The genius behind so many great Ferrari designs has passed away at the age of 91.
Sergio Scaglietti, a native of Modena, Italy, was just 17 when he and his brother started their body shop not far from Enzo Ferrari’s garage. After Ferrari had seen the quality of their work, he hired them on to create and build bodywork for his cars.
Eventually Scaglietti the company became part of Ferrari and today that name is on the factory in Modena that houses the state-of-the-art production line that builds aluminum bodies for models like the 458 Italia.
It certainly wasn’t like that in the beginning, when Scaglietti and his men hand hammered aluminum sheetmetal over bags of sand into such luscious shapes as the pontoon-fender Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa.
Yet it wasn’t just the perfection of their finished sheetmetal that made Scaglietti so famous. It was the shapes that metal took. Another wonderful example is the Ferrari 250 GTO, the 1962 GT that is so venerated today…and worth at least $25 million each. We hear so much about the tools modern designers have to create and shape the bodies of today’s automobiles, but I once asked Scaglietti how he created the GTO body. The modest gentleman said, “By looking at cars. Just looking…with the eye. If you use your head, knowing the car has go fast, you make it small and lighter.” He created the GTO shape with no plans, no drawings and no clay models, making the framework that would be the shape with his eye and forming the aluminum around it. Scaglietti also gave full credit to the men who worked for him. He then told me, “I don’t even know what a computer is.”
And what was his favorite among the cars Scaglietti built for Ferrari? The 275 GTB.
No related posts.
Source : Google Reader
No comments:
Post a Comment