Marcello Gandini, “true innovation is the fruit of a single mind”

Almost a car-tailor, you might say.

They were very highly skilled craftsmen. They would take the chassis and stretch wire over it to simulate the lines of its bodywork. And then
the customer would say: “Okay, but I’d like it a bit longer.” In those days this was the body-styler. My first car was made like that, by pulling up these wires at an obscure car body-maker’s, with a man who mostly did repair work. The aluminium would be hammered and the metal plates were formed, just by using these lengths of wire. After this the wires were removed and the frames were made to support the body-shell panels. I started with racing cars, working with people who competed in uphill races with a souped-up Fiat 600, and had a few liras to spend on modifying the bodywork.

So it was actually more like making the car than designing it.

In those days there was no proper drawing, at the most a rough sketch. At the beginning of my career, when I used to work for Bertone, an old boy came in one day who had a hotel chain in Hawaii. This chap wanted a Rolls Royce custom-built for him. By then things like that were seldom done any more, but he had a very pretty young wife who did the drawings. So this guy arrived with little sketches of how he wanted this Rolls Royce to look. He was the typical client from the pre-industrial era of motoring.

Today would that be called customisation?

You could say that, but there were practical purposes too. I remember a fellow who had bought one of the rst Abarth Zagatos, the one with the hunched back. He wanted to make it lighter, and as it was derived from the Fiat 600 and had a rear engine fixed to a crossbar at the bottom, we sawed off the tail end. So as not to leave moving pulleys and sheaves uncovered, we tted a wire net that looked like a henhouse.

This way of working you describe is very different from today’s situation in the car industry.

That’s right. A style centre today is made up of hundreds of people.

Is real innovation still possible in this kind of context?

There’s a problem that’s always existed, but it’s perhaps the central issue today: everybody would like innovation but nobody is prepared to start from scratch. Real innovation nearly always stems from the presence of some highly charismatic gure in the company, coupled with the company’s willingness to realise this individual’s vision, or even his fantasies. The most glaring example is Flaminio Bertoni’s Citroën DS19. Bertoni was a genius but also an absolute autocrat who managed to condition company choices to the point of carrying through projects that made no sense according to industrial logic, even though almost without exception they turned out to be brilliant.