| Did you know that... The Lancia factory in Torino was working 24 hours a day, 6 days a week and employed 4.000 factory workers, 800 office staff and 200 design and engineering personnel? Despite this, they struggled to produce 200 cars a week. Lancia refused to buy shock absorbers from another company as they preffered to build them themselves. The Flaminia transaxle has its own oil pump and the transmission is built into its casing with three needle type roller bearings. These transaxles were individually tested at 2000 rpms during 2 hours. If not utterly silent, they were scrapped! This Flaminia driven by Cabianca finished first in class in the 1961 Mille Miglia and the 1961 Targa Florio and two years earlier, in 1959, Elio Zagato won the Mobilgas Economy Run. Cabianca also broke a record by driving this Flaminia from Bologna to Milano at an average speed of over 200 km/h! Enzo Ferrari declared about the Zagato Sport that it was one of the best handling cars ever built. Juan Manuel Fangio, Peter Collins, Lance Macklin, Paul Fr�re... all these famous racing drivers had a Flaminia. Several moviestars like Brigitte Bardot, Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren... all had theirs too. Battista and Sergio Farina could be seen in nothing else. The engineers at Lancia did what had to be done.... any accountant who opened his mouth got trampled on. Thus we have these elegant solutions to mechanical problems... The front suspension is mainly formed by forgings and castings, and where it's bolted together, there are split pins used through the bolts heads. All the castings have their rough edges smoothed and on each piece teeth marks of the hardness testing machine can be found. Next to these grip marks is the tester's stamp and number... Looking at it you sense a work of art! It was one of the best built cars of its time! For the price of a Flaminia sedan you could have 10 Fiat 500 (Italy 1962) Lancia Flaminia's were built at a rate that never exceeded 10 cars a day. In 1955, Lancia retracted from the racing scene and decided to offer their state of the art race cars (spares and tooling included) to Ferrari. The D50 was furtherly developped and won all major racing events with drivers like Collins and Fangio. The Lancia Thema 8.32 was a way to remember this donation. TO BE CONTINUED |
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