A Beautiful Shambles

A B E A U T I F U L

S H A M B L E S When an E C C E N T R I C W H E E L M A N conspired to win the purse at L A C A R R E R A

PA N A M E R I C A N A , he phoned A F L E D G L I N G ROAD & TRACK for help. The pair moved mountains to get L A N C I A’ S M A S T E R P I E C E on the grid. Like any grand adventure, the journey became the destination, and the destination A B E A U T I F U L D I S A S T E R . Seventy years on, we search for meaning in T H E O N LY C A R T H AT S U R V I V E D I T A L L .

O N A D U S T Y T E X A S R U N -

W A Y,

a cargo plane touches down four days late. A low-slung, rose-red Italian coupe rolls onto the asphalt. “And there was the Lancia, ” Bill Brehaut wrote in Road & Track, January 1952. “A perfect lady she was too. ”

There’s a finality to his words, as if this Lancia’s story would tie up neater than a Christmas ribbon. The car had already crossed two continents and the Atlantic. It survived an aerial engine fire and an emergency landing. Finally, it reached the starting line of La Carrera Panamericana. Surely nothing could blunt the mighty Lancia’s ambition.

Then a blown head gasket did just that.

Yet the real story isn’t about one car’s disastrous moment, but rather the rare highs before the fall. The Aurelia set the bar for every sports coupe that came after, spurred on as it was by a forgotten Formula 1 ace. The editors of this magazine delivered the car to the foot of its destiny, and for one glorious moment, everything felt possible. To find that silver lining among the wreckage, we must first go back.

In 1947, Gianni Lancia’s eponymous company arrived at a crossroads. Gianni’s father, Fiat test driver Vincenzo Lancia, co-founded the company in 1906 in Turin. He died of a heart attack in 1937. A decade on, his son Gianni had finished an engineering degree and was poised to carry Lancia forward.

What Lancia lacked in resources, it made up for in imagination. When the Marshall Plan doled out cash to kickstart the Italian auto industry, Lancia was passed over. Vincenzo had cooperated with wartime communists to overthrow the fascists—a reasonable bargain, but not to the Yanks. It left Lancia with prewar tooling and a shoestring budget.

However, Fiat and Alfa Romeo, newly flush with Lira, were bereft of the one thing they could not buy: Lancia engineer Francesco de Virgilio’s genius. Correspondence shows that even mighty Enzo Ferrari courted de Virgilio. For a decade, he tried to lure the Lancia engineer with prestige, offering him titles like capo ufficio tecnico (chief technical officer). It’s plain to see why.

On May 4, 1950, at the Salone dell’Automobile in Turin’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Lancia unveiled de Virgilio’s masterstroke. They called it the Aurelia. It was a rolling quantum leap in production-car design, and its groundbreaking engine, chassis, and packaging were delivered with Italian panache. At the Aurelia’s heart, the first production V-6 engine: 60-degree cylinder angles, overhead cams, and a rotating assembly balanced to perfection. It was a notion thought impossible just years before. The Aurelia also debuted the first production rear transaxle and radial tires. Later Aurelias received the first production five-speed manual transmission. The Aurelia’s independent front suspension (a de Virgilio design borrowed from the earlier Flaminia) was paired with one of the first fully independent rear suspension systems on a production vehicle.

More than the technical breakthroughs, the clever packaging of these ideas stands out decades later. The independent rear suspension used triangulated semi-trailing arms and coil springs, an evolution of de Virgilio’s early studies of swing arms and de Dion tubes. These arms were linked to the transaxle by a set of curious offset bushings, which improved geometry across the wheel’s travel. The arms tied into the trans-

C A. (Previous Page)

The dancing Lancia, graciously loaned by

Strada e Corsa BV. B. This Lancia Aurelia’s gentle curves hide tons of engineering genius (and one helluva story). C. The brain trust:

Gianni Lancia (center) with engineers Vittorio Jano (right) and Francesco de Virgilio.

A. Our account of the trip to La Carrera remains one of the great feats of gonzo road tripping. Catch a full reprint of the story on our website.

A. Factory paperwork for the Lancia’s delivery, a one-way ticket to disaster and glory. B. Bonetto earned his nickname, “the

Pirate. ” The F1 ace raced flat out, with gusto for days. C. The charming work bay of Antique Auto

Restoration, where good folks (and hot metal) abound. B

axle rigidly, allowing its case to act as a stressed member of the chassis. All of this in 1950.

The technological leaps would have embarrassed any production car from Italy—even Modena—in an era when most fast cars still sported a live axle and leaf springs. The Aurelia set a high-water mark, the source from which all sports coupes would trace their headwaters. None other than legendary F1 impresario Juan Manuel Fangio fell hard for the two-door Aurelia.

“It actually is a car in which impetuosity, common sense, imagination, and daring are beautifully blended, ” he gushed in Velocita (later translated and reprinted in Style Auto). “All the most admirable virtues are grouped in the Lancia Aurelia GT, mild as a lamb, if necessary as lithe as a panther, as tough as the camels who manage to cross the desert chewing a small morsel of food. It’s a smart, fast, impressive car. ”

But before Fangio, there was another admirer.

