Something ‘Speciale’

Up to the 1950s and often beyond, if you wanted your chassis to be complemented by some gorgeous bodywork you would head off to the Italian design houses, or carrozzeria, such as Bertone, Touring, Zagato, Pininfarina, and later Guigiaro’s Italdesign.

Failing to win the patronage of Pininfarina with his designs in the early 1950s, Franco Scaglione approached Bertone. A collaboration between the two led to some great designs, often for Alfa Romeo and Fiat/Abarth. The futuristic Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica (BAT) cars Scaglione drew for the carrozzerie had an emphasis on achieving the best possible aerodynamics. Some of those design cues can be found on the Alfa Romeo Giulietta SS Prototipo, Turin Show car of 1957, now preserved in Corrado Lopresto’s Milan collection and on Michael Wyatt’s 1962 car, featured this month.

Giuseppe — or Nuccio, as he was also known — Bertone was rightly famous for his successful designs and a fairly taut house style, and early on it was largely thanks to Scaglione’s design input that he became a master car body builder. Some of Scaglione’s most outstanding designs included the 1963 ATS and 2500 Berlinetta, as well as the Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale he built for the carrozzerie with Carlo Chiti.

RACING IMPROVES THE BREED

The 1957 SS was a car designed before computers yet its beguiling profile achieved a highly creditable 0.28Cd factor even without the aid of a wind tunnel. Early photos show the prototype on the autostrada with multiple tufts of wool attached all over its bodywork. These telltales told their