Age of Innocenti

For a brief spell in the 1960s, an Italian company built a distinctly Continental-looking coupé based on unlikely British underpinnings. Glen Waddington discovers the Innocenti C

- 

'IT LOOKS A bit like a Facellia. That’s shrunk a bit.’ Cue derisive chortling from editor James Elliott. And fair enough. But there's something distinctly, well, European about this engaging little car. And when you discover what it’s based on, that air of apparent sophistication is perhaps surprising. Because beneath the faintly exotic metalwork sit the underpinnings of the Austin-Healey Sprite, a fabulous little roadster that, to us Brits, offers rather less of the cosmopolitan appeal of this car.

That's not to knock the Sprite, of course: if it hadn’t had so much to offer, there's no way we'd be discussing it now. And the story of how an Italian manufacturer that had built its success on the Lambretta scooter came to put together a tiny number of coupés around British mechanical components is surely worth exploring.

Needless to say, the Sprite itself is an object lesson in how to conjure a tasty recipe from humble ingredients. Launched in 1958 as a low-cost roadster that ‘a chap could keep in his bike shed’, it arrived wearing a distinctive single-piece clamshell bonnet with integrated headlamps, which earned it (affectionately) the ‘Frogeye’ nickname (‘Bugeye’ in the US). It was intended as a more modern successor to decades of tuned, lightweight Austin Sevens, and was designed by the Donald Healey Motor Company, a few years after the pioneering, larger Austin-Healey 100, using proprietary BMC parts such as the Morris Minor’s brilliantly direct rack-and-pinion steering and a tuned, twin-carb version of the Austin A-series engine. It was produced at MG’s Abingdon factory and the badge-engineered MG Midget joined it in 1961.