Every photo of Felice Bonetto looks the same: black-and-white, heavy film grain, Bonetto at the wheel of something slinky and Italian. His brow is furrowed and his pinched fingers hold a match to the end of a suggestively lengthy cigar. Born in Brescia, Bonetto raced F1, the Mille Miglia, road rallies, circuits—anything that might turn up a payday. He was good too. Unlike the gentleman racers of the era, Bonetto raced to put bread on the table. A driver ahead of his time, Bonetto proved a savvy pitchman with a nose for business, the missing link in racing’s transition from a diversion for the idle rich to pure motorsport.

In 1951, a win at La Carrera Panamericana paid $18,500—an enormous prize when most American families brought home $3700 annually. But Bonetto had no ride of his own. Instead, he pitched his friend Gianni Lancia: Bonetto would take the cutting-edge Aurelia GT coupe, modified for race duty, and raise Lancia’s banner on the international stage. Gianni balked. As of that year, Lancia had a factory-backed F1 effort to attend to. La Carrera Panamericana was a world away and an expensive gamble.

Undeterred, Bonetto rang the offices of a small American magazine. In exchange for a handscrawled livery on the car’s fender and access to the vehicle for an exclusive and lengthy road test, R&T would ship the car stateside, then deliver it to La Carrera Panamericana. Lancia prepared the Aurelia and sold it to Bonetto at fair value, making this Aurelia one of the earliest factory Lancia racers ever built and marking the Aurelia’s foray into factory-backed competition.

The pieces were set in motion, R&T’s editors salivating at the prospect. The Aurelia was a pure competition car built from a peerless production coupe. For Bonetto, a driver who understood opportunity better than most, it was a chance for life-altering victory. For Road & Track, it was chasing the kind of adventure that would become a hallmark of the brand.

“Sometimes around the offices of Road and Track, the personnel kicks up its heels and does exactly what it wants to do, ” we wrote in the 1952 piece. “This was one of those times. ”

But racing is fickle. On the first day of La Carrera Panamericana, the Lancia V-6 blew a head gasket. Bonetto’s race ended, and it was a long way back to Italy. The car and its blown engine were deemed too expensive to ship back home; R&T had only offered a one-way ticket.

Later Aurelias made good on the promise of this early race car, but this spectacular chassis—one of the oldest, if not the oldest, surviving factory Lancia competition car on earth—was robbed by chance of its time in the sun. For all it represents to this magazine and all it did to pioneer technology on roads and racetracks, this time capsule was too tempting to leave shut.

I F I R S T T O O K I N T H E A U R E L I A ’ S C U R V E S A T A R E S T O R A T I O N S H O P

outside Monterey, California. It’s hard to argue with Brehaut’s appraisal. Low-slung and compact, the Lancia’s body is muscular and feminine, a design classic built by Pininfarina. Its satin, red body drapes over the mirror-polished wheels like silk cloth.

From every outside angle, this Aurelia hints at racing roots. La Carrera’s organizers stipulated that cars in the Lancia’s class must remain relatively stock. Yet, bizarrely, only the camshaft profiles of the cars were scrutinized post-race.

Lancia, with the cleverest engineers on earth, explored the limits of the rulebook. Our Aurelia’s A-pillars rake lower than a production GT’s,

meeting the short leading edge of a chopped roofline. The Aurelia’s doors were pounded into shape from thin-gauge steel, the hood and trunklid built from lightweight alloy.

The car’s naturally aspirated 2.0-liter six fires in a breath. It’s a shock—straight-piped, loud enough to make you wince. The engine snorts through two chunky carburetors perched atop the cast intake manifold, twice the number found on bone-stock Aurelia sixes.

You’ve never heard a V-6 this angry. At idle, only a low rattle. But on throttle, at 2100 rpm, the engine goes on cam and throws a haymaker at your eardrums. It’s a wall of sound, a grinding racket, like two animals fighting over food.

I aim the Aurelia inland to California’s hill country, Spanish missions dotting the horizon. At any speed, steering effort is lighter than you’d expect, courtesy of a slow rack that asks for hand over hand over hand to whip a two-lane U-turn. At a gallop, none of the road’s texture reveals itself to your palms. If something more than a prayer held you against the plush seats, you wouldn’t have to grip the wheel with anything more than a fingertip’s whisper through high-speed sweepers. On straights, the car tracks dead on.

A little wrist nudge noses the Lancia into the bends squirming up the canyons of Monterey County. With every input from the wheel, a sashay follows as the body sets politely against coil springs. This race car rides smoothly, acknowledging comfort as a key to running top speed over long distance.

The four-speed shifts beautifully. There’s zero play once you’ve slotted the shifter into any gear. It’s improbably intuitive too; this early Aurelia’s cabin is a mirror image of any American road car. Wheel’s on the right. First gear sits forward and right, next to your kneecap, with fourth situated rearward on the passenger’s side. You rip the tricky second-third interchange with your left hand every single time.

