For the last 28 years, the Concorso Italiano has been celebrating the best of Italian design during the Pebble Beach week-long automotive festivities – aka Monterey Car Week. Concorso Italiano 2013, again held at the Laguna Seca Golf Ranch outside Monterey, California, attracted aficionados, owners and more than a few design directors.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Lamborghini, Italy’s ‘other’ supercar company – the one started by three talented men who were determined to challenge Enzo Ferrari and his road cars. Ferrucio Lamborghini hired Giampaolo Dallara (a former Ferrari engineer) to design a chassis, and later, Franco Scaglione to create the supercar maker’s first vehicle. In the end, Carrozzeria Touring prevailed with the winning design of the 350GT, which was introduced at the 1963 Turin auto show.
Lamborghini 350 GT
The video above features Touring Superleggera’s Head of Design, Louis de Fabribeckers, speaking to Form Trends about the most significant car at the event — the 350 GT, Lamborghini’s first ever production car.
De Fabribeckers enthusiastically explained how the 350 GT’s proportions are pure and elegant and how well its details are refined, even though the car’s surfacing is very complex (especially when it made its debut in 1963). While there is an unmistakable purity in the car’s clean lines as well as its concave and convex surfaces, they were difficult to manufacture at the time.
The windscreen is one of several unique features of this car. Its very round shape wraps around the greenhouse, which results in an A-pillar that is atypical of classic styling solutions.
The rear deck’s unique wraparound feature was an important inspiration for de Fabribeckers when he designed the A8 GCS Berlinetta, a ‘gran coupe’ based on the Maserati GranSport platform. “It’s a line that you can see in three dimensions,” he says.
