8 replies to this topic

[Leo]

Recently I was searching the www for some information about Cisitalia. The first thing I stumbled on, was this website: http://www.cisitalia.com.ar It seems the Dusio family resides in Argentina now and tries to revive the Cisitalia brand. The website looks quite good, unfortunately I don't understand Spanish.

Information on Cisitalia is quite thinly spread on the web. Classic car sites sometimes mention the 202, which is a stunningly beautiful coupe by the way, but my real interest is in the D46 and even more in the Ferdinand Porsche designed 360 Grand Prix. This car was very complex with four wheel drive and a supercharged V12 engine, and caused the bankrupty of the company. Well, that's all I know and I would like to know more about it.
I know I probably should by a book instead of claiming time from you all, but unfortunately I'm quite broke at the moment. So who can tell me more??

[Flicker]

[Leo]

Here's another picture:


"1949: Presetation of the Cisitalia racing car
The Cisitalia racing car is presented at the Torino Motor Show, featuring a 12-cylinderdual-compressor boxer engine in midship arrangement, 1493 cc, 385 bhp at10600 rpm, top speed 300 km/h (186 mph), four-wheel drive with individual drive activation of the front wheels."

Did the car ever race?

[jarama]

Hi, Leo:

The Cisitalia G.P.car designed by Ferry Porsche actually never raced, though Tazio Nuvolari tested it.

About his carachteristics, I can add a little more stuff:
wheelbase was 2600 mm., car's long was 3990 mm., while weighed 718 kg. In the cockpit there was the turn-on/turn-off lever for the front transmission.

[Marco94]

Leo,

The car is also described in "Porsche-Excellence was expected" by Karl Ludvigsen. My guess is that you can find the best info there.

Marco.

[JimE]

You can get a very rough translation at http://babelfish.alt...m/translate.dyn

For the D46 it came out as

After those of one devastated by is war, Piero Dusia and Dante Giacosa managed to construct to the fabbloso monoposto D46, that participating in citizen circuits, syudo to recover the passion and the enthusiasm in the Italian streets. Today, we are constructing delicadmente, 54 exclusive units in honor to its history and the men who made it possible. Cisitalia presents/displays the second editing D46 series 2000

I know this is not perfect but at least you can get the general drift.

[karlcars]

True, the car never raced but it did set an Argentine land speed record at something like 145 mph with Clemar Bucci driving. It was then known as the 'Autoar' after the company that Piero Dusio was setting up to make cars in Argentina.

The complete car is in Porsche's collection. At Donington Tom Wheatcroft has many of the parts of a second car on display. I describe the Cisitalia in some detail in my new book 'Classic Grand Prix Cars'. It's a wonderful design!

[John Cross]

The Cisitalia was indeed a fascinating project - shame it never made it to the grid. Karl does indeed describe it's main features well in his excellent book and concludes by saying 'had it raced it might well have advanced the mid-engined era by a decade'.

BTW, jarama, I do not think Nuvolari actually drove the car - the transmission was not complete at the time.

Doug Nye has a fascinating section of the whole Cisitalia story in his book Motor Racing Mavericks. Here is another photo of it:



and here is a side view showing the prop shaft to the front wheels running underneath the engine:



Here is Nye's version of the story:

While the Tucker Torpedo, the Fageol Twin-Coach and the Spike Jones Special were being campaigned at Indianapolis, the CTA-Arsenal was being planned in Paris, and Alfa Romeo were blowing brick-dust and cheese rinds off their Alfettas at Portello, 'something big' was stirring in Turin.

That 'something' was the growing Cisitalia company, founded by Commendatore Piero Dusio. He had been Italy's champion amateur racing driver prewar with a blown 2.5-litre Alfa Romeo and he was a capable and astute businessman in addition to being a great racing enthusiast.

After the war ended in 1945, Dusio rightly calculated that the European public would be thirsty for any kind of sporting spectacle. He gauged the time to be right for the production of a cheap but efficient proprietary racing car.

He approached Dante Giacosa, designer of Fiat's famous Topolino, to devise him a car which must be capable of being built very quickly, and in large numbers.

Giacosa immediately decided to use the Fiat 1,100 production engine, and modified it to produce 60bhp in place of its normal 32 and then converted it to dry-sump lubrication so that it could be mounted lower in the frame.
This frame was one of the earliest multi-tubular spaceframes - pre-dated in racing by the Trossi-Monaco already examined - and prompted both by Giacosa's aviation experience and by the fact that Dusio had a clandestine source of otherwise almost unobtainable chrome-molybdenum tubing!

