The ultimate italian coachbuilder site
The ultimate italian coachbuilder site
In the late 1940s, Karl Abarth, a deeply talented engineer and retired motorbike racer, moved from his native Austria to his ancestral home of Merano, Italy (adopting the name Carlo in the process) to pursue a career in four-wheeled motorsport.
The Cisitalia 850 Coupé Allemano: Abarth teamed up with successful industrialist Piero Dusio and fellow engineer Dante Giacosa to form Compagnia Industriale Sportiva Italia – best known as “Cisitalia”. Their first car, the D46, was enormously successful in open-wheel Voiturette classes. It was followed by the ultra-slick 202 Nuvolari spyder and subsequent 202 Gran Sport which proved to be a highly influential machine and formed the blueprint for numerous Italian GTs through the next decade. Despite their success, the ambitious and costly Cisitalia-Porsche Grand Prix project pushed Cisitalia to the brink of extinction, nearly bankrupting Dusio in the process, who moved to Argentina in the aftermath of its failure. Carlo Abarth left to strike out on his own, and Piero’s son Carlo Dusio took over operations at Cisitalia. After Abarth’s departure from Cisitalia, he built one of the most successful racing teams of all time, building (mainly) Fiat-based specials and bespoke racing cars to contest the highly competitive smallbore racing classes of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Fiat’s ubiquitous 600 provided the platform for a number of iconic Abarth race cars and road cars. Carlo Abarth had, in fact recognized the importance of selling road cars to supplement his racing operations, and he offered a number of thinly disguised road-going racers to meet demand. But the Cisitalia 850 Coupé Allemano of 1959 was a more civilized and sophisticated machine that shared the same platform and 79-inch wheelbase as its race-bred siblings, but was strictly a road car, clothed in a Michelotti-designed body built by Allemano that, despite its tiny proportions, was quite elegant. Meanwhile, Cisitalia found new footing in Argentina where they continued building a variety of sporting Fiat-based specials. The collaboration with Abarth was revitalized and an Argentine version of the 850 Allemano was introduced as the Cisitalia-Abarth 850 Scorpione. It was in essence the same as the home market Abarth, but built and marketed in Argentina as a Cisitalia.
Story and photo courtesy of Hyman Ltd
The Cisitalia 202 is particularly important to automotive history both because it was the first car in the world to be permanently exhibited in a modern art museum, the MoMA in New York, and because it can be considered the first example of the postwar Italian-style granturismo.
