Fiat 8V Coupé Zagato

When you think of sports cars with V8 engines, you don’t necessarily think of Fiat. Indirect, through their modern subsidiaries Maserati and Ferrari, maybe, but directly in their own model range? Yes, there was one. However, only briefly between 1952 and 1954. Originally, they planned a new luxury sedan above the also in 1952 newly introduced Fiat 1900 (Tipo 105), for which the board room originally wanted a six-cylinder engine. Dante Giacosa, then Head of Vehicle Development, considered this engine concept to be too difficult to balance and personally favored a V8. In the course of the development work he rejected first an inline six-cylinder and a V6 engine as well as a V8 with 90° bank angle. In the end, he developed an eight-cylinder engine with a V-angle of 70°. This initially wasn’t optimally balanced and had to be elaborately developed, but promised plenty of power in a compact space. At the request of the sales department, an engine was mounted for testing purposes to an extended chassis of a Fiat 1400 and provided to Pininfarina for a new sedan bodywork. However, this Tipo 104 was too big and too heavy for the drive was therefore discarded immediately.

But the V8 engine was too promising to put it into depot unused. Dante Giacosa proposed to develop a sports car as a prestige vehicle from which a new sedan could possibly be derived afterwards. Siata was entrusted with the chassis development, whereby it was consciously taken care that in addition to the factory-own bodywork also external constructions could be adapted. At the Geneva Motor Show 1952, the Tipo 106 finally celebrated its world premiere as Fiat 8V (Otto Vu). Whether the name really arose because senior Fiat employees feared that the name ‘V8’ could be under copyright protection in the US, is no longer certain to determine today. Finally, the chassis, the engine and the factory bodies were predominantly produced in the development department, which of course was considerably more expensive than the industrial mass production of the other Fiat models. Since the development of the planned sedan version was discontinued in favor of the 1900 as a new top model, it wasn’t surprising that in 1954 the sports car project came to an end for economic reasons. The engine was available in the three versions Tipo 104000 (105 hp), 104003 (115 hp) and 104004 (127 hp) in these three years of production.

Of the total of 114 built Fiat 8V most got a Coupé bodywork. In addition to the ex-factory version, co-developed by Fabio Luigi Rapi and Dante Giacosa, there were two different Coupé designs by Ghia (a one-off by Mario Boano and the unbelievably beautiful Supersonic by Giovanni Savonuzzi), a single Coupé by Pininfarina, eight vehicles designed by Giovanni Michelotti and built at Vignale as well as 32 vehicles, which were coachbuilt at Zagato. While five Coupés came with Fiat bodies and were only revised at Zagato, in parallel they designed an own lightweight Coupé bodywork in 1952 for the Fiat dealer Ovidio Capelli from Milan. This special design went into low-volume production from 1954 and customers could choose between a flat roof and the characteristic double-bubble roof. These Zagato Coupés were produced until 1959 on the basis of stored chassis.

Such a car is now part of a RM Sotheby’s auction at Villa Erba during the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este. Chassis number 106000076 was produced in 1955. Originally, the car received an emerald green paint finish and was first delivered to an address in Turin. In particular, it was the ‘Societa Nazionale Olii Minerale’, the Italian national oil company, that bought this sports car. Over the years, various Italian owners followed between Rome and Padua. In the 1970s it participated in various vintage competition events and from the 1980s eight times in the Mille Miglia Storico. The current owner had the vehicle extensively restored and also found the original engine, which had been replaced at some point in the past decades. Now RM Sotheby’s expects a hammer price between 1,600,000 and 1,800,000 € for this beautiful Italian car.

Images: RM Sotheby’s, Paolo Carlini