An “unidentified object” on wheels that aroused curiosity and speculation, leading both journalists and the public to come up with stories bordering on science fiction. A skilful marketing trick by the Portello-based company, in partnership with Carrozzeria Touring, that led to a very unique car, and we will tell you all about it through another very special encounter.
Words Fabio Morlacchi
Photography Paolo Carlini
Archive Courtesy of Alfa Blue Team, Sanesi Family, Fabio Morlacchi Archives
Introduction
Looking back at the story told by SpeedHolics of the Alfetta 158 on show at MAUTO - National Automobile Museum in Turin, “Alfa Romeo 158: the 159.109, a Milanese in Turin” (see the Yearbook 2023), at the end of the long interview directly with “her”, the 159.109 pointed out another racing car further back in the half-dark hall, another Alfa Romeo that she often chatted to when things were quiet. And looking in the direction she indicated, I thought I saw a faint flash.
As I believe that some cars communicate with us, I went back to the MAUTO a second time to hear the story of that other car, the C.52 Disco Volante 3000. And here I am again, in that large, half-dark hall. And once again, I see that faint flash coming from the Carello headlamps ...
Disco Volante - “I haven’t had a busy life, in the sporting spotlight like the 159.109 over there, and I’m not used to talking. Please let her do it for me. But remember, there’s something that has annoyed me for a very long time, like a stone stuck in the tyre treads. My engine isn't the CM.3000 3500, but the previous 3000 developed by Giuseppe Busso! I don't know why, but after the first edition of the Museum catalogue, they always wrote that I had a 3500!”
So here I am, tasked once again with telling you a story.
The story
Monday 22 August 1936, in the sky between Venice and Mestre. Two pilots and their Fiat CR.32 biplane fighters took off from a Royal Italian Air Force airbase nearby, hit the throttle hard on the Fiat A.30 RA Bis 600 HP engines and managed to tail, for a short time, a metallic flying saucer with a diameter of between 10 and 12 metres, before it disappeared from view at high speed. The alarm was given across the skies of North-Eastern Italy. Benito Mussolini was promptly informed of the event:
“Are they armed? Are they friends?”
“Duce, perhaps they are English!”
“What did the pilots see?”
“A Saturn-like, disc-shaped aircraft that gave off a regularly flashing bright orange-white light, with smoke and sparks.”
“Deny, deny any version you hear! Put it all down to an optical effect.”
With its developments monitored by Mussolini in person, this was the first sighting of a flying saucer documented by the military in Italy, and many others would follow. The facts became known after the war.
On 24 June 1947, the US businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his plane when he saw a formation of large flying saucers over Mount Rainer, near Seattle. This was when the term “flying saucer” was first coined and became immediately popular. In an incident a few days later, on 8 July, in Roswell, New Mexico, an alien flying saucer crashed to the ground in the desert and was recovered by the US Air Force. In 1952, the same United States Air Force coined the term UFO, Unidentified Flying Object, to define these unknown objects. In the popular imagination, we continue to talk of flying saucers – or “disco volante”, in Italian.
There were many “sightings” after the war, arousing both curiosity and apprehension among the people, not without a strong attraction to those alien ships about which nothing technical was known, except that they were able to chase off even our most modern planes. But did people really see them? Were they Martians? At the time the popular belief was that the aliens came from the nearby red planet … Alfa Red?
But there’s more: in spring 1952, some flying saucers were seen in the sky above Milan. And, in early May of the same year, Alfa Romeo announced the presentation of a new Sport category car in Monza. This was quite unusual; this type of car was never presented officially to the press and was usually kept under wraps until just before the race. This is the first oddity.
Between late May and early June, the journalists and curious onlookers at the Autodromo saw a red flying saucer. It went really fast, but had 4 wheels and some of the people there swore that they saw not an alien, with green skin, a trumpet-shaped nose and pointed ears at the wheel, but Consalvo Sanesi, Alfa Romeo's chief test driver and an able F1 driver.
Sanesi entered the track driving the new C52 Disco Volante spider with a 3000-cc straight-6 engine, the first version to be ready and tested. The Alfa Romeo Chairman Pasquale Gallo was also present. Gioachino Colombo, the car designer, standing near the entrance gate, shouted some final advice to the driver above the roaring engine and the “music” that came out of the poorly-silenced short twin exhausts. Sanesi put his foot down hard, accelerating along the straight in front of the stands and into the short circuit, causing the Disco Volante to skid visibly into a slight counter-steer with a clear side roll into the porphyry bend on the Brianza circuit. At the end of the first day of test runs, the 3000 had driven at an average speed of 177 km/h, while on one of the following days, the 2-litre, 4-cylinder model, completed in the meantime, recorded an average of 164 km/h, faster than the Formula 2s!
