But a Ferrari in chestnut brown?

As far as I recall, these were my first words when I heard the news that Steve McQueen’s first Ferrari, chassis number 4891GT, was set to go on the auction block. While far from being a rosso corsa purist and nurturer of a great soft spot for midnight blue 612 Scagliettis, brown sounded all wrong for a Ferrari. Think brown and what’s the first thing that comes to mind? A UPS truck, no great friend of high-strung V12’s.

Little did I know that two years later, I would be looking at McQueen’s Lusso beneath the namesake for its paintjob—a chestnut tree—and realize that in person, it’s shockingly beautiful.

Not that it hails from a particularly hideous age of car design. Modena in the early Sixties was a proper Golden Age. The Lusso was the last act in Ferrari’s first great play, the 250, a ten-year-old construction by the time they introduced the Lusso in 1962. Since the first prototype had been tested in 1952, 250’s won everything there was to be won in road racing, to transcend mere cars and become the sort of objects car geeks approach with a visible trembling of the knee.

Most 250’s are beautiful but the Lusso—Italian for luxurious luxury—stands out even in that crowd. As the name suggests, it was designed by Pininfarina as a grand tourer, with an eye on stylish, high-speed motoring as opposed to racing. There is ample luggage space behind the two seats swathed in beige leather, and the engine is set forward to allow for more legroom.

Beneath the aluminum and steel skin however, it’s a pure racer. The Lusso’s Borrani racing wheels, disc brakes, suspension and all-aluminum engine come from none other car than the 250 GTO. And the Lusso itself was more than suitable for racing: at 2,200 pounds, it weighed little more than a Miata and was in turn powered by the last version of the 3-liter V12 used in all 250’s, sucking air through three twin Webers to produce around 250 HP.

But forget all that. Though lovely numbers the Lusso has, they are not what make it interesting. What does is that the Lusso and its contemporaries—like the 250 GTO, the Breadvan or the Miura—stand out as the first generation of supercars to which we can relate to as proper cars. Pre-war Bugattis and Alfas are awesome, but they look way too fragile and old to be appreciated as actual cars as opposed to very nice objects on wheels.

Look at a Lusso instead and what you will feel is pure petrolhead lust. To fire up that V12, to motor out of wherever it’s parked, and to shove the go pedal right through the floor.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve McQueen drove it like that. Back in the 60s, when roads were sparsely populated, gas was ultra-cheap, and people knew how to party in style.

It almost makes you forget that these cars had live rear axles. Like Mustangs!

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and the author. Note: unfortunately, the owner of the Lusso was not around to pop the hood for us. The engine you see in the gallery is that of a Ferrari 250 GT SWB, very similar to the Lusso’s.

All you need to complement your new Bimmer is a Panama hat, a proper summer suit and a well-timed head movement where you direct your gaze from the post-Bangular posterior of your car to a posterior clad in form-fitting clothes.

Easy as pie.

Yes, I know this will make many of you here hate me, but I must say it — I have never been a fan of the station wagon. Yes, I do see the point — you can fit loads of kids, dogs or elephant guns in the back but then I’ve never thought of the car as a thing to transport kids, dogs or elephant guns. You need a sedan to be grownup cool or a coupé to be rock and roll cool, and that’s about it.

Except that station wagons are now called estates or avants or sportbacks and in recent years, I have come across a few which have rather struck my fancy. The Alfa Romeo 156 GTA Sportwagon, for instance. The Dodge Magnum. In SRT8 trim, of course.

I know people who love estates like motor oil loves to get under fingernails. In fact, two of my friends are planning on converting a Volkswagen Phaeton into one. Google Translate will help you right along with their project briefing—in Hungarian—a quick auto-translated snippet of which reads:

And when they physically exist, the preparation will be tangible things considered, we are bound to a common central images of creative images, crept kombikészítéshez.

Imagine my shock now when, certainly not a man of creative images, crept kombikészítéshez, we arrived at the Villa d’Este last week and the first thing I saw after a BMW 750i dropped us off was a Maserati Quattroporte. A Quattroporte estate, that is.

