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L’Arte dell’Automobile

Christian Gulliksen

February 4, 2003

The ’60s also brought the ambitious Lamborghini 350GT and its follow-up, the 400GT 2+2, Touring’s swan song. While they flirt with sharp edges and elaborate compound curves, it is their stablemate Miura that takes a far more significant step with its mid-mounted engine. The Bertone coachwork by Gandini could be described as an utterly flattened berlinetta, and signals the beginning of the end for the form that started with the Cisitalia in 1947. As well as being a departure from the stylistic norm, the Miura and the Daytona helped create the new category of supercar, where a new challenge was to achieve a top speed as close to 200 mph as possible, even if it meant edging out its challenger by only 1 or 2 mph. Aerodynamics became that much more critical, and a dedicated wind tunnel appeared at Pininfarina's facilities. The competition was getting more scientific.

Ital Design championed the wedge shape in its show cars. A consistent theme in the late ’60s and early ’70s, variants included prototypes for Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Porsche. Pininfarina, with its fetish for aerodynamics, also produced some remarkably wedge-shaped prototypes. The difference between Ital Design and Pininfarina is that the former put its thinking directly into production while the latter massaged what it had learned in its test beds into less dramatic packages. One of Pininfarina’s experiments in the late ’60s was with a three-seat layout that placed the driver at the center of the car, with two passengers on either side and staggered somewhat to the rear. It never found its way into series production, but McLaren ran with the idea for the million-dollar F1 in the 1990s.