Curiously, to track the new car and take the official photographs to be used for the analyses, one of the three 1900 sedan prototypes that remained at the “Sperimentale” (the Alfa Romeo Experimental Department in Portello) was fitted with test plates.
The journalists began to wonder where the incredible cars they had just seen were heading, also because everyone’s lips were sealed at Alfa on the subject. This was the second weird thing. They wouldn’t be competing in the Mille Miglia as they thought because, it had just finished. Perhaps Le Mans that was in less than a month, the Targa Florio, and certainly the 1953 Mille Miglia, they wrote! Alfa had timed the event perfectly to get the journalists’ imagination going. Initially the two versions were recognisable by a few details, and the 3000 was slightly wider, with a twenty-centimetre longer wheelbase and a more pronounced rear overhang, which gave the car a more slender line. The tyres were also wider.
But these were all characteristics that were hard to note when looking at the car on its own or in motion. During the first test runs in Monza between late spring and summer 1952, the 3000 version had a single windscreen in front of the driver’s seat, while the very slightly later 2000 had a longer windscreen running across the two seats. On the smaller 4-cylinder version, the twin exhaust pipes were at the rear, while in the 6-cylinder version they were beneath the left-hand door. The headlight frames also different, practically non-existent on the 2-litre version and very visible on the 3-litre version. In subsequent tests, when the 2000 was also ready, the 3-litre version also had the same long windscreen, probably useful for protecting any engineer-passengers, at least from the wind racing in their faces, leaving them to enjoy the adrenalin rush caused by Sanesi’s “heavy foot”.
The Alfa Romeo had just left the Formula 1 having won the first two World Championships in 1950 and 1951. The “Alfettas” – the 158 and its evolution the 159, with 450 HP reached on the test bench by some particularly successful and “fresh” engines, had reached the end of their development and began to occasionally show the first signs of failure in some engine parts, including the cylinder head. To remedy these problems, everything had to be done from scratch, or at least preparing new crankcases and heads to replace those that had been in use for years, with costs that Finmeccanica, the state financial holding of the IRI Group that Alfa Romeo belonged to, wasn't willing to cover. Better to withdraw undefeated.
Perhaps these futuristic Disco Volantes were the cars intended to race in the Sport category after the three special competition berlinettas, the C.46 Competizione or Sperimentali, with a prepared 6C 2500 engine. The sports journalists already saw them as rivals of Mercedes and Ferrari.
Aside from the engines, the new Sport category cars were the work of the engineer Gioachino Colombo, assisted by part of Orazio Satta’s team and watched with interest and curiosity by the Alfa Chairman, Pasquale Gallo. Having worked at Portello in the 1920s and later at Itala in Turin, Gallo was a technician, a poet and a bit of a dreamer, and very much in love with Alfa Romeo.
When he was hired at Portello in January 1924, Colombo was “loaned” to Ferrari, which managed the Alfa Romeo racing team until 1929. In 1937, he designed the 158 in just a few months. Returning to Alfa Romeo, after the Alfa Corse racing department had been set up in late 1938, he was deputy manager of the racing car design department. Colombo left Alfa in August 1947, to return in February 1951 to manage the car design department, and left again on 31 August 1952, finally leaving the technical team in the hands of Satta and Busso.
Returning to the C.46 Competizione, it is worth mentioning that the third and last car built was never equipped with the racier 145 HP 6C 2500 engine, but rather a unique 2995-cc straight-6 engine based on an engine designed by the technical team of the Spaniard Wifredo Ricart just before he left Alfa Romeo in March 1945. When Gioachino Colombo left Alfa Romeo in 1947, he was replaced temporarily as head of the design team by Luigi Fusi until Busso's return. Having returned to Portello in January 1948 after a short break working for Ferrari for 18 months, Giuseppe Busso began to design a new engine at the end of the year, having assessed the one made by Ricart, a straight-6 2700 cm3, originally fitted with a single overhead camshaft, hydraulic tappets, coolant pump driven by an electric servomotor, underlining the fact that nothing is created from scratch in motor mechanics, things are merely developed.