Flabbergasted I stood, mostly as a result of the intense craving I felt at its lovely butch lines. Although I still consider the Lamborghini Espada the perfect family car, the youngest of them will be approaching thirty-five by the time I acquire one—and kids to carry in it. And thirty-five-year-old handbuilt Italian cars are not as much vehicles for transportation but more vehicles that make for very stylish and very static object by the side of the road as you stand puzzled over their V12’s spewing oil. I am, of course, not making this up:

So this is it then. The Maserati Quattroporte Bellagio Fastback Touring, to finally call it by its ornate full name, with a beckoning slope to its roof. Built by Carrozzeria Touring—the people who invented superleggera in the 30s—, it was first shown at last year’s edition of the Concorso d’Eleganza, an event to which it has now returned unannounced, parked by a gift shop that sells swooningly expensive silk scarves.

A car that has a Ferrari engine up front, acres of leather in the middle, and kids, dogs or elephant rifles in the back. All in a package that’s got the Quattroporte’s irresistable swagger—with a locomotive of a rear end.

Be alert not to carry kids, dogs and elephant guns at the same time though. That would be unwise.

If you are now itching to spend that money which was supposed to finance your kid’s higher education, may I refer you to a PDF at Carrozzeria Touring’s website, which reads in part as follows:

Those interested in buying a Bellagio Fastback Touring must address to Carrozzeria Touring Superleggera or to Rossocorsa, the Milan Maserati dealer. After the delivery of a Maserati Quattroporte saloon (any version) the work starts and is realized together with the client, who’ll be involved in any choice: a unique and fascinating experience, almost impossible to imagine, in the era of mass production also for extreme cars.

There you have it. And one more thing: just as we were about to leave the Villa d’Este, I stumbled into the Bellagio once again, tucked into a corner in an underground parking lot. I tried to take a nice picture of it but this thing in red kept creeping into the frame.

My sincerest apologies.

Photos by the author expect the picture of the broken down Lamborghini Espada, which is by Balázs Fenyő.

A few hours after we published our in-depth interview with Stile Bertone’s new design director Jason Castriota, I was standing by Lake Como with him showing me the secrets of his first Bertone design, the Mantide.

The front fenders melt into wings behind the front wheels then draw up into a single taut bunch—reminiscent of a calf muscle—which in turn passes under an archway similar to Castriota’s famous C-pillar for the Ferrari 599 GTB. The confluence of curves and LED’s in the back is, when viewed from a step back, a classic Kamm tail. While retaining the tried-and-true shape of the fastback, the Mantide is boldly futuristic.

But will anyone be able to drive it? There are plans to make two more examples, Castriota says, in white and green, to create an Italian flag with the addition of the first car. Then, in an email to the New York Times, he said: “We would not rule out producing as many as 10.” A price has also been quoted: €1,500,000

That's close to two million US dollars at the current exchange rate—almost two Veyrons worth of cold, hard cash. Not insignificant for a car built on a Corvette ZR1, which retails for 5% of the Mantide’s asking price. Let’s examine what you get for that kind of money, apart from the warm feeling of contributing to a company’s survival which has given us the Miura, the Countach and the Lancia Stratos.

Interior

While Jeremy Clarkson has named the Corvette ZR1 his car of the year for 2008 and our own road test editor Wes Siler called it “the best car ever made,” the fact remains: on the inside, it's all Corvette.

To whit, from our first drive:

In fact, the only thing detracting from the ZR1’s grand touring credentials is the interior. The only options on the $103,300 car are an awful set of chrome wheels and the 3ZR upgraded interior package, which succeeds in moving the interior from cheap and nasty into luxurious bass boat territory with more embroidered ZR1 and Corvette logos than my fragile mind could comprehend. We have a hard time accepting the “value” excuse; for this kind of money we’d no longer like to feel like a Jeff Foxworthy punchline. An automatic transmission is, thankfully, not an option.

