Karl Abarth was born in November 1908 in Vienna and as a boy became a very competitive bicycle racer who could maintain his own bikes and as he got older he started to look at the new motorcycles that were hitting the market. By the time he was 16, he was working for a motorcycle chassis builder and a tuner and he designed his first full motorcycle at the age of 20! The … [Read more...]
Open Top Cars
What is fascinating about the car industry is the number of names used for the same item - and often it comes down to history with Europe and the US adopting different names at different times. The convertible is such a beast - it has so many different names, some driven by marketing and others by other long forgotten reasons. The simplest of the names, a convertible … [Read more...]
Auto Italia 2017
A few weeks ago I headed down to Canberra for Auto Italia 2107. This was my fourth visit over the years having been down for 2013, 2015 and 2016. Each year there are two interesting points about the day. The first is that there is usually a "headline" marque - this year it was Ferrari for their 70th anniversary. The second point is that it brings out some of the rarer machines … [Read more...]
Centenary of Ferruccio Lamborghini’s Birth
On Sunday I attended a lunch to honour the birth of the founder of Lamborghini. Ferruccio was an industrialist who owned many sports cars before creating his own supercar company Automobili Lamborghini to produce luxury Grand Tourer (GT) cars. He had owned several Ferrari and Maserati vehicles and felt he could do better! His birth was actually on April 28th and this was the … [Read more...]
Innocenti
This weeks history article is about Innocenti who built cars under licence and were the makers of the famous Lambretta scooter. Ferdinando Innocenti set up his company in 1922 to make steel tubing. During the Second World War, his factory was flattened in a bombing raid. After the war, in an attempt to rebuild his company, Innocenti saw a market for a cheap transport method … [Read more...]