The engine was completely redesigned by Giuseppe Busso, inspired by the Gazzella 2-litre, a sedan prototype developed during the war. It had a 3-litre engine capacity and a crankshaft with double overhead camshaft, originally intended for a large, American-style sedan, the 6C 3000. This was the replacement of the 6C 2500, the engine of which had been in production, initially with a 2.3-litre engine capacity, since 1934.
Busso started developing the engine in the autumn of 1948, and in the summer of 1949 three engines were ready, complete with spare parts, and bench testing began.
Consalvo Sanesi tested the chassis of the large sedan in November 1949, but in early 1950 Finmeccanica stopped the project for this large and expensive car. 1949 saw the start of the project for the first modern Alfa Romeo, the 1900, finally equipped with a monocoque and a 4-cylinder, 1.9-litre engine with double overhead camshaft, officially presented in Milan for the first time in the autumn of 1950.
In 1951, developments began on a 4-cylinder, 2-litre engine based on the 1900 type.
The relationship between the 6-cylinder, 3-litre and the 4-cylinder is clear, even though the 2-litre, 4-cylinder had an aluminium crankcase, in contrast to the cast iron engine block produced as standard on the 1900 and those used on the engines of the four subsequent 2000 Sport/2000 Sportiva cars from 1954-56.
The 6-cylinder, 3-litre version, originally designed during wartime and so in a period when precious materials such as aluminium, destined almost exclusively for building planes, were scarce, had a cast iron crankcase from the start, with only the crankshaft in aluminium. This choice was also imposed to ensure the required rigidity for the cylinder block with six straight cylinders, reducing the torsion effects of the long shaft. The final bore measurement chosen by Busso while developing the engine, was 82.55 mm (3 1/4 inches), common in 6 and 4 cylinders but unusual with the strange decimal places, explained by the need to source the pistons and processing machinery from England immediately after the war when it was practically impossible to find anything in Italy. The piston stroke was also different, 92 mm for the 6 cylinders and 88 mm for the 4 cylinders, with actual engine capacities of 2995 and 1884 cc.
After Finmeccanica stopped the 6C 3000 project, as we have seen three 3-litre engines (and respective spare parts) had already been built, and one of these was fitted on the third berlinetta C46 Competizione, consequently renamed the 6C 3000 C50; this was driven by Sanesi in the 1950 Mille Miglia. In the 4-cylinder engine used on the Disco Volante, the bore had been taken to 85 mm, with an 88 mm stroke, and an actual engine capacity of 1997.4 cc.
The preparation had a good thrust, and indeed the engines apparently delivered 158 HP at 6,500 rpm. This was quite high, and might have indicated a compliance with the US SAE regulation, which required that engine power be measured without any accessories or exhaust systems mounted. 130 HP at 6000 rpm, the data given on the official technical data sheet of the time drafted by Alfa Romeo itself, would appear more plausible; it would seem to be indicated here according to the German DIN or Italian CUNA standards, where power was measured practically in the actual operating conditions. The data provided by Luigi Fusi in the notes he made in the ‘60s from memory are improbable: according to these, on the bench the 2000 reached an outstanding 188 HP, i.e., 94 HP/l, in November 1952! The data probably refers to the 3000-cc version, as for the 3-litre it states around 190-200 HP at 7000 rpm, the engine prepared with more thrust than the one mounted on the berlinetta C50 Competizione, which reached 165 HP at 6000 rpm. Not bad at all, if we think that the original mono-carburettor version envisaged for the large 6C 3000 sedan delivered 120 HP at 4800 rpm.
Weighed unladen, the scales stopped at 660 kg for the 2-litre Disco Volante and 100 kg more for the 3000, with a much larger engine built mostly using the much heavier cast iron. The cars were in any case very light and aerodynamic, modern, very unusual and attractive, with a name that was also clouded in mystery. What could be more intriguing for fans of the time, when UFOs were often seen in the skies around the world? We have seen that – much to the chagrin of Busso and his technical team, Colombo returned to Alfa Romeo once more in an executive role. And so the engineer from Legnano had to manage the project and the first developments of the new sports car. This is why two groups of engineers were set up in Alfa. One looked at the new car in an overly diffident and critical manner, the other with the enthusiasm that is usually devoted to one’s own creations.
The genesis of the new car was very quick. Alfa Romeo filed the patent for the original “Bodywork for cars with symmetrical biconvex profile with on-board wing-flared sides” in the summer of 1952, in the name of Colombo just before he finally left Portello, and with the approval – under duress – of Carrozzeria Touring, which at the time included Alfa as one of its largest and prestigious clients.