Let’s see what the Mantide has to offer:

As you can see, it’s a modern European alcantara-carbon-fiber-leather affair, with the car’s hexagonal theme continuing as cutouts on the racing seats, themselves thin carbon shells. The instrument screen is the one used in the Ferrari FXX, the gearshift is a nice aluminum knob and it’s certainly got a snug racer feel to it. But it’s perhaps not as remarkable as the car’s exterior.

Certainly a major upgrade on the Corvette, though, but then that’s not saying much when you’re considering this is a two million dollar Italian super car.

Exterior

Here in Europe, the current Corvette is not liked much. It’s a big, brash American design, a brute amongst small European cars, but while it’s unarguably alien to these shores, I rather fancy its low, wide, flowing looks. In ZR1 trim, it’s a proper menace, with all the right vents, wings and scoops.

The Mantide gets rid of that all. Aside from the front-engined layout and the fastback silhouette, you would be hard pressed to tell there’s a Corvette underneath. And there is: the Mantide is not like the Italian-American cars from the 60s like the Iso Grifo or the De Tomaso Mangusta which paired an Italian chassis with an American V8. Beneath the red carbon fiber is a Corvette ZR1: LS9 engine, aluminum chassis, the works.

But what carbon fiber! It’s all sharp Bertone creases which turn into subtle arcs as you examine them up close, dihedral Enzo doors, smatterings of hexagons everywhere. The angular rear wheelarches—straight off the M577A armoured personnel carrier which transported the space marines into the doomed reactor core in Aliens—frame black Transformer wheels.

It’s dramatically new, so shockingly new that it’s actively disconcerting to take a few steps back and see its classic berlinetta profile. In person, it creates the sort of time warp the iPhone did when it first went on sale in the summer of 2007. You felt as though you were holding a sliver of 2011 in your hands.

The Mantide? I’d say it’s from 2017. Similar vehicles are on their way to leave the inner Solar System.

But then is it worth the price of 20 ZR1’s? There is, of course, no rational answer to such a question, as even the ZR1 is not an entirely rational purchase, being, as Dan Neil put it in his article The rapture of the hypercar, a big needle to deliver the combustible heroin of petroleum.

If you have space-faring ambitions on the public road, set to the soundtrack of a pushrod V8 with titanium bits, then by all means get in touch with Stile Bertone and put down whatever deposit they ask. The car geeks of the world need you to enable them to carry on the traditions of coachbuilding.

And then I saved the best part for the end. If you open the gigantic hood and peer inside, what you’ll see is exactly what you'll see when you open the hood of the ZR1 — a grinning, black Corvette Racing skull named Jake.

So even though this is not a race car, your Le Mans ass-kicking heritage is right there. And who could ask for more.

Photo Credit: Alex Conley (Corvette ZR1), Natalie Polgar and the author (Stile Bertone Mantide)

With over 60 very interesting and very pretty cars on display, the Concorso is a photographic Battle of Ypres. There is no way to capture everything and by the time the cars are packed away for the night, everyone is reeling with exhaustion.

Going over the hundreds upon hundreds of photos we shot over this very long day, here’s the three dozen we like the most. We hope you’ll enjoy.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and Peter Orosz

There is something definitely wrong with the heat exchangers of Italian air conditioners. Granted, they have fans in them and machines with fans will never be silent but cooling a small building by Lake Como should not require a jet engine.

There, I said it—and as if on cue, this orange-silver concoction from half a century ago rounds a bend and motorvates leisurely down a service road. The noise is deafening, high, piercing, slightly dangerous.

The Gilda—named after Rita Hayworth’s famous role in the 1946 film of the same name—is not a Chrysler in the way a 300 or a Hemi engine is, but it would certainly not exist without the company.

Chrysler’s executives commissioned it in 1955 and it was designed by Giovanni Savonuzzi of Italy’s Ghia coachbuilding firm. The car was shaped to take a gas turbine, but it was never fitted with one: the Gilda toured the show circuit with a 1.5-liter OSCA four-pot, then was handed over to the Henry Ford Museum, where it sat until purchased by a Californian eight years ago for $125,000.

