The Best Odds

The cars I recall most fondly were neither the prettiest nor the quickest. Certainly not the most expensive. They were machines that emerged willfully peculiar and intractably idiosyncratic.

- John Phillips

IN MY LIFE, I've clapped eyes on exactly two Fiat Dinos in the flesh. The first was at the 1969 Can-Am race at Mid-Ohio. That’s where Formula 1 driver Jo Siffert arrived in a gunmetal Dino Spider and kindly said hello to 17-year-old me. The second was 55 years later, when John Bennett of Missoula, Montana, not only said hello to 72-year-old me but passed the keys to his personal 1967 Rosso Corsa Spider. I might have swooned, so brightly has my lust for this car burned.

Dino was the nickname of Enzo Ferrari’s son Alfredo (also called Alfredino), born in 1932. He adored engines and proposed a V-6, then still something of a rebellious gesture. But Dino died in 1956, and his father was so grief-stricken that he mandated all Ferrari V-6 engines thereafter be called Dinos, at least while he drew breath sufficient to insult his F1 drivers. That engine eventually boasted scores of variants.