks fresh because it's so close to the "first impression" sketches; nobody had time to argue about stuff.

To those who were not car-crazy high school or middle school kids in 1963, the Avanti only seems vaguely familiar because of the many cars it influenced.  Some features showed up fairly soon, such as the "Coke bottle" shape of the body in plan view, with a subtle indent between front and rear fenders, with the wheel arches linked by a sharp horizontal crease front to rear.  These items showed up in 1967 on the Camaro and Firebird twins, GM's belated answer to Ford's Mustang. Those cars also echoed the Avanti's shallow, blade-like bumpers, semi-fastback roofline and upswept, tapered tail with short rear overhangs.

In a way, the 1967 Camaro was a Mustang in an Avanti suit; it had the proportions and massing of the Ford, but the handling of form and surface development was much more like the Studebaker. This is especially visible in a comparison of side elevations below. Note that the wheel arches on the Avanti are not concentric with the circles of the wheels; they are rearward-slanting half ovals, leading the eye forward and imparting a sense of movement to the whole composition. They also emphasize the car's "California rake", a nose-down, tail-up attitude inherited from hot rodders.  On the Avanti, there's no grille, just a simple air intake below the bumper, while the Camaro has a conventional oblong grille linking the headlights.  The Avanti's asymmetrical hood bulge forms the instrument binnacle when it crosses the plane of the windshield.  It, like the blade shapes formed into the tops of the fenders, was intended as an aid in aiming the car.  Those blade shapes were suggested by Loewy after he saw a preview of the 1961 Lincoln Continental (see "When the Sixties Really Began" in the archive for 11/18/15).  This is almost comical, as the Lincoln is a composition of straight, parallel lines, and the only straight lines anywhere on the Avanti frame the backup lights...

In their design for the Camaro, GM's design staff produced a sort of smooth jazz version of the Avanti, erasing most of the cool, hipster eccentricities that were a product of the Loewy team's improvisation under pressure.  Some people will prefer the Camaro to the Avanti, but their view is just a reminder of why Kenny G was able to sell more records than, say, John Coltrane.  By the time that '67 Camaro appeared, Studebaker had stopped producing cars, but production of the Avanti had been resumed in 1965 by the Altman brothers, ex-Packard dealers.  Ironically, their version featured a Chevy engine…Production continued into the 1980s, and the Porsche design team credited the Avanti with influencing their 924 and 944.

*Footnote:  Or at least, the first caliper disc brakes that stayed in production during the life of the car.  Chrysler had offered disc brakes on the Town and Country in 1950, but they weren't caliper discs, and Crosley had offered true caliper discs in 1949-50, but went back to drums for the 1951 model year owing to corrosion and maintenance problems with their discs.

Photo credits:

Top and 3rd from top:  Studebaker Corporation

2nd:  car-from-uk.com

Bottom:  blacktopcandys.com

The Etceterini Files, Part 4: Innocenti 186 GT

Innocenti, a firm known mainly for assembling a variety of British Motor Company products in Italy, might be passed over for consideration as a bona fide etceterini maker, were it not for the 186 GT. The company was founded in the 1920s and by the early 1970s achieved the second highest sales figures in Italy with its locally-assembled variations on English favorites including the BMC Mini and, from 1961 through 1970, a Ghia-styled version of the Austin-Healey Sprite. Bodied by OSI, a Ghia affiliate, it featured roll-up windows before the Sprite acquired this feature, and was also available in coupe form, unlike the Sprite or MG Midget.  The Spider shares the Sprite's 80 inch wheelbase, while the rarer coupe, introduced in 1966, has an 86 inch wheelbase and a roomier cabin…

Mechanical improvements paced the Sprite and Midget during the production run, so the 948cc engine in the original cars was replaced by a 1098 in 1968, and superseded by the 1275 in 1970. But while these cars achieved a bit of success by offering more comfort and style than the Sprite, their temperament was never quite Italian enough for some fans.  That wouldn't have been a complaint if their sister car, the prototype 186 GT, had achieved production.

Like the ASA 1000 featured in our previous essay, the 186 GT was styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Bertone.  Unlike that car, it has some affinity to the Iso Rivolta notchback coupe he designed around the same time, especially in the treatment of the grille, the horizontal character line running across the door and around the rear wheel arches, and the tidy curve of the tail. Apparently only two prototypes were built in 1963, and these differed in details like the rear wheel arch molding, side marker lights and wheels*.  

