A Beautiful Shambles

When an eccentric wheelman conspired to win the purse at la carrera panamericana, he phoned a Fledgling Road & Track for help. The pair moved mountains to get Lancia’s masterpiece on the grid. Like any grand adventure, the journey became the destination, and the destination a beautiful disaster . Seventy years on, we search for meaning in the only car that survived it all.

- By Kyle Kinard

On a dusty Texas run-way, a cargo plane touches down four days late. A low-slung, rose-red Italian coupe rolls onto the asphalt. "And there was the Lancia," Bill Brehaut wrote in Road & Track, January 1952. "A perfect lady she was too."

There's a finality to his words as if this Lancia's story would tie up neater than a Christmas ribbon. The car had already crossed two continents and the Atlantic. It survived an aerial engine fire and an emergency landing. Finally, it reached the starting line of La Carrera Panamericana. Surely nothing could blunt the mighty Lancia's ambition.

Then a blown head gasket did just that.

Yet the real story isn't about one car's disastrous moment, but rather the rare highs before the fall. The Aurelia set the bar for every sports coupe that came after, spurred on as it was by a forgotten Formula 1 ace. The editors of this magazine delivered the car to the foot of its destiny, and for one glorious moment, everything felt possible. To find that silver lining among the wreckage, we must first go back.

In 1947, Gianni Lancia's eponymous company arrived at a crossroads. Gianni's father, Fiat test driver Vincenzo Lancia, co-founded the company in 1906 in Turin. He died of a heart attack in 1937. A decade on, his son Gianni had finished an engineering degree and was poised to carry Lancia forward.