Cars are inanimate objects. They don’t hold political views. So you can’t really accuse the pale grey-green machine here of being fascist, although Benito Mussolini probably viewed it as such. He would surely have known about it, because it won the unsupercharged class by 27 seconds in the 1938 Coppa di Natale in Italy’s most perfectly planned new city (Asmara Nova) in one of Italy’s proudest overseas territories (Eritrea, in East Africa). And Il Duce lent his words to the race programme’s opening pronouncement. ‘Io ho per le strade una passione romana’, he said. You get the (four-wheel) drift.
There was much celebration of fascism in the programme. It was the Italian brand, the way to power and domination. All the cars in the race were Italian, of course, but only one was a Lancia. This one.
It’s a Lancia Dilambda, but not as most people knew it. The regular Dilambda was a hefty saloon, coupé or tourer with a 4.0-litre, narrow-angle V8 engine and not a whiff of raciness. Stripped of that heavy bodywork and 2ft 7in of wheelbase, though, it could make a viable racing car, especially with its engine’s aspiration eased by a free-flowing exhaust system and a carburettor able to gulp more air. As far as is known,