But it was under the hood that the 186 revealed its true intent.  To go with the enhanced rigidity of a new tubular chassis, the Innocenti crew specified a unique adaptation of the early 60 degree Dino Ferrari engine, here in 1,788 cc, 156 hp form and looking for all the world like half a Colombo V12, which it basically was.  To my knowledge, this car is the only place where the 1.8 liter version of this early Dino V6 appeared, though Ferrari had raced a 196S in 1962.  That engine was also a 60 degree, sohc design. 

The 186 GT can be understood, like the ASA before it, as another attempt by Ferrari to generate revenue by getting one of their engine designs into larger scale production. Unlike the ASA, it had the backing of a larger industrial concern with much bigger production facilities.  But it was doomed by a recession that blunted the demand for these kinds of cars. Ferrari would need to wait for the design of a new 65 degree V6, and for an agreement with Fiat, to get that car on the road.

*Footnotes added 5-7-19: The 186GT  prototypes featured 4-wheel disc brakes and 4 speed transmissions with overdrive, and the first car shown above with Borrani wire wheels was built with a tubular frame. The 2nd car, a production prototype shown here with disc wheels, was engineered by Innocenti with unit body construction. The production prototype was destroyed, but the earlier car was discovered by historian Ermanno Cozza in an Innocenti building when the company was taken over by Fiat in 1994.  It appeared in an exhibit at the Museo Ferrari in 2015, the year before this post originally appeared.

Photo credits:

Top:  Innocenti 950 Spider  /  wikimedia

2nd:  Innocenti Coupe 'C'  /  bringatrailer.com

Remainder:  Innocenti 186 GT / modelfoxbrianza.it

The Etceterini Files Part 3: ASA, the Ferrarina

The term "etceterini" usually refers to small, often Fiat-based, sports and race cars built in Italy in the first quarter century or so after WWII.  Etceterini were so named because they were not from any of Italy's fabled suppliers of fleet machines, such as Alfa Romeo, Lancia, or Maserati.  And they were certainly not from the one postwar upstart which had already achieved universal fame by the early 50s:  Ferrari.  But I'd argue that one almost-forgotten car straddles the categories of etceterini and Ferrari:  the ASA.

While getting his own 250GT into series production in the late 1950s, Enzo Ferrari explored the idea of getting a less expensive baby Ferrari into production.  Design proposals from his engineering staff centered on an inline, single overhead cam engine which was, in essence, 4 cylinders from the 3 liter V12 which powered Ferrari's 250.  The young Giorgetto Giugiaro, new on the job at Bertone, sketched a clean fastback coupe to clothe the tubular chassis of the little (1,032 cc) car.  The divided grille echoed the twin-nostril motif which had just appeared on Ferrari's Formula One racers.  Production of the car was licensed to the De Nora industrial concern, and began in 1962.

The hope was the ASA would, at around $6,000, offer the mystique of a Ferrari at half the price. But cars like the Fiat Abarth 1000 and Alfa Romeo Giulietta offered equal or better performance for about two-thirds the cost.  De Nora's production capacity was too limited to ratchet up volume enough to offer a more competitive price.  Total production over a period of five years amounted to something like 125 units.  But in an attempt to garner the publicity that comes with racing success, Giotto Bizzarrini (father of Ferrari's GTO) designed a sleek competition coupe, which was built in tiny numbers...

Near the end, there was also an update on the idea of a dual purpose GT for touring or occasional race use.  This was the Roll Bar Spider, offered in RB 411 (4 cylinder, 1100 cc) and also RB 613 (6 cylinder, 1300 cc) versions.  The bodywork presaged that of other cars with built-in roll bars (Corvette, notably) and it was a tidy package, but it came too late to save ASA.  The 6 cylinder ASA engine is a real rarity, as it was essentially one bank of a Ferrari V12.  It makes one wonder if it would have had greater success it they had made a lateral rather than longitudinal slice, for a compact V6.  But that's a story for another chapter…

Photo credits:

Top:  ASA 1000 GT /  Wikimedia

2nd from top:  ASA 1000 Berlinetta Competizione / Autodrome Paris

Bottom 2:  ASA RB 613 Spider / ASA Automobili

Forgotten Classic: The Graber Alvis

The car in the picture below is not a Bentley, though it has an English chassis.  And though the frontal design scheme may remind you of a Facel Vega, the body did not come from France.  It’s a 3 liter Alvis, bodied in Switzerland by Hermann Graber Carrosserie.  In the mid-fiftties Graber became the Alvis importer for Switzerland, and the cars were bodied under an arrangment that allowed duty-free imports of foreign chassis (there were no Swiss makes by then) as long as they were bodied by one of the several Swiss coachbuilders.  Graber, active from 1925 until 1970, was the best known and arguably the most successful of these, and also applied his talents to Aston Martin, Packard, Duesenberg, Bentley, Delahaye, and Talbot-Lago chassis.