Giacosa grafted Topolino front and rear suspensions onto this tubular structure, added a double-reduction back axle to drop the propeller shaft low down beneath the driver's seat, and then clad the whole thing in a neat slipper body.

Although the car would be hopelessly out-gunned on fast circuits it would be a fine competitor on tight, twisty courses, and in any case Dusio was planning a 'Cisitalia Circus' in which the top drivers of the day could compete against one another exclusively in his tiny new racing cars.

Dusio engaged Piero Taruffi as test driver, and the Cisitalia D46 was soon in full production with orders flooding in. Dusio himself won an early D46 race at Turin's Valentino Park in which Nuvolari competed and walked home waving his steering wheel which had come off in his sinewy hands.

The Cisitalias raced everywhere around the Mediterranean, even making one abortive sortie into Egypt. Giacosa was commissioned to build a two-seater sports version, with which Nuvolari very nearly won the 1947 Mille Miglia, and Dusio became acknowledged as one of the new lions of Italian motor racing. These successes were all grist to the mill, for he already had a Grand Prix project under way, and for his design he had gone to the very top - to the Porsche Design Office.

After severing his connections with Auto Union in 1937, old Dr Porsche had been responsible for many Nazi projects although he was a completely apolitical animal, the complete engineer, immersed in his work.

He had perfected the original Volkswagen 'people's car', and for Daimler-Benz he had designed an aero-engined 4-ton six-wheeled record car with which Hans Stuck was intended to attack the world's Land Speed Record at Bonneville. The war put paid to these German plans to achieve 400 mph on land, and the car is now engineless and bitter in the Unterturkheim museum of Daimler-Benz.

During the war Porsche's military designs included the vicious Tiger tank and the Ferdinand SP gun, and culminated in the ultimate land tank - the Mouse. This behemoth was a terrestrial battleship, weighing 180 tons, carrying 250mm armour and packing an 18cm artillery piece. It was so heavy there were no military bridges which could carry it, so Porsche blandly waterproofed the thing for a depth of forty feet and enabled it to wade any river. Porsche's Stuttgart office also designed military and agricultural tractors at this time, and then came Germany's military collapse and orders to move the office to Gmünd in Austria.

After the occupation, the 70-year-old Dr Porsche and his son Ferry were held on their estate at Zell-am-See while Chief Engineer Karl Rabe held the business together in Gmünd. In June 1945 the old man was taken to Hessen for interrogation by the Americans, and later that year the French took him, Ferry and son-in-law Dr Piëch to Baden-Baden. They wanted the family to cooperate in the design of a French people's car, and took them to Paris where Renault were developing their 4CV.

Meanwhile Louise Piëch - the Doctor's daughter - and Rabe kept the business going by repairing VWs, while news came from France that the three senior executives had been interned. In response to chivalrous appeals from Raymond Sommer and the French motoring journalist Charles Faroux, the two younger men were shortly set free and returned to Zell-am-See.

While this was going on, Dusio had travelled to Austria to see Rabe, and had signed a contract with him for four Cisitalia designs. They were to be the Porsche type 323 11hp tractor, the Type 370 1,500cc sports car, the Type 385 water turbine and the Type 360 Grand Prix car.

Dusio attached top priority to the GP design, allowing only three months for the schematic drawings to be finalised and planning to complete the prototype by September 1947. He demanded assurances that the Doctor's absence in internment at Dijon would not delay development, and that the office did not have the 1.5-litre Auto Union stashed away somewhere, ready to bring out in competition at a later date!

He was assured on both counts, and his fat cheque was used by Ferry Porsche to meet the savage ransom being demanded by the French authorities for his father's release. In August 1947 Dr Porsche was in Austria, giving his approval to Rabe's plans for the new car, but in postwar Europe there was no way the prototype could be completed and running by that September.

Despite the shortages and delays in gaining clearance for even the most mundane functions, Rabe's design team had laid down a bold Grand Prix car, bristling with unusual features.

It was to have a horizontally-opposed twelve cylinder engine, with 56 x 55.5mm bore and stroke to produce a displacement of 1,492.6cc. In Italy Gioacchino Colombo was at this time laying out his 1.5-litre supercharged Ferrari V12 engine, which was to introduce similarly 'oversquare' engine dimensions into Grand Prix racing for the first time since 1907, at the end of which season cylinder bores had been limited in size. Both Austrian and Italian designs had been pre-dated by the Gulf-Millers.

