Ghia 450 SS: Foreshadowing Fiat Chrysler

It’s often been said that if you want to lose a bunch of money in a hurry, going into the car business is even more effective than farming.  The saga of Burt Sugarman and the Ghia 450 SS is a case in point.  The story really begins sometime in 1963, when Ghia was aiming to attract repeat business from Fiat, which had commissioned their 6 cylinder grand tourer, the 2300 S coupe then in production (first photo below), from Ghia a few years earlier…

So that car’s designer, Sergio Sartorelli, took up the task of sketching out something a bit more like a sports car, and the Ghia Fiat G230 S (2nd & 3^rd photos) appeared at the Turin show in autumn of 1963, then quietly got lost in the shifting sands of the car business for awhile, as Fiat prepared to replace the 2300 S inline six with the Fiat Dino V6, with the body contracts for the new spider and coupe going (much to Ghia’s disappointment) to Pininfarina and Bertone.  The Dinos would show up in 1966, but in the meantime Road & Track featured Ghia’s sleek, deftly proportioned prototype on its cover during 1965, and Hollywood producer Sugarman (movies and TV shows, not cars, at least not yet) was immediately smitten. 

He approached Ghia about producing a limited run of cars for the U.S. market, but suggested two changes: making it a convertible and substituting an American V8 for the inline 6.  Ghia had commissioned a tubular chassis from Gioacchino Colombo to be built by Gilco (a team involved early in Ferrari prehistory) that was stout enough to take more power, and the coupe inherited the disc brakes from the production 2300 S.  Ironically, by this time in December 1965, the designer of the new Fiat Dino coupe had arrived from Bertone to take over the chief designer spot at Ghia from Sartorelli.  Georgetto Giugiaro must have seen much that he liked in Sartorelli’s coupe, because he retained nearly everything in his rework except the fastback roofline and glass hatch, substituting a convertible top, flat deck and removable hardtop for the new 450 SS.  The "production" car featured a Chrysler 273 with either Torqueflite or a 4 speed from the Barracuda, and rectangular tail lights replaced round ones.  Giugiaro is often credited as sole designer of this car but a comparison of the green coupe with the convertible below as it appeared at the Turin show 3 years later will help you decide where credit is due…

So a kind of accidental Fiat Chrysler went into limited production in 1966.  It wasn’t the first time Ghia had bodied something with Chrysler power; there were the Exner-designed show cars and the Imperial Ghia limousines (on which Sartorelli had worked) and most famously the Dual-Ghia (see our posting for Aug. 29, 2015) which had been aimed at the same show biz celebrities as this new car.  So you’re probably thinking, “What could possibly go wrong?”  Well, labor costs had gone up a lot since those first Ghia projects had been built in the 1950s, and combined with shipping costs involved in the circuitous supply chain, the delivered price of the car was $13,000 in 1967.  That was close to Maserati territory, and by this time Ghia was also building bodies for Maserati as well.  Still, most people (including Johnny Carson and Wilt Chamberlain) who took delivery of the estimated four and a half dozen cars built were happy with them.  Happier than Burt Sugarman, who lost money on every car he sold… 

Footnote:  The most frequently quoted production tally runs from 52 to 56 cars.

Only two Fiat-engined G230 S coupe prototypes were built, and only one is known to survive today.  For notes and photos on some other Ghia-bodied, Chrysler-powered cars,
see our post in the archives for August 29, 2015 entitled "What Defines a Production Car, and Why Would Anybody Pay $3 Million for One?"

Photo Credits:

Top: 1961 Fiat 2300 S Ghia:  Fiat as reprinted in cartype.com
2nd & 3rd:  1963 Ghia Fiat G230 S:  Wikipedia Commons
4th: 1966-67 Ghia 450 SS:  the author (from the 2012 Concorso Italiano)

Porsche 914: Alternative Visions

One reader of our recent posts wondered when he'd hear more about the Porsche 914 chassis hidden under the twin-rotor Corvette and maybe under its Opel cousin.  When rumors spread in the late 60s that Porsche was readying a mid-engined car for production, many of us expected it might resemble some of the previous mid-engined Porsches, most of which were road racers like the 550 (see the Jan. 18 post, "On a Lonesome Highway in California") .  The very first Porsche 356 prototype pictured below had also featured a mid-mounted VW engine, but for the first production cars made in Gmund, Austria, Porsche  reverted to the rear mount.