Designer and critic Robert Cumberford, writing recently in Automobile, commented that no inspired car designs had ever emerged from the Swiss coachbuilding houses.   Based on the work Graber did before the war on a Duesenberg chassis and after the war on nearly a hundred Alvis chassis, I’d suggest that this is a rare case where the esteemed Mr. C. has gotten it wrong.  Perhaps the Duesenberg body pictured below was not a game-changer like Gordon Buehrig's Cord 810 from the year before, but in my view it was the only Duesenberg ever (out of scores of different custom designs, including 3 by Graber) on which the body looked as modern as the Duesy’s engine.  Note the way the tapered slope of the grille harmonizes with the teardrop fenders and the deftly tapered tail section.  The teardrop spare tire cover enclosing the similarly shaped license plate recess is also a deft touch.  Graber shortened the chassis of a 1934 Model J to give it more sporting proportions during this rebody performed in 1937.  In the last year of Duesenberg production, Graber succeeded in pulling the noble beast into the modern era.

After the war, he performed a similar service for England’s Alvis and France's Talbot-Lago, taking on Swiss distribution rights for both makes, dragging both into the midcentury automotive mainstream in terms of packaging, and beyond the mainstream in terms of craftsmanship and attention to detail.  Note the similarity of the black ‘55 Alvis below to the red '53 Talbot-Lago directly above it.  Decoration is limited; Graber relies on control of proportions and contours, along with the exposed wire wheels, to convey a sense of the machinery beneath the shell.  The nearly vertical chrome strip at the beginning of the rear fender forms seems a simplified version of that era's Cadillac, but unlike on the Caddy, the trim leans forward where it joins the sill trim, leading the eye ahead to those long hoods.  Only the grille shape, fog light vents and more subdued fender curvature differentiate the English car from the French one.

Graber designed a coupe with wraparound rear window during the same period and built two dozen of this TC108G model, shown below.  Willowbrook produced bodies to the same design in England, but these were costly and troublesome to build, so Alvis switched English body production to Park Ward after only 13 of these were completed.   Graber's design on the blue TC108G below it served as the template for the TD through TF series produced in about 1,500 copies in coupe and convertible form by Park Ward from 1959-67; these were big numbers for a specialist like Alvis.

Graber continued to produce up to ten special bodies a year during this period.  Later efforts provided a bit more identity to the Alvis, including the reverse slope rear window on the 1959 Panoramic TD21 cabriolet above, and lower stance emphasized by the broad grille and stacked headlights  of the 1965 Super cabrio below.  The 1967 Graber Super Coupe, the last of the line, seemed a perfect modern GT with its tall glassy cabin and Mercedes-like proportions, except for the somewhat leisurely 150 hp provided by the sturdy but aging 3 liter inline 6.  By then, Alvis had been acquired by Rover, which, after toying with the idea of using its then-new aluminum ex-Buick V8 in a replacement model, decided to halt Alvis production altogether.  After bodying a couple of prototype Rover P6-based sport coupes, Graber Coachworks suspended its coachbuilding operations in 1970, the year that Herman Graber died.

Photo credits:.

Top:  pantheonbasel.ch

2nd from top:  hemmings.com

3rd & 4th:  alvisarchives.com

5th:  classiccarcatalog.com

6th:  wikimedia.com

7th:  wikimedia.com

8th:  alvisarchives.com

9th:  christophegrohe.com

10th & 11th: alvisarchives.com

12th: supercars.net

On a Lonesome Highway in California

It's the slow season for tourists in central California, two days before the New Year.  You've been droning along sleepy two lane roads for hours since waking up at a tired little motel in the desert.  You'd like to break for lunch, and maybe take the pooch on a little walk.  You stop at a roadhouse that looks like it may not have changed since the 1950s. Given the pace of change in most of the state, it's mildly surprising to find some feature of the landscape that has resisted change.  But here it is...

You walk out back with the hound on a leash, and then you notice all the rattlesnake warning signs on the fences and so you decide to cancel the walk, buying off your floppy-eared pal with a treat and settling him in the car while you go inside to eat. Your phone thrums; a cell phone seems oddly out of place here, and you'd almost forgotten you had one in all those miles of unpopulated desert.   It's a text message from your friend Dan; you're supposed to visit Dan and Margaret in Watsonville later in the day…

"Where are you?"  