Scott Grundfor, the car’s new owner, had the car restored and fitted, as originally intended, with a gas turbine. It’s a perfect complement to the styling, which, as you can see in our gallery, is perhaps the most extreme example of Fifties jet plane car design. A weird one-off from an era where ultra-high speed transport seemed to be just around the corner. And when Project Orion was not the name of a space program set to retrace our achievement from forty years ago, but stood for a set of spaceships powered by atom bombs.

Yeah, the Fifties were cool.

Postscript: Chrysler’s partnership with Ghia in designing a jet car culminated eight years later in the Chrysler Turbine Car, a test run of 50 automobiles powered by the A831 turbine engine making 130 HP at a very un-V8 60,000 RPM. While the cars were reliable, they never made it into production, and died quick EV1 deaths.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and Peter Orosz

Eight hundred miles in the dark, four hundred milligrams of caffeine consumed from cans and ceramic cups and there it is: Lake Como. The road approaches from the top of the steep hills which flank its five cubic miles of frigid slate-gray water. We descend toward the city of Como then on to Cernobbio, home of the Villa d’Este, a magnificent lakeside hotel built half a millennium ago and for a day every late April, home to a handful of the world’s most beautiful cars ever built.

I can feel the small white rocks through the thin Kevlar soles of my sneakers. If you focus your eyes to ground level, a honeycomb pattern emerges, cast by the grille of a red coupé. On this very spot two years ago stood another red coupé, designed by the same man, who is now showing me secret archways of aerodynamics. The car is, of course, Jason Castriota’s Stile Bertone Mantide and this is the Concorso d’Eleganza, a show to fry every brain even vaguely interested in cars.

Classic cars, you say? Then what is Castriota’s new concept, unveiled a week ago, doing here? The Concorso was first held in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, as a beauty contest—for the most beautiful new cars. It certainly is the perfect geological backdrop for automotive beauty, a stone’s throw from the villa where Anakin Skywalker wed Padmé Amidala, and this will be the very last Darth Vader reference in this blogpost. The Concorso soldiered on through the Depression until World War Two, then was briefly relaunched only to die a quick death and remain in a coma until BMW resurrected it ten years ago. It is now the premium event on the European concourse circuit.

There is a tendency among petrolheads to arrive at the cars of the 50s and the 60s as the most perfect embodiment of the automotive form. It certainly is easy to see why. Prior to World War Two, the car was a luxury good, clearly evidenced by the prewar cars which make up three classes of the Concorso. These are mostly huge, baroque battleships and visually, they have more to do with horse-driven carriages than with the vehicles we think of as cars. It is very pleasing to look at, say, a 1936 Auburn, but it would be more at home on the waters of Lake Como as a hydrofoil boat than on the public road.

Something happened during the production lull which was World War Two. The cars that emerged in the 50s were smaller, more human in scale, and much closer mechanically to modern cars. To look at a Ferrari 250 GT is to look at a fairly modern sports coupé.

There is a particular 250 GT on display, a Lusso, the last model in Ferrari’s labyrinthine first production model, and this car is chestnut brown and was owned by Steve McQueen. It is deeply beautiful and next to it stand a 250 GT SWB, a Lamborghini Miura, Paul Frère’s old Maserati, and so on. Most of these cars were closely related to motor racing, a pioneering and highly dangerous— therefore very cool—activity back then. They also happen to be really pretty.

But their prettyness stems not from the fact that they are old, au contraire, they are pretty because they were radically new for their day. The Miura was one of the first road cars to have its engine midships. The Ferrari 250 GT SWB was perhaps the best road racing car of its day. The Jaguar D-Type had disc brakes.

These were cars made by people who believed in progress.

This is why it’s wrong to treat them as anything other than fine museum pieces and why it’s so refreshing to see new concepts make up a separate class at the Concorso. Concepts which may be very abstract exercises in design, never making it into production, but concepts which may introduce new ideas. Like the many trick wings on the Bertone Mantide.

What is the point of it all? It’s hard to tell. There are people here who collect cars the way they collect wristwatches and vacation homes and then there are car geeks with mischievous twinkles in their eyes, people like you and I who happen to be wealthy enough to own an interesting old car and it is their cars which bear evidence to daily driving.