A Hirth-type built-up crankshaft was to be used, running in roller bearings, and the twin overhead camshafts in each bank were to be shaft-driven. The original scheme called for three Roots-type superchargers, but this was later amended to two Centric compressors, operating in parallel. Rabe projected a rev limit in excess of 10,000 rpm, and an output of 300bhp at 8,500rpm.

Naturally, this engine was to be mounted amidships, but drive was to be to all four wheels and so the gearbox was inserted between the engine and the rear final-drive mechanism. Porsche had formerly mounted their gearbox outboard, behind the final-drive and this new location was dictated by the need to take power forward to the front wheels.

The gearbox itself was a five-speed unit, unusual in that its gears were in constant mesh and changing entailed pushing the selector lever backwards and forwards in a straight line, in motor-cycle style. The original design also called for research into a foot-operated change, and the gearbox is historic in that it used the first Porsche ring-type synchromesh.

Step-down gears at the engine's rear powered the gearbox, and were used to set the forward propeller shaft low down in the car, as it ran forward under the engine. Drive was stepped up to a simple chassis-mounted final-drive unit between the front wheels. A limited-slip diff was used at the rear.

This complex mass of mechanism was mounted in a true multi-tubular spaceframe chassis of enormous bridge-like dimensions formed in welded chrome-molybdenum steel. Suspension was torsion bars front and rear with hydraulic shock absorbers, and absolutely gigantic two-leading shoe drum brakes were specified, deeply-finned for cooling. Wire wheels with 17- or 18-inch diameter rims were projected, and an 8ft 4.5in wheelbase was chosen with track of 4ft 3ins. Aluminium pannier tanks were slung on either side of the chassis, containing twenty-one gallons each, and the large nose-mounted radiator carried five gallons of glycol. Compression ratio was as high as 15:1 to accept alcohol fuels and the dry weight of 1,583lbs was distributed roughly 758lbs on the front wheels and 825lbs on the rear.

Rabe designed a sleek slipper body for the car, and predicted speeds through the gears on fast-circuit ratios of 80mph in first, 102mph in second, 127mph in third, 157mph in fourth and 210mph in fifth!

While the design office were working hard on the detail drawings, it was obvious that Dusio's late '47 target date was impossible to meet. Rabe called in ex-Auto Union designer Dr Eberan von Eberhorst to assist with his meticulous calculations, while the first parts were being made at Cisitalia's Turin plant where engineers Hruschka and Abarth (later to become famous for his own range of performance cars) were based.

Dusio had laid down a very comprehensive programme, calling for the construction of six cars with sufficient spares to run them in a full Grand Prix season.

Not until November 1948 was the first prototype near completion, and its construction had proved so expensive that Cisitalia were in a poor financial condition. During that same month Dusio announced that he had been in negotiation with the Argentinian dictator, Peron.

He had a scheme to establish a company in the Argentine to develop high-performance and commercial vehicles, drawing heavily on Porsche design skills, and with Peron's blessing and backing Auto Motores Argentinos was founded, the name being contracted to 'Autoar'.

In February 1949 Cisitalia's creditors obtained a temporary court injunction for the payment of 240,000,000 lire debts and simul-taneously the Cisitalia employees sued Dusio for 25,000,000 lire arrears in pay. Dusio fought an appeal which served to delay the axe's fall, and in Mardi photographs were leaked to the press showing Nuvolari in the cockpit of an apparently complete car.

This was not true, the transmission was not complete, and in mid-summer Dusio concluded his deal with Peron, who covered his company's debts in return, for Dusio taking the whole Cisitalia project south of the equator. His wife sold their Turin home to satisfy major creditors, and with the 420-strong labour force made redun-dant, Dusio took off.

On 14 March 1950, the Porsche office was about to return to Stuttgart from Gmünd, and they ran a complete inventory of the Turin works which revealed one car complete, plus enough parts to assemble a near-complete second car. Only parts of the other four cars were in existence, not enough to assemble into anything worthwhile. Later that year Dusio had the complete car shipped to Autoar, never having run in its native land.

Meanwhile, the 1,500cc formula to which it had been built was on its last legs, and at the close of 1951 - during which year the Cisitalia-Porsche had lain dormant in Buenos Aires - the Grand Prix organisers began to lay plans for the new year. Early in 1952 they announced that since Alfa Romeo's retirement, they felt that Ferrari versus the V16 BRM in Formula 1 would make no contest, and there-fore the World Championship events of 1952-53 would be run for two litre unsupercharged Formula 2 cars.

