…didn’t bear the Ferrari nameplate!
I never before knew about this interesting chapter in automotive history, and I thought that I would share the info, along with some photos of Enzo’s first beautiful car:
Any auto writer that quotes Brock Yates is ok with me.
The nose looks a little odd but that car has some beautiful flowing lines to it. I wonder how far into 7 figures, or 8, that one would go at an auction…
Heck of an engine with 8 cylinders spread over 1.5 Liters. The cylinders must be the size of a Campbell’s soup can.
Very interesting trivia and news to me. Thank you for posting that.
Just like how the first Porsche was a VW
From that story, it’s astonishing that the car went from an initial vague idea to completed and road worthy car in 4 months time.
“the first Porsche was a VW”
Well…actually the first Porsche was the Lohner-Porsche, produced around the turn of the century. This car’s gasoline engine turned a large generator, and the car was directly powered by an electric motor in each wheel hub. Thus…no transmission! This very innovative car actually had some success in early racing events, with Dr. Porsche at the wheel.
The first Lamborghini was a tractor.
Story goes that Old Man Lamborghini made a big pile off his tractor business and bought himself a Ferrari, and kept getting the runaround from Ferrari on upgrading the clutch, including from Enzo himself who supposedly told him to kiss off because what could a tractor builder possibly know about sports cars? That ticked Lamborghini right off, and he decided to make his own sports car.
You can still see Lamborghini tractors running around fields in Europe today. And they even look sporty even though they haven’t been linked to the car company since the early 70’s: http://www.lamborghini-tractors.com/en-EU/open-field/101-r7
^
James Ward Packard constructed his first car after buying an expensive Winton, and having a lot of problems with it. On one of his many return visits to the Winton factory, he was in the midst of giving Mr. Winton some suggestions on how he could improve his car when Winton reportedly said something along the lines of, “If you think you can build a better car, then…dammit…why don’t you do it.”
And thus was born the Packard–which was indeed immediately superior to the Winton automobile, and Winton faded into oblivion a few years later.
Sometimes I wonder what the world would look like if blowhards would shut up and listen to good ideas without prejudicing them based on who had them.
@shadowfax Yes, history is full of bad judgements. After WW II, the British high command examined the Wolfsburg Volkswagen complex that fell into their hands in 1945.
The team examined plant and products and summed up their report by: “There is really nothing of value for us here”, and turned it over to the local government of Lower Saxony, who spun it into the successful venture it turned out to be.
For years nobody actually knew who exactly owned Volkswagen.
In the meantime, British car manufacturing produced one inferior product after another in the lower price range.