But make no mistake: this is a beauty contest. A day of fine escapism, and while there are new cars on display, the answer to the future of the automobile will not emerge from here. However space age the looks, the Corvette ZR1-based Mantide will not be an answer to a world running out of space and oil and filling with people who have never owned a car but would certainly like to do so.

Perhaps the best way to approach it is as a game. Dress up in a fine spring suit, grab a glass of champagne, and enjoy the Alpine sun as you walk around the mammoth sycamore by the hotel and lean in close to the leather straps which hold engine covers above triple Webers. Tomorrow will be another day. But if you lean in close enough, you can just about hear a racing V12 scream down the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans.

Just make sure you step back when the car’s owner guns the engine for real. These things are LOUD.

Next up, we’ll look at the more interesting cars of the Concorso in detail. Like this 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B pictured above, which won this year’s Coppa d’Oro: the grand prize of the event.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and the author

The Concorso d’Eleganza is no Goodwood Festival of Speed: the cars are parked on the lawn of a fancy hotel. Because of this static nature, it’s not much of a video event, being much better suited to photography. Still, in breaks between photo sessions, we couldn’t resist turning on our trusty Flip camera to capture the few moments when the cars were in motion between the exhibition area and the garages.

If you click play, you can hear the sound of a 1955 racing Maserati, a 1969 Miura, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GT SWB—and Jason Castriota’s Stile Bertone Mantide.

And click here if you missed our video of the Aston-Martin One-77 idling its 7.3-liter V12.

The fraternal quadruplets are decked out in the colors of some of Bugatti's most successful racers, who drove the legendary Type 35 to well over 2,000 wins during its decade of operation. The white one matches the car driven by Hermann zu Leiningen, blue for Jean-Pierre Wimille, Malcolm Campbell in green and Achille Varzi in red. No word on whether these examples will be for sale, but considering the ready market in the United Arab Emirates, we'd be shocked if they sat in the Bugatti headquarters for long.

[via Autoblog]

Yeah, you sort of expect a 7.3-liter V12 to sound good, but hearing the big Aston for the first time was quite a shock. Literally, as the huge noise reverbated off the Villa d’Este’s walls and probably the mountains on the opposite side of Lake Como as well, wreaking havoc with George Clooney’s morning espresso.

And it’s not like there was no aural competition at the Concorso. At various points during the day, cars like a Jaguar D-Type, a Lamborghini Miura and various Ferrari 250 GT’s had their engines sent revving, noises which would normally be the high point of a car geek’s month.

There was only one car which could rise to the occasion. Although car might not be the best word to describe this most insane example of Italian engineering. Until the orange mechanical menace gets its own post, try and guess what it is:

And if you’re stuck, look up in the sky for a clue.

As you’re reading this, Jalopnik’s European squad—yours truly, teamed up with Crazy Euro Car Girl—are heading down to Italy to arrive on Saturday morning for this year’s Concorso d’Eleganza. It’s the 80th showing of perhaps the classiest classic car event this side of Pebble Beach and on display will be a number or rather special cars. Racing Ferraris, prewar Bugattis and even Jason Castriota’s new Bertone Mantide. Only this time it's the real thing instead of the foam model on display at the Shanghai Auto Show.

The Concorso is a peculiar event for the car geek. For one, it is of a mind-boggling scale. There are close to a hundred cars on display, every single one of them not only very beautiful, old and exciting, but often with an intriguing story. Ferraris driven by 50s playboys. Maseratis owned by movie stars. An Alfa Romeo used by Benito Mussolini’s mistress Clara Petacci to escape at the end of World War Two, unsuccessfully. And so on. It is a monster of a show, easily inducing Stendhal syndrome in those so inclined.

On the other hand, the Concorso brings into sharp focus the oddity of the vintage car scene. There is a tendency among people who are into cars—and I am certainly not immune to this—to think that all the best cars, be they road cars or racers, were produced in the 50s and the 60s. And in that regard, the Concorso should be the pilgrimage of a lifetime.

