Street Racing Cars For Sale: Italian

Showing posts with label Italian. Show all posts

Sunday, August 29, 2010

The winner of the 1907 Paris to Peking endurance race

0 comments Posted by st at 6:49 PM

The 1907 ITALA mod. 35/45 HP won the prize of a magnum of Mumm champagne. The race went without any assistance through country where there were no roads or road-maps. For the race, camels carrying fuel left Peking and set up at stations along the route to give fuel to the racers. The race followed a telegraph route so that the race was well covered in newspapers at the time. Each car had one journalist as a passenger, with the journalists sending stories from the telegraph stations regularly through the race.

The 9,300 mile race was kicked off by a challenge by a newspaper "What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere. Is there anyone who will undertake to travel this summer from Peking to Paris by automobile?"

It was held during a time when cars were fairly new, and went through remote areas of Asia where people were not familiar with motor travel. The route between Peking and Lake Baikal had only previously been attempted on horseback. The race was won by Italian Prince Scipione Borghese of the Borghese family, accompanied by the journalist Luigi Barzini, Sr. He was confident and had even taken a detour from Moscow to St Petersburg for a dinner which was held for the team, and afterwards headed back to Moscow and rejoined the race. The event was not intended to be a race or competition, but quickly became one due to its pioneering nature and the technical superiority of the Italians' car driven by Count Scipione Borghese, winning by three weeks. These sporting successes helped sales dramatically, the company continued to grow. The company experimented with a range of novel engines such as variable stroke, sleeve valve, and "Avalve" rotary types

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_to_Paris and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itala

Thursday, April 2, 2009

1968 Bizzarrini Duca d'Aosta

0 comments Posted by st at 4:26 PM

One Strada owner’s passion for his car led to the ultimate street Bizzarrini. The Duke of Aosta was in his 20s and resided outside Florence, and the engineer remembers him buying a Strada that he used a lot.
In fact, he liked his Strada so much he approached me, wanting a car that was even more racy. I offered him [P538 003], but he was too tall and didn’t fit.’
And so was born the car you see here, the Duca D’Aosta, designed and built from scratch. Bizzarrini and his men made a P538 chassis and invited the Duke to Bizzarrini’s small factory in Livorno. They took his measurements and went to work making a new car to debut at 1968’s Turin Auto Show.
At around the same former Bertone and Ghia designer Giorgietto Giugiaro (who had just formed ItalDesign) expressed an interest to build a striking show car based on the P538 chassis.