Readers of car enthusiast mags like Road & Track, this writer included, were hoping we'd get something like the 904 from 1963-65, which featured modern, lightweight materials (including Porsche's first fiberglass body) and slippery, wind-cheating lines.  The 904 served as a platform for the 4-cam 4 flat 4 racing engine (a mechanic's nightmare of legendary status), as well as a test bed for the then-new s.o.h.c. dry-sump six being readied for the 911 (twenty of the 904-6 variant were built) and even the Formula 2-derived flat 8.  We hoped we'd be seeing something like that level of mechanical innovation (but without the flat eight's exploding flywheels).  Then again, anyone standing next to a 904 might have realized that adding bumpers (or even headroom) might have put an end to its visual fascination.

What we saw instead when the new 914 broke cover in late 1969 was a design apparently driven by concerns about practicality of use and economy of production, in a style best described as Unconscious Bauhaus…

But the new car had some advantages: plenty of space for two people and their luggage, user-friendly handling, and a variety of engines starting with a 1.7 liter VW flat four (this version was sold in Europe as a VW) with an optional 2 liter flat six from the 911, and later including 1.8 and 2.0 liter fours. The lift-off roof panel stored easily in the trunk, and visibility was better than most mid-engined designs, although engine access seemed deliberately designed to discourage or even offend amateur mechanics (a trait shared with the current Boxster / Cayman twins).  But even people who enjoyed the handling and convenience thought it didn't look enough like a Porsche, or even a sports car.  This group included Italian, French and even German designers, which is why, after featuring a rotary-powered 914 disguised as a Corvette in our previous post, we have still not exhausted the trove of eccentric, mostly forgotten 914s.  We can lead off with the Heuliez Murene…

which was designed for the French coach builder Brissonneau & Lotz (which also produced the '68-'73 Opel GT bodies) but built and exhibited by specialist manufacturer Heuliez. It seems to miss both the sports car and Porsche identity that enthusiasts wanted, instead offering even more practicality in a Citroen-flavored package.  A little while later in Germany, Albrecht Goertz, designer of the hallowed BMW 507, offered his prototype of a 914 Eurostyle sports kombi, and Porsche execs were interested for awhile, but decided that demand for a sports wagon with almost no rearward visibility would not justify tooling costs…

And then Giorgetto Giugiaro at Ital Design showed the Tapiro, a glassy exercise with gull-wing entry and engine doors on a 914-6 chassis.  Giugiaro claims this design as his first true wedge, and like all but three Giugiaro show cars built through the year 2000, it was painted silver gray, as the master felt this color best showed off the forms and surfaces of his cars.  Tapiro never was seriously considered for production, and suffered a fire after being sold off as a road car.  The shell is now on display at Design Giugiaro's museum.

The most practical offering after the Heuliez effort, and also maybe the least polarizing of this group of designs, showed up on Pietro Frua's stand at the Geneva Show in March of 1971.  It was built by Frua on a 914-6 chassis for the Porsche distributor in Spain, and Porsche brass was so impressed with it that it was considered for a limited run of production cars. It displays Frua's usual deft handling of proportion and detail, with angled louvers in the sail panels flanking the backlight so that occupants could catch more rearward view, but like the other show cars (and like the production 914) looks not a whole lot like a Porsche…   

For their next foray into offering a mid-engined car to the public, nearly 30 years later, Porsche would stay closer to the design vocabulary they established with their Spyder race cars, and the Boxster would find wide acceptance and success.