In fact, the Disco Volante was the result of a very close and secret collaboration between Alfa’s Colombo, along with some of his close colleagues, Carlo Felice Bianchi Anderloni and Federico Formenti, respectively owner and head of the Touring Style Centre. Only the Chairman of Alfa Romeo, Pasquale Gallo, was “kindly” allowed to take part in the meetings. The project was drafted during secret sessions held both during the day and often during the evening.
The secret design (… of course, it was for a flying saucer!) was developed considering the mechanical dimensions very closely. The chassis continued to follow the new tubular technique, integrated and completed by smaller pipes housing the aluminium panels shaped by the panel beaters, which formed the bodywork in line with the classic Touring method. It was therefore indispensable to work in synergy, to avoid doubling the parts and increasing the weight, and that was how things were done. Although a serious project, it was actually great fun for the people involved. Who would ever have thought of designing and building a car that was fundamentally unsuited for racing due to the width of the bodywork without being able to exploit it to widen the axle tracks to improve the road holding, a powerful, bare-bones car built cheaply that would become a legend for its unique beauty!
Then there was the issue of the original name, “Disco Volante”, which, as explained, in November, again in agreement with Touring, Alfa Romeo deposited for its own exclusive use. The suspensions of the new Sport were taken from the standard 1900 sedan, including the rigid rear axle, in the new version with lower longitudinal tie-rods and upper central triangle to control the transversal axles shaking and complete the guide in extension. This type of rear suspension with rigid axle was to characterise all Alfa Romeo’s production up to the advent of the Alfetta in 1972. Busso’s team wanted to use a rear De Dion axle, which was what then happened for the later 3000 CM and 2000 Sport/2000 Sportiva, designed when Colombo had once again left Alfa Romeo for the last time.
The brakes had two shoes for each brake (4 are often specified, incorrectly), with helicoidal-finned aluminium drums, while the engine returned to the aluminium crankcase of the first sedan prototypes, later abandoned due to the known problems of flexure and noise, which were unacceptable on a passenger car. But here it was significantly ribbed during casting with a thick rhombus pattern to stiffen the cylinder block. According to Giuseppe Busso, it was Colombo who wanted this solution, which turned out to be expensive while saving only five or six kilos in weight. Counter-weighted engine shaft, single fuel supply with two Weber double body horizontal draught carburettors with simultaneously opening throttles, the same as the ones used on the 3000-cc engine, which however mounted three of them. The dynamic air intake on the carburettors of the 3-litre were characteristically positioned against the right-hand horizontal lobe of the chassis and covered by a mesh, originally further back and poorly visible on the 2-litre.
Four spider versions of the Disco Volante were built, one 3-litre and three 2-litre.
After the tests conducted in the summer of 1952, in order to improve the aerodynamics Touring successfully modified the style of a spider 2000 to become a coupé, to offer three configurations of the same car to be tested and “fed” to journalists and enthusiasts: 2000 spider, 2000 coupé and 3000 spider.
Today the beautiful coupé seems almost to be the inspiration that led Sir William Lyons’ team of stylists to create the 1961 Jaguar E-Type, another wonderful car legend that, in this case, was produced in series.
Perhaps at this point, if he was still alive, Henry Ford would even have agreed to not wear a hat any longer! Poor Mr. Ford, I always end up mentioning him, but with some Alfa Romeos that is inevitable!
In October, to present its range of new production and racing cars, Alfa Romeo organised a day in Monza called “A chilling encounter”, to which artists and scholars, poets and philosophers, painters and dramatists were invited, all people usually considered distant from the car world. Drivers including Ascari, Fangio, Farina and Sanesi, took these unusual guests out in the various versions of the 1900 and the Disco Volante on the Brianza track, slippery with rain, and the spectacular success of the event was assured.
Although considering that the Disco Volante was not designed for racing, in the autumn of that magical year 1952 it was decided to modify one of the two remaining spider 2000s for uphill racing, removing the characteristically large sides to narrow the bodywork to a conventional size in order to make it more drivable both on the circuits and on the mountain routes. Also in this case, Touring made all the changes quickly and easily, and the Disco Volante, defined somewhat hypocritically, as Busso said, as the “narrow hip” type, began its competition career in January 1953, the only Disco Volante to do so.