The Aurelia blossoms along the coastal roll of California’s Highway 1 and its swooshing inland four-lanes. The long fourth gear stifles the Lancia’s V-6 at legal speeds but makes sense near triple digits. This was an object built for a purpose: to consume Mexico’s length flat out, from Tuxtla Gutiérrez near the Guatemalan border up to Ciudad Juárez, just across the line from El Paso— 1933 miles at full scream.

The brakes wilt under your soles with typical Fifties drum-brake mush, asking for a bootful of stomp before biting. But their actual stopping power, if you’re willing to flex your quads, holds up to modern traffic. Even riding on period-style narrow tires with a kiwi-sized contact patch, this Lancia could outbrake any modern SUV, I bet.

P A R K I N G I N F R O N T O F C A R M E L ’ S S P R A W L I N G M I S S I O N B A S I L I C A

provides a second chance to take in the Lancia, its grandeur lit by the honeysuckle sun. The details boggle. An oil-pressure gauge sewn from art deco daydreams, fluttering like a hummingbird’s heart while the engine hums, has no temperature reading on its face. Instead, two needle-thin hashes sandwich the elegantly serifed word normale that points to a range of acceptable temperatures.

Concentric gold filigree surrounds the gauge in a radiant ripple. It’s a mechanical jewel that doesn’t function so much as stoke wild swings between panic and adulation. You could spend a day with a loupe poring over all the details on this car and still miss something divine.

If the Aurelia seems impossibly overengineered, it was also impossible to sell profitably. Lancia built more than 18,000 Aurelias, including LHD hardtop convertibles meant to lure wealthy Americans. But with Lancia’s ancient tooling requiring intensive hand-built processes—the company had its own foundry for bolts and other fasteners—Gianni could not keep up with the bills. In 1956, a family of Italian industrialists acquired Lancia, attempting to bail out a sinking ship. Then, in 1969, Fiat took over. The Lancia family’s golden era ended for good.

But before the corporate takeovers, Lancia, Bonetto, and the Aurelia flew close to the sun. The trio took second in class and eighth overall at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1952, plus third at the 1953 Mille Miglia in the Lancia D20 (essentially a race-prepped Aurelia) and first overall at the 1952 Targa Florio in an Aurelia B20 competition car. Still, racing success could not save Lancia from eating itself. Chasing victory eventually consumed Bonetto as well.

Two years after the cargo plane, desert, and blown head gasket, Bonetto returned to La Carrera Panamericana in a Lancia D24 factory car powered by a 3.2-liter version of the Aurelia’s screaming six. Before grand road races, Bonetto painstakingly marked dangerous corners with paint. When a competitor ahead of Bonetto stalled and obscured those markings, he missed the warning signs and entered a 60-mph corner at 120. The Lancia crashed into the balcony of a house, the main impact against Bonetto’s head.

He died instantly.

Despite Scuderia Lancia’s grief, the factory team pressed on, claiming every spot on the podium. Fangio stood on the top step, brokenhearted. It was at once Lancia’s greatest triumph and darkest tragedy.

Seventy years later, all of that history still feels palpable. The Aurelia’s seats are ripped to tatters,

C

the leather finish worn down to hide, receipts from long days at high speed. Staring over the Lancia’s short hood, ghosts of the past appear.

“Felice Bonetto sat here, ” I kept thinking, unsure why it mattered, but sure that it absolutely did. As I sat and felt the V-6’s idle, some other thoughts occurred to me. Good cars are nothing more than an assemblage of the right parts. A rip-snort engine, a snick-snick gearbox, grippy rubber—that recipe is simple. But great cars like the Lancia Aurelia are built from groundbreaking ideas: pioneering chassis and suspensions, revolutionary engines, breakthrough engineering.

Bonetto’s death and Lancia’s failure may complicate the legacy of the Aurelia, but they do not dull its shine. This Aurelia GT reminds us that not every racing story resolves with a victory. Still, there is nobility in struggle.

So what does it mean that Lancia pioneered so fearlessly in the Forties and Fifties only to go belly up? Or that Bonetto hit it big only to meet an early end, his name known only to motorsport historians? Or that this then-fledgling magazine laid all its cards on the table so a car with a handdrawn livery could bleed out on Mexican asphalt an ocean away from home? What was the point of it all?

From the cab of this Lancia, my hands on the wheel Bonetto once held, I can’t tell you exactly what it all means. I can’t tell you why we should gamble when failure is the expectation, not the exception. But what one visionary automaker, its doomed driver, and Road & Track reached for 70 years ago is not diminished because they couldn’t grasp it, even if only the car remembers.

A. (Previous pages)

This Aurelia would seem familiar to any hot-rodder. Chopped roof, squat stance, ear-bleeding yelp. B. The Lancia’s cabin, built in service of beauty and smiles. C. An evolution of the first production V-6 engine, snorting through twin Solexes.