The daring stroke - 'the most fantastic racing car the world has ever seen' - had run out of time.

Late in 1952 Dusio returned to Turin, trying to get going again. Cisitalia was revived, and in a huge works mainly devoted to the rag trade - making military uniforms to Government contract - Dusio began production of more modest, non-Porsche-designed, motor cars. He tried to persuade Porsche to develop a 2- or 2.5-litre engine for the existing Grand Prix chassis, but perhaps predictably they were not interested.

Meanwhile things were stirring in Buenos Aires, where Autoar dusted-off their unique car, painted it in blue and yellow national racing colours and entered it for the Formule Libre Buenos Aires Grand Prix at the Municipal Autodrome in January 1954.

The engine was stripped and rebuilt, bench-tested at 275-280bhp and then mounted in the car which was tested at San Isidro, just outside the city. Its suspension proved far too soft, with the car bottoming badly. Right at the close of practice for the Grand Prix the electrifying-looking car rolled out onto the Autodrome with pipe-smoking Italian driver Felice Bonetto at the wheel.

Autoar had discovered that the car had different final drive ratios at front and rear during the San Isidro test, and attempted to compensate by fitting odd-sized tyres. This was no car to be treated so lightly, and after one lap Bonetto was at the pits with the car lost in a dense cloud of blue smoke. An oil pipe had parted, it was fixed, and then local driver Clemar Bucci took over to see what he could do. He found himself consistently barrelling into corners to find the gearbox selecting neutral (which was present between each gear) and eventually advised that the car be withdrawn because it was totally unraceworthy.

Both drivers praised the car's road-holding, but it was obvious that too many years and too many miles separated its complex systems from the engineers who had devised them. Early in 1953 Autoar were said to have produced over 360bhp from the flat-12 engine, and Bucci was asked to attack the South American flying kilometre record in an attempt to salvage some prestige.

The record was old, forgotten and virtually meaningless, having stood at only 140mph for many years. Autoar's calculations indicated that their car should push it up to a respectable 187mph, but they chose to make their attempt in July, which is the depth of the Argentinian winter.

Bucci found the engine running cold and sooting its plugs on a bitter morning with a howling knife-like crosswind. He managed one misfiring run at 146.6mph, testing the car up to 7,000rpm, and then wheeled into a second more serious attempt. The engine cleared and was pulling well until an oil pipe ruptured, a piston burned-out, and the engine cut abruptly as Bucci coasted past the timekeepers to record 142.2mph. The two-way average of these curtailed runs was a laughable 144.7mph, but still enough to take the record.

This spelled the end of the Cisitalia's mobile career, and in the late fifties Porsche sports car driver and team manager Huschke von Hanstein found the car in the Autoar garage, while in Buenos Aires for a 1,000km endurance race.

It was in a sorry state, having been under deep flood waters for some time the previous winter. Ferry Porsche managed to acquire the rotting remains in 1959 and shipped them back to Germany, where the Cisitalia-Porsche 360 was completely rebuilt and today occupies a proud position in the company's car collection.

Curiously enough, the uncompleted second car was discovered somewhere in Switzerland in about 1970 by some Italian enthusiasts, and dealer Corrado Cupellini sold it to Tom Wheatcroft in Britain for the public Donington Collection of Single-Seater Racing Cars.

It arrived as a collection of rusty parts, some of them unmachined castings, but with a complete chassis frame and two transmission sets. It was completed with a replica bodyshell in the Wheatcroft work-shops and today has pride of place among the collection's unique display of seven four-wheel drive Grand Prix cars. The system was not revived in Grand Prix racing until 1960-61, by Ferguson, and then again in 1964 by BRM, and in 1969 by Cosworth, Lotus, McLaren and Matra. It didn't work in later years, but the front-engined Ferguson driven by Stirling Moss actually won the non-Championship Oulton Park Gold Cup race in September 1961.

The Cisitalia-Porsche story had an early sequel in the fifties. An engineer named Vigna had studied at the Porsche Office, and he gained backing from the French film producer Sacha Gordine to build a series of major-Formula racing cars, which he based on Cisitalia experience.

This equally fascinating story was the subject of another thread recently:

http://www.atlasf1.c...p?threadid=8158

[Leo]

Thanks John, this is great!
And the University library has Karl Ludvigsen's book, so that's where I'll go monday morning.