Alfa Romeo never had the “narrow hip” Disco Volante compete officially but often loaned it to private drivers to take part in races, mainly in southern Italy, in 1953 and 1954. In 1954 the car was sold to the Swiss driver Jean (Willy) Ducrey, who raced it a few times in Switzerland and France. In 1959, the “narrow hip” returned to Italy, purchased by the Neapolitan driver Luigi Bellucci, who raced it in 1953 while it still belonged to Alfa Romeo. Fritz Schlumpf bought it from Bellucci in early April 1963 through Jean Studer, a former driver and partner of an Alfa Romeo dealer in Switzerland.
Carlo Felice Bianchi Anderloni of Carrozzeria Touring recalls a fifth Disco Volante and gave the VIN number, but there is no trace in any archive or any memory of this spider 3000. It is very probable that the chassis was built, not completed with bodywork and later destroyed at the “Sperimentale”, given the “propagandist” intention of the car, and also because there was only one other 3000 engine available, which they perhaps preferred to keep as a reserve for the existing 3000 or the berlinetta C50.
And then, the 1900 was already in production and had to be marketed. It was therefore quite logical to afford more space to the 4-cylinder version. It should be noted that efforts were in any case made to exploit the 6C 3000 engine. In late 1951, negotiations were held with the Paris-based company Facel-Metallon, which was interested in the construction licence for the engine and related production machinery, and a contract was drafted specifying an initial royalty of 3% on each of the first 1000 (!) engines built and the related spare parts. It is not known which car the French wanted to mount it on (and they would in any case have to use the wording “Manufactured on licence from Alfa Romeo”), but nothing came of it and, after its brief period on the Disco Volante 3000, the 6C 3000 engine finally entered Portello history.
Alfa Romeo exploited the ownership of the Disco Volante name even after the original Touring creations. The subsequent 3000 CM spider and coupé (but with a 3.5-litre engine) which raced intensively in the following sporting seasons in the hands of drivers of the calibre of Fangio, Kling, Sanesi and others, initially received this name from journalists and enthusiasts, practically forcing Alfa Romeo to adopt it semi-officially, even though they did not have the typical biconvex bodywork and were not bodied by Touring, but by Carrozzeria Colli.
In fact, in early December 1952, Alfa asked Touring to make the new sports cars with the new 3500-cc engine at a cost that could not exceed the offers of other coachbuilders, a sign that it had “already had a look around”. The matter was finally solved in late August 1953, when Alfa received Touring’s official refusal to produce the bodywork for the new Sport at the indicated financial conditions. In any case the job had already been given to Colli, in Viale Certosa in Milan, a few hundred yards from Touring’s headquarters in Via Ludovico Da Breme, also close to Portello. The letter, dated when Alfa already had a few of Colli’s 3000 CM taking part in the races, seems to be done at the request of an “official” reply (verba volant, scripta manent...) and relieved Alfa from any potential problems.
It is worth remembering that the new racing car not only didn't have the same original type of bodywork of the Touring Disco Volante, but neither the chassis, the suspensions or the mechanics generally. As Giuseppe Busso well recalls, their 3.5-litre engine was based vaguely on the 3000 originally intended for the 6C 3000 sedan, but this is practically a new project with completely different vital measurements, despite keeping that now-classic Alfa layout with six straight cylinders and double overhead camshaft with hemispherical expansion chamber and single power supply, here with six Weber 50 DCO horizontal monobloc carburettors. Some accessories were in a different position, and the distributor was splined to the rear of the exhaust camshaft like on the standard 1900 and the 3-litre Disco Volante 2000, while on the 3.5-litre it was positioned to the side of the crankcase.
The tappet system was also different; on the 3.5-litre they were done by interposing valve lifters in oil bath, adjusted by calibrated pads, between the cam and the valve, instead of the classic adjustable plates.
The subsequent reduction to a 3-litre engine, used on the “PR” (acronym of Passo Ridotto, “reduced wheelbase”) was also obtained by reducing the 3.5-litre engine stroke. But for now, as they say, that’s another story.
The only Disco Volante 2000 of the three built, the spider with convex sides, polished and finished with greater care and equipped with a twin exhaust beneath the door, continued its “promotional work” and was loaded onto a Douglas DC.3 twin-engine plane and taken to New York, where from 21 February to 1 March 1953 the “World Motor Sport Show” was held in Madison Square Garden. The world’s production of the most beautiful sports cars of the day was on show at this prestigious exhibition, in a parade that made dreams come true!
While it was travelling to Linate in an Alfa Romeo 450 truck, the ill-fated driver of a Vespa 98 hit the mudguard of one of the truck's rear wheels. Who knows, perhaps it was even one of the very first Vespas, with the body and cylinder built by Alfa... keeping things in the family!
