Historia Automobilia

[Dingfod]

A couple of 50 year automobile mileposts were passed this past week or so.

50 years ago, Lamborghini Trattori was one of the largest manufacturers of tractors and agricultural equipment in Europe. They also made heaters and air conditioners. Ferruccio Lamborghini was already wealthy because of it and had owned Ferrari automobiles since 1958. He liked the high performance automobiles, but found them to be too rough and noisy to be good road cars, so he primarily used Ferraris as track cars, race track. When the clutch broke on one of his Ferraris, he found the Ferrari design to be flawed, so he fixed it with tractor parts. When Ferruccio asked Ferrari to fix their cars with more durable clutches, Enzo Ferrari told him that he was a tractor maker and therefor could not know anything about sports cars. That made Lamborghini decide he could build a better car than Ferrari.

Prior to starting his own auto manufacturing, Lamborghini contracted with a company called Autostar, run by Giotto Bizzarrini, who had designed the Ferrari 250 GTO. Lamborghini wanted a car to compete with Ferrari's 3.0L V-12s. Bizzarrini designed a 3.5L engine that produced 360 horsepower, but it revved very high (9800 rpm) and wasn't the streetable engine that Lamborghini wanted. Bizzarrini refused to change the engine, Lamborghini refused to pay him the agreed to amount, which was to include a bonus for every horsepower over what Ferrari produced. Bizzarrini sued and won.

Lamborghini designed and built his first car, the 350GTV in four months, in time for the 1963 Turin Motor Show. Because of the ongoing legal battle with Bizzarrini, the prototype had no engine, was weighted down with bricks in the engine compartment so that the car sat at the right height. Lamborghini (the car company) was officially incorporated on Oct. 30, 1963. The first cars were fitted with detuned engines of the Bizzarrini design, making only 280 hp instead of 360, and sold at a loss to keep them competitive with Ferrari. They made a total of 120 350GTVs. Their first mid-engine car the P400 Miura, was introduced two years later, a design imitated by the Ferrari Dino and Porsche Carrera GTS. The P400's 350 horsepower 3.9L V-12 engine and transaxle were of a single aluminum casting, a design idea taken from the Mini.

Lamborghini 350GTV:




Lamborghini P400 Miura:



For comparison purposes, the 1967 Bizzarrini P538, powered by a 5.3L Corvette V8, not a Bizzarrini motore ad alta velocità.



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Also marking 50 years, Toyo Kogyo, a machine tool manufacturing company now known as Mazda, introduced the world to the first Wankel rotary engine powered automobile, a 70 horsepower 798cc two-rotor in a Mazda Cosmo prototype. Mass production was still several years away, but they had a running prototype to show the world at the 1963 Tokyo Motor Show. 49 years later, Mazda would announce they have ceased production of the Wankel rotary engine, an engine last seen in the Mazda RX-8.