Photo credits:

1948 Porsche 356-1, 1964-65 Porsche 904, and 1970-71 Porsche 914-6:  Wikipedia
Heuliez Murene 914-6:  Heuliez / Brissonneau & Lotz
Goertz 914-6 Eurostyle:  zwischengas.com
Ital Design Porsche 914-6 Tapiro: Ital Design photo reproduced on flatsixes.com
1971 Frua Porsche 914-6 coupe:  ideiblog.com 

The Italian Jobs Part 4: Saved From the Crusher

The car pictured below is yet another Corvette (sort of) in our series of Corvettes bodied in Europe, and joins the Kelly Corvette in our pantheon of annoyingly desirable Chevies.  But it was denied Corvette status for awhile owing to the fact that it's kind of un-Corvettelike in some departments like the body (built of steel by Pininfarina in Italy) and engine type (it's a two-rotor Wankel built under NSU patents by GM) as well as engine placement (close to the middle of the chassis).  Oh, and the whole assemblage is built on a Porsche chassis; almost forgot to mention that…

Anyway, in a spasm of Revisionist History at GM about a a third of a century ago, it was decided that XP-897GT was an inconvenient reminder of GM's expensive experiment with rotary engines just before the first fuel crisis, and should be sent to the crusher.  Fortunately, a future Jaguar design chief named Geoff Lawson was working at GM's Bedford Truck Division in Luton, England when the order came through to crush a steel-bodied Corvette. He called his friend, automotive historian Tom Falconer, who was able to arrange a meeting in Detroit with Chuck Jordan, then the GM styling chief and someone Falconer had previously encountered during a book project.  And so the unique Corvette two-rotor was spared from the crusher…

The car had been produced in a 6-month crash program to demonstrate GM's new rotary engine concept, and the engine was transversely mounted ahead of the rear wheels, and driving them through a prototype automatic transmission being developed for the forthcoming X-body cars like the (pretty forgettable) Chevy Citation.  Owing to the short development time, GM decided to build the car on a modified Porsche 914-6 chassis, which offered a couple of advantages beyond saving time, like sturdiness and great brakes.  Pininfarina, which had been trying for years to get more special projects from GM, built the body.  The car was finished in April 1972 and displayed at car shows the next year.  Like the Avanti featured in an earlier post, the XP-897 probably owes a lot of its visual freshness to the collapsed schedule.  The overall forms are clean, spare, easy to read, and mostly reinforced by unfussy attention to detail.  Tom Falconer still has the car, has repainted it in its original shade of red, and replaced the unobtainable GM two-rotor engine with a Mazda 13B rotary driving through a Cadillac transmission.  Corvette enthusiasts voyaging to the Mother Country still knock on his door to see it...

And XP-897 had offspring of a sort.  Apparently GM's Opel Division in Germany was two years late in getting the memo about abandoning the rotary engine, and designed its own mid-engine GT-W around a rotary (the "W" is for Wankel).  After rotary engine development was halted, the Wankel was replaced by a 6 liter V8.  Also called the Geneve (it was displayed at Geneva), the Opel GT-W features concealed headlights, eliminating the one distracting feature on XP-897 (those deep light tunnels) and deftly integrates the gill-like vents for the front-mounted radiator with a tidy attempt at a 5 mph bumper (remember, it's 1975).  Not sure if Pininfarina built this one, but there are clear references to other Italian designs, like the dropped window sill and belt line crease echoing Giugiaro's seminal Mangusta of nearly a decade earlier.  At the rear, the Geneve was even cleaner than XP-897; it seems like nothing could be subtracted or should be added…

If there's a lesson in Geoff Lawson's refusal to crush XP-897, or in Opel's not noticing (or pretending not to notice) that their Wankel car project had been cancelled, it may be that it's a good idea to cheerfully ignore stupid orders.  History may thank you someday...

Photo credits:

Top:  General Motors

2nd:  General Motors, reprinted in corvettes.nl

3rd:  General Motors

4th:  General Motors

The Italian Jobs Part 3: Another Eurovision Corvette, or Maybe Two

It's late 1962, and you're Battista Pininfarina.  You'd like to get some more design work from the Americans, to follow up on those Nashes (including the Healeys) you did in the early 50s and the Cadillac Broughams you built for GM in '59 and '60.  You've just seen previews of the new Corvette Sting Ray, and while you think it's okay, you also think you can do better.  So you persuade GM's head of styling, Bill Mitchell, to send you a new Sting Ray chassis and you assign the job to a young American on your staff, Tom Tjaarda.  This blue car is what he sketches out for you.  It makes its debut at the 1963 Paris show as the Corvette Rondine.

