As its amusingly-contrived title suggests, this get the job done is a specific study of all of the cars and trucks created in Britain, but styled in Italy. Italy has extended been recognised as the finest car planning country in the globe, creating some of the most attractive, influential and admired auto styling for many years. Seminal Italian vehicle style and design times have provided the fashionable Zagato-bodied 1930s Alfa Romeo 1750 GSs and Touring 8Cs, Pininfarina’s greatly revered and influential 1947 Cisitalia 202, additionally afterwards classics as numerous as the Ferrari 250 GTO, Giugairo’s Fiat Panda and exquisite Pininfarina Peugeot 406 Coupe.
In the important Export or Die period of the British Motor market article-war – the largest vehicle exporter on the planet in the 1950s – Britain’s motor vehicle makers popped out some deserving but staid equipment, benefitting from sound engineering and quality, but with gray porridge’ layouts that lacked a particular style or flair.
When paying a formal take a look at to BMC’s styling studio at Austin’s Longbridge drawing business in the mid-1950s, for illustration, none other than H.R.H Prince Philip remarked to the motoring giant’s eager hosts proudly supplying him a privileged sneak peek of their prepared foreseeable future spouse and children saloon cars, that the designs were far too staid and unadventurous, recommending that BMC goes to the celebrated Italian designers to design and style appealing and desirable cars. BMC took observe and acted on Prince Philip’s shrewd recommend. They commissioned Pininfarina of Turin to style a number of vital future types. These bundled the influential truncated-tail Austin A40 that established the two-box sample and profile for today’s well-liked hatchbacks, decades in advance of this sort of machines existed. Pininfarina was also tasked with styling the reasonable higher-medium-variety salons of 1959, these successful Austin Cambridge/Morris Oxford relatives versions collectively regarded as the Farina cars. The auto that dominated Britain’s new auto revenue all through the 1960s – the Austin-Morris 1100-1300 range – also liked that crisp, present day styling Pininfarina excelled at.
Further than BMC and Pininfarina, a broad assortment of other British motor vehicle makers have overwhelmed a path to the doorways of Italy’s greatest car designers and studios for a lot of a long time from the late 1950s Meadows Fiskey microcars, nevertheless to Triumph, AC, Aston Martin, and even Rolls-Royce.
Below are ten key examples of British autos, in no certain get, all dressed in sharp Italian fits. There is significantly far more detail supplied on just about every device (plus lots of other folks) in Chris Rees’ very-proposed Encyclopaedia Britalicar, a steal at £48 for all genuine motor vehicle enthusiasts.