"Lunch stop in Cholome; not sure of spelling.  East of Paso Robles."

"Excellent almond waffles in Paso Robles.  You're in Cholame."

"Thanks."

"At the Jack Ranch Cafe?"

"Yep.  Too hungry to wait for Paso."

"You know that you're near the spot where James Dean crashed his Porsche and died, right?  The bacon-Ortega chile cheeseburger seems to be the hot call. "  

"Thought JD bought it closer to Salinas."  He'd been on the way to Salinas, anyway.  You remember that much.  Testing his 550 race car with a mechanic friend.

"Nope.  You're right there.  In fact, there's a memorial sign right outside the Jack Ranch Cafe.  Might be worth seeing the spot."

The sculpture outside was commissioned and donated by a Japanese businessman in the late 1970s.  It has a sort of Zen understatement about it, and manages to enhance the dignity of the old tree it enfolds. The stainless letters spell out Dean's lifespan (he was 24) and the sheet aluminum reminds you of how they used to build race cars.  You can imagine the stillness and fly-buzzing heat of early evening in late September just over sixty years ago, broken by the rasp of an air-cooled engine in the distance.  Number 130, it was…

                                     

Later on, you'll find out that forensic analysis concluded that Dean, having collected a speeding ticket in Bakersfield, was probably not speeding, maybe going only 55, and that he'd braked and swerved, but that the Ford turning across his path, and driven by a college student, was too big an obstacle to avoid.  That Rolf Wutherich, the mechanic, survived and never talked about it.  Later on, you'll hear that #130's engine and transmission were transferred to another car which was involved in a fatal racing accident, and that #130 fell off a truck on the way to a traffic safety exhibit, killing a truck driver, and that it eventually disappeared completely.  But you don't know any of that right now.  You reflect that it's fine you decided against having that beer with lunch, and you watch for rattlesnakes on the way back to your car.

Photo credits:

Top:  vendorgirl.com
Center:  the author
Bottom:  Porsche AG in welt.de

The Etceterini Files Part 2: Golden Arrow, the Moretti that Broke the Bank

The few people who recall the name Moretti appearing on something other than beer probably associate it with some stylish custom bodywork which appeared on modified Fiats in the 1960s and 70s.  This Moretti 2500s Spider from 1963, for example, hit the spot for Henry Manney at Road & Track, perhaps because it looked so much like Giorgetto Giugiaro's one-off Ferrari SWB for Bertone from a year earlier.  Underneath the sinuous curves of the body shell is an enlarged version of Fiat's 6-cylinder 2300 engine.  Earlier, though, Giovanni Moretti designed and built his own sports racers to compete against OSCAs, Stanguellinis and the like, and the expense of this bankrupted his company.  What's left of this period is a handful of almost forgotten cars and the saga of the Frecchia d'Oro, or Golden Arrow...

Moretti started building motorcycles in 1925 and graduated to microcars (before they were called that) in the late 1920s.  After building some electric vehicles during the war, Moretti launched a line of utilitarian small cars with his own 600cc 4-cylinder engine in the late 40s.  The first Moretti to get attention from sports car fans in the USA was the tiny 750 twin cam from the early 50s. Giovanni Michelotti has been credited with the design on the coupe below, from 1953-'54.

There were also spyder versions in both 750cc and 1200cc engine sizes, and these were credited to the same designer…

And there were a handful of slightly larger and very handsome coupes with the 1200 Grand Sport engine.  These could have competed against the then-new Alfa Giulietta Sprint, had Moretti been able to produce them in greater numbers.