And while the car attracts respectful and sometimes admiring attention on the show circuit (especially after the reverse-slope backlight and raised deck shown below are replaced with the more harmonious window and deck shown above), it does not result in any new jobs from GM for PF...at least, not in the decade we're talking about.  So what do you do?  

Well, you have an assignment from Fiat to design a body for the upcoming 124 Spider.  And you give that project to young Tjaarda as well, and sure enough, when the Spider takes its bow in 1966 it features the same belt line crease kicking up to form a rear fender ridge, the same handling of the volumes formed by the trunk and rear fenders, and also a split rear bumper.  This Fiat becomes the longest-lived of any PF design except for the Alfa Romeo Duetto which appears earlier in the same year…

So maybe, you're thinking, it's time for PF to give the big six-cylinder Alfa 2600 a new lease on life as well.  So you ask for some fresh thinking from Tjaarda and his co-workers in the studio.  And they come up with something sleek and shapely, first as a spider…

And later as a glassy coupe…

But observant types, especially the ones who write for car magazines and maybe also the ones who run Alfa Romeo, notice how this car looks like nothing much more than an elongated and cleaned-up Sting Ray…

…reconfigured for a European tour after hanging out in the World of Tomorrow, with the faux air vents scraped off, the fender-top blisters smoothed and blended back into the fender sections, and with the knock-off alloy wheels replaced by simple perforated Alfa discs.  But still with the strong horizontal crease enveloping the whole car, with flip-up headlight doors like the Rondine (on the Sting Ray the whole light units flip) and with split bumpers like the GM design.  Because you're Pininfarina you never miss anything, and you've seen that horizontal plane dividing upper and lower body volumes earlier on the original Corvair, a design which Europeans will take even longer to get over than they do this Corvette.  But that's a story for another day…

Photo Credits:

Color shots of 1963 Corvette Rondine:  wikipedia

Black & white Rondine:  Pininfarina

Fiat 124 Spider:  imcdb.org

1963 Alfa Romeo 2600 Pininfarina Spider:  carbuildindex.com

Alfa Romeo 2600 PF Coupe:  Pininfarina

1963 Corvette Sting Ray:  General Motors

The Italian Jobs Part 2: The Kelly Corvette Was the First Postmodern Car

By 1961, there had already been an example or two of what we'd call "retro cars" today, like the 1956 La Salle show cars from GM, designed to recall the flamboyant designs of the 1930s. Some British manufacturers were still making designs from the 1940s (the Morris Minor) or the 1930s (the Morgan) but these weren't retro cars, and there wasn't anything postmodern about them. They were just obsolete designs made with old tooling.  The postmodern attitude goes beyond mere nostalgia for the long ago; it asks us to look at familiar forms and patterns with new eyes, and allows us to appreciate things which may be too new for nostalgia, but perhaps are just old enough to be out of fashion.  At the Paris Auto Show in 1961, crowds were stunned by the appearance of the Kelly Corvette on the stand of renowned coach builder Vignale.  But, appearances to the contrary, while the car was indeed a material product of Alfredo Vignale's workshops, all of its design, from overall concept to the tiniest obsessive detail, came from Wisconsin.  In 1960, an industrial designer named Gordon Kelly, whose day job was at Brooks Stevens Associates in Milwaukee (and whose customers included Studebaker and Kaiser Willys), bought a new Corvette and designed a body which signaled the arrival of the postmodern car, nearly 30 years before Mazda gave us the Miata, and 35 years in advance of Audi's TT.  The freshness and bold simplicity of the resulting design, which still startles onlookers, may owe its origin to the fact that this was not a project for a client; from the outset it was to be Gordon Kelly's personal car.