Except that the old Ferraris are no longer raced by Italian daredevils on public roads. They are tended to by retired American businessmen in ice-cream colored polo shirts. The paintjobs, never meant to be immaculate, are given lustruous sheens with soft clothes and have their names pronounced in accented Italian.

And that the glamour of all these cars stems from the fact that they were radically new back in the day, not museum pieces.

I first came face to face with the Concorso two years ago, and ten days later, produced what was perhaps the most difficult article I’ve ever written, which is now republished in English at Hyperleggera:

Sergio Scaglietti is a short Italian gentleman. Immaculate in appearance, but that’s Italian DNA, his hands sinewy, his eyes like the lake. All around us park Ferraris which Scaglietti had designed fifty year ago. Cherry blossoms captured as they reached the ground, a half century old yet gleaming, all proper use carefully polished away.

Take the red 121 LM Spider we had passed on our way to the hotel. Eugenio Castellotti led with it the race at Le Mans in 1955 before the world erupted into flaming magnesium. The red 860 Monza. Juan Manuel Fangio drove it to victory in Sebring in 1956.

Under the paintjobs, covering aluminum curves, are Sergio Scaglietti’s fingerprints. They’re from an age when the right materials, the right technology and the right people combined to create perfection, time after time after time. Florence under the Medicis was similar. Athens under Pericles.

Modena in the Fifties and the Sixties.

If you’re in the Lake Como area, you can attend the Concorso yourself on its public day of Sunday for €10. If not, check back here on Monday, when, armed with hundreds of photos, we’ll show you what’s hot and what’s not.

It took until last fall for Google Street View to make it across the Atlantic, a year and a half after it debuted in the US. Both roads and privacy laws are narrower here. This must have figured in the delay, but the age of Peeping Toms is now upon us. And there certainly are other things to explore than the digitally blurred faces of Italian politicians on campaign posters around the Duomo in Milan.

Some of our roads are so narrow that even seated in a Hot Wheel of a local supermini the idea of traffic coming the opposite way is enough to fill you with dread. Convex mirrors to the rescue! You can find them in most intersection, like here in the village of Cernobbio in North Italy:

Look closer and you can see the Street View car itself reflected, with its scaffolding of camera equipment balanced on top. It is a black Opel Astra, which translates to Saturn ~ in the American language.

But look even closer, move along the road, and grind your teeth in frustration at the missed opportunity. This mirror happens to be mounted at the entrance of Villa d’Este, a magnificent estate on Lake Como, site of the annual Concorso d’Eleganza. The public road Via Regina passes right next to the Villa, at one point crossing beneath in a short tunnel, and when the Concorso is on in late April, you can stop at various observation points and drool at all the cars. Since this is Italy, you can do this in the close proximity of excellent food, so that all the Maserati-induced saliva will not go to waste and will help bits of mozzarella di bufala become parts of your body.

Should you find yourself in the area this year, do swing by on the weekend of April 25-26. It’s only 15 Euro-bucks to get in and you can liquefy your brain on cars faster than it takes a Ferrari Colombo engine to rev into the high latitudes.

If you happen to arrive at the right time, you can even catch a glimpse of ladies in decadent dress, idling by a Bugatti Type 57C Voll & Ruhrbeck. As if waiting for this 1939 cabriolet to set sail not for Lake Como, but for the Southern Ocean itself.

As of now, the M1 Homage is strictly a design exercise. We haven't seen shots of the interior, the mechanical bits, or of the vehicle in motion, so it may very well be no more than a hot body. The styling is directly influenced from not only the original M1, but also from that car's inspiration, the BMW Turbo Concept. So if history is to repeat itself, perhaps this Homage is a predecessor to a toned-down limited-production version, but don't hold your breath. There have been optimistic rumors of a BMW return to the mid-engined supercar game, and this would certainly be a bold first step. But we'll have to wait and see just how far BMW is going to take this concept. For now, we'll settle with gawking at the motionless photos of this modern automotive sculpture. [Photo Credit: BMW]