Instead of tooling up to produce any of these promising designs in large (or even noticeable) numbers, Moretti decided to produce a sports racer to compete with the OSCAs, Maseratis and (increasingly) Porsches in the 1500cc class.  This was the Frecchia d'Oro, the Golden Arrow from 1956. Like other Morettis, it featured an all-Moretti engine, but this larger unit featured an alloy block, twin ignition with twin distributors, and twin carburetors.  The tubular chassis and the alloy bodywork were also the product of the Moretti shops, an unusual accomplishment in an era when race car bodywork was usually subcontracted to specialists like Scaglietti, Motto or Zagato.  With the exception of the Fiat 1100 transmission, then, this was an all-Moretti Moretti.  Three cars were produced in response to an order from a client in Argentina.  The Argentine client never paid for the first car delivered, and before Moretti could devise a way to repossess a car in faraway Latin America, the deadbeat client added injury to insult by demolishing the car.  The was the last straw for the fragile finances of Moretti, and the second and third Golden Arrows were seized by creditors in a bankruptcy reorganization.  Golden Arrow #2 disappeared in a trade for an Alpine Renault in the late 60s, but car #3 came to the USA in amazingly original condition, and shows up for car shows and vintage races today.  Moretti, reorganized post-bankruptcy, shifted to using Fiat engines entirely by 1960, and focused on providing special bodywork on the small end of the Fiat line, producing a few exceptional cars on the big 6-cylinder Fiats, and one body on a Maserati 3500 chassis.  Moretti continued to build specialist Fiats* until the late Eighties, and their nearly 6 decade run marks the Moretti team as champion survivors in the competitive world of etceterini.

*Footnote:  Moretti began to shift from cars to off-roaders based on the Fiat 500 and later 126 during the 1970s.  One source indicated that last road car was built in 1985; the last off-roader was built by 1989.  In December of that year, after building a run of special Fiat Uno Turbos, Moretti stopped building vehicles.

Photo IDs and credits:
Top and 4th from top: Moretti 2500s and 1200 Sport (Moretti Automobili)
2nd from top:  Moretti 750 Grand Sport (Coys Auctions + Sports Car Digest)
3rd from top:   Moretti Grand Sport Spyder (www.abarth-germany.de)
Bottom:  Moretti 1500 Frecchia d'Oro (the Williams family,  www. gwandrw.com)

The Etceterini Files Part 1: Ermini

The term "etceterini" is often associated with Fiat-based road racing cars, in two-seater and single-seater format, which appeared in great profusion after WWII and mostly disappeared by the early 1970s, when Fiat purchased Abarth, the biggest producer of etceterini.  They were usually small and lightweight to take advantage of their small (mostly 750cc or 1100 cc) power units, though some cars were built to take larger engines from Fiat, Alfa or Lancia and a few were built with American V8s.  Today's focus is on one of the rarest examples of the etceterini phenomenon: the Ermini, which fitted form to format so well that fiberglass replicas of Erminis likely outnumber originals by more than ten to one, making the arcane, dauntingly scarce Ermini seem exotic and yet oddly familiar all at once.

Pasquale Ermini made cars in such tiny numbers that there were almost as many types of Ermini as there were specimen Erminis.  One thing they apparently all shared was a twin overhead cam head designed and built by Ermini; in the early days this was fitted to a cast iron engine block sourced from Fiat.  During 1952, Ermini engines began to feature their own alloy engine blocks. Around 1955, in response to competition from the Maserati brothers' OSCA racers,  a new twin-ignition head appeared, designed by Alberto Massimino, also of Maserati (250F) and later of Ferrari (Dino) fame.  There were more Ermini engines than Ermini cars, as some engines were supplied to other race car builders.  The lovely 1390 GT coupe below was bodied by Frua in a style very much echoing their work on the Maserati A6G2000, and was shown at the San Remo Concours in 1954.  The body shell appears as a tight skin over the machinery; note the deft integration of bumper protection with the grille and fog lights.  According to the Ermini website it's the only 1390 GT built, and may also be the only Ermini intended for touring as opposed to racing. 

If any Americans of a certain age remember the Ermini at all, however, it's because Californian Bill Devin used an Ermini sports racer as the model for his series of fiberglass bodies in the 1950s and 60s, forming his molds directly from the alloy Scaglietti body of a Tipo 357.  He offered these bodies as kits for people wanting to streamline the appearance (or just reduce the weight) of their MGs, Triumphs and even VWs.  Many of the resulting kit cars wound up on the race circuits supporting the burgeoning road racing schedule sponsored by the SCCA, and some may have even raced against actual Erminis. The first picture below shows one of only three 1431cc Ermini 357s bodied by Scaglietti from 1955; the second shows a Devin-bodied special from 1957, this one on an MG chassis.  Devin's exercise of artistic license occurred at least three decades before the phrase "intellectual property" became commonplace…

Photo ID & credits:
Top: 1954-55 Ermini Sport 1100 (Ermini Automobili)
2nd:  1954 Ermini 1390 GT (Ermini Automobili)
3rd:   Ermini 357 Sport at Laguna Seca Historic Races (the author)
Bottom:  1957 Devin-MG-Chevy (Wikimedia)