It was clear to many observers, including to this writer, then sketching cars at the back of 6th grade social studies class, that Kelly's real inspiration, his point of departure, had been the Ferrari coupes penned by Giovanni Michelotti and built by Vignale in 1951-52.  And it seemed that the motivation behind this was not nostalgia, but genuine admiration for the best aspects of those Ferraris.  As evidence, I'd cite the fact that by 1960, the Vignale Ferraris were mostly forgotten, tired used cars, and Kelly could have bought one for $4k to $6k, expensive but much less than he spent on this Corvette.  And I'd note that in his design, Kelly doubled down on the signature features of the Vignale designs.  These include the pronounced curvature of the unadorned surfaces, the sense in which the exterior skin is tightly stretched over the structure and machinery, and the emphasis on the wheels as a design element, which is aided by placement of the wheels unusually close to the edges of the car in both plan and side elevation.  And of course, by selecting Vignale to build the car, Kelly insured that the ideas in his drawings and model would find a sensitive expression in metal...

The front view shows how the grille opening echoes the egg crate oval of the Ferrari; at the same time the shape is modernized by having its boundaries follow a simple section through the bodywork.  Note also that at this point, the section through the forward part of the hood is a simple oval.  Unlike Vignale's Ferrari 340 and 225 shown below, the fenders do not project above the hood line. At the A-pillar, Kelly's windshield more nearly fills the arc of the roof, and the side windows are a glassier interpretation of those on the Ferrari.  The profile of the car on the wall underlines the purity of those curves.

Moving around to the rear, we can see that Kelly has emphasized the roundness and unity of form by erasing the boundary between the roof forms and rear fender forms.  Instead of the roof and fender following stacked ovoid sections as on the blue Ferrari 212, here Kelly merges the two forms, and links the front and rear wheels with a crease which fades aft of the wheels.  This detail, along with the long wheelbase / short overhang proportions, anticipates the work of Nissan's and Audi's design studios forty years later.  It's as if Gordon Kelly has found a hole in the space / time continuum and calmly walked through it.  Other features show a straightforward practicality; the substitution of the glassy hatch for the small trunk lid, and the tidy recesses for the trunk latch, license plate and tail lights are simple and sufficient.  The 8-lug wheels express finned alloy brake drums (obsolete even in '61 but pretty).  The black rubber shapes which form bumpers replaced the bright metal exhaust outlets which doubled as bumpers when Kelly first showed the car. Happy with his handiwork (and Vignale's), Gordon Kelly kept this car for the rest of his life...

When I was a 12 year-old aspiring designer who had just read Raymond Loewy's book, I ranked early 50s Vignale Ferraris with Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water as nearly perfect man-made things.  Tiny, lightweight and simple, their design attitude seemed to say, "We don't have time for styling; we're going racing."  But Gordon Kelly showed how seeming perfection could be used as a springboard for new explorations.  In his obsessive pursuit of his dream, he found the benefits of the quest embodied in Loewy's dictum: never leave well enough alone.

For a video drive in the Kelly Corvette, go to:

http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/classic-cars/videos/a28127/coachbuilt-corvette-is-like-driving-a-van-gogh-work-of-art/

Photo Credits:

Top:  Corbin Snyder Photography / corbinsnyder.com  

Note:  Mr. Snyder did the photos for a forthcoming book on the Kelly Corvette entitled "Driven by a Dream."

2nd:  Vignale

3rd (340 MM coupe) & 4th (225 coupe):  the author 

5th:  coachbuild.com

6th: the author

Bottom:  tabloidcar.com

The Italian Jobs: Corvettes in Italian Suits

This is the first in a series on cars most people have never heard about: Chevrolet Corvettes that were bodied in Europe (mostly Italy).  These cars, a tiny minority of the nearly 1.6 million Corvettes produced from the first year (1953, when Chevy managed to sell only 300) through 2015, are a subset of yet another exclusive category…that being Corvettes with metal bodies. Our first example was actually built in Switzerland by Ghia Aigle, an offshoot of the better-known Torinese Ghia.  For a good while before WWII and afterwards as well, Switzerland offered duty-free imports of foreign chassis as long as they were bodied by a Swiss coach builder.  The subject car is a rebodied '54 Corvette, meaning it has the unloved Blue Flame Six under that scooped and streaked hood, and was featured as shown (hmm, salmon pink with gray accents and orange interior) at the 1957 Geneva show.  Giovanni Michelotti gets most of the credit (and blame, too) for the design.  One can only dimly imagine the design brief, maybe something along the lines of, "My wife doesn't know that I blew our new car budget on a used Corvette, so please disguise it as a '56 Plymouth Savoy business coupe…"

Later on, this alloy-bodied car was updated (by Michelotti again) with radiused rear wheel cutouts and a "fin delete" package.  With the added vent panes and reworked metal in the front fenders it almost seems a different car, but the records say there's only one.  It looks better in silver gray (a bit like a giant Triumph Italia, no coincidence), but apparently the remodel did not extend to plunking a small block Chevy V8 in place of the anemic Blue Flame...

Lack of power is not a problem with our next examples.  These are the three 1959 Corvettes bodied at the request of Texas racers by Scaglietti, the same outfit that built many of the legendary Ferrari road racing cars in the 50s and 60s.  Gary Laughlin, Jim Hall (later of Chaparral fame) and Carroll Shelby wanted something lighter than a stock Corvette, but with the Chevy's cheap, reliable power.  As the resulting alloy-bodied cars were to be raced against Ferraris (see last photo) in the SCCA, Old Man Ferrari made his unhappiness known to Scaglietti, and the cars took over 2 years to deliver.  When you compare them with the Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France in the last photo, you'll see that none of the draftsmen at Scaglietti had to put in much overtime scheming up new ideas.  They are pretty, though…And one happy aspect of the Italians pulling the plug on this operation is that it may have led, however indirectly, to Shelby shoehorning a Ford V8 into the lovely lightweight AC Ace roadster to make the Cobra.   

Photo credits from top:

Top & 2nd:  corvettes.nl

3rd:  corvetteblogger.com

4th & 6th:  conceptcarz.com

5th:  petersen.org 

They Don't Build 'Em Like They Used To...

That would apparently apply to car industry execs as well as cars.  The more I reviewed the Studebaker story, the more I was struck by what an extraordinary guy Sherwood Harry Egbert was.  The Studebaker board of directors, wanting to diversify and nudge the company out of the car business, picked the 40-year old McCulloch (industrial engines) exec for the job early in 1961, thinking that someone from outside the car industry would be ideal.  And Egbert had a track record of getting results.  After 2 years of junior college, he'd worked construction pre-war and taken on managing a crew of 800 to build a plant for Boeing, then won a Bronze Star with the Marines in the South Pacific during the war.  When he got to Studebaker, he studied the car operation and fell in love with it, moving his wife and 5 sons to the lodge at Studebaker proving grounds near South Bend (that hedge spelling "Studebaker" in the aerial shot isn't a hedge…it's 5,000 pine trees).  Within 18 months of taking the job, he had:

1.)  Spearheaded the redesign of the Hawk, contracting it to Brooks Stevens Associates, and gotten the redesigned and retooled car into production within 10 months.

2.)  Brainstormed with engineers and Loewy's Avanti design team* in a crash program to create a distinctively new performance car, and gotten it into production in about the time it takes General Motors to introduce new Chevy paint options (or discover an ignition switch failure and then cover it up).  Egbert's hands-on approach out at the proving grounds had real results:  The reason some of the switchgear is above the windshield header is that Egbert, a pilot, liked it there. And the one design flaw the car shares with the E-type Jag (a too-vertical windshield angle) is that way because Egbert bumped his head getting in and out of the prototype...

3.)  Subcontracted redesign of the bread-and-butter car, the Lark, to Brooks Stevens and gotten that extensively revised body design into production by summer of 1963.

These initiatives involved epic battles with the Studebaker board, and the fight took its toll on Egbert's health.  The directors proved that their hearts were firmly lodged in the same oblivion as their heads by firing Egbert as he was recovering from cancer surgery, on November 24, 1963. Egbert went on to found an industrial consulting firm in LA, and died at 49 in 1969.

*For a more detailed discussion of the Avanti, see "Lines of Influence",
the post from 2/17/16.


Photo credits from top:
1.)  South Bend Tribune
2.)  Wikipedia
3.)  Autoweek
4.)  carstyling.ru
5.)  Raymond Loewy as published
on theavanti.net