The Disco Volante waited patiently on the truck while the police assessed the scene, and at last it reached the airport, where the terminal was still under construction. The loading operations were stressful and it took a long time getting the car into the wide side door of the plane, pushed by hand and overseen by Formenti and Touring’s lawyer Ponzoni.
The sides of the car touched the edges of the plane door and the car had to be slid inside directly from the truck, turning it immediately to fit longways inside the plane's fuselage. This was certainly the reason why the 3000 was not sent to the States, as the extra 42 cm length would have been an insurmountable problem for loading it onto the plane. It was weird that nothing went wrong, but on its return to Italy, during the unloading operations, the tail violently hit a beam, slipped and was ruined.
The event in New York was a huge success, but despite this the Disco Volante was assured none of the much-expected commercial success that was described in the press. It was simply put to one side. Perhaps the mysterious fifth car was not completed but destroyed precisely for this reason.
We have seen how this car was deemed a brilliant exercise in style but ineffective in the sporting field. Or, perhaps that was precisely its purpose, to arouse international interest and advertise mass-produced cars, an amazing marketing strategy at reasonable costs, seeing as most of the mechanics were already available, including the now-useless 3-litre engine taken to the limits of its potential, and further fuelling the “Alfa Romeo legend”.
Perhaps Sanesi knew or realised this, and that was what came across in the photos portraying him during the test runs at Monza. In one photo he has that typical, restrained and enigmatic smile, his penetrating gaze telling the photographer: “Nice isn’t it? Desire one, but buy a 1900. I’ll show you what it's capable of driving round the track in mine, but you will never know how awkward it would be among the other racing cars on the tight bends. Nothing like Le Mans!”.
I hope the ladies won't be offended, but the real Disco Volante is like a curvy woman with wide, sensual hips, a slim waist and generous bust, totally unsuited for competition sports... As the interest aroused by the car confirms, Alfa continued to receive letters in the late ‘50s from enthusiasts from different countries, first and foremost the United States, asking how and where they could buy a Disco Volante.
Today, all four Disco Volante “sisters” still survive in their original configuration or modified condition, aside from a few details. The 2000 spiders (the one taken to New York and the coupé) are on display at the Alfa Romeo Museum in Arese. “Our” spider 3000 – the star of this story – is at the National Automobile Museum in Turin, gifted by Alfa Romeo in the 1950s, and as she herself has “told” us, she is often incorrectly indicated as having a 3500-cc engine. Curiously, only the first edition of the catalogue (1960) correctly stated that she has a 3000-cc engine. The 2-litre “narrow hip” is on display at the National Automobile Museum in Mulhouse, France, bought by Fritz Schlumpf, shortly after the end of her long, if not intense, sporting career that ended in 1959.
When other 4-wheeled flying saucers have been or are seen, they are merely the monsters created in the mind of a modern Mary Schelley.
This is the story of a car that seems to come from deep space. A skilful marketing operation that produced a four-wheeled dream, that still today makes enthusiasts’ hearts beat faster.
Disco Volante - “Thank you so much! You know, here there’s another Alfa Romeo that has a few stories to tell, you must know her. She’s older than me and the Alfetta 159.109, her name is P2...”.
I look around for her... I’ll be back to you again as well, I promise. And it’s been exactly one hundred years since ...
Credits and Acknowledgments
The author, Fabio Morlacchi was born in Milan in 1960, and studied architecture and advertising graphics. In 1983, he started working for an advertising agency, on the launch of the Alfa 33. A car fanatic from a young age, Alfa Romeo was a passion at home too, as both his parents worked there: his father was a designer and his mother worked in Sales. His love of planes came from his paternal grandfather, who was a bomber pilot and officer of the Regia Aeronautica (Italian Royal Air Force) from 1918 to 1943. He is a member of the Alfa Blue Team, historian, speaker and writer on car history, particularly that of Alfa Romeo, as well as the history of Italian aviation.
The photographer, Paolo Carlini, is a professional photographer from Milan with over thirty years of experience. He is a member of the Order of Journalists and the National Association of Prifessional Photographers Tau Visual. Specializing in commercial imagery, he has worked with prominent clients both in Italy and internationally. Carlini has captured portraits of artists, designers, and entrepreneurs, which have been exhibited in prestigious shows. He has also published photography books and shares his expertise through workshops and courses. Paolo Carlini is a respected figure in the world of photography
SpeedHolics thanks the MAUTO – National Automobile Museum in Turin, for having made available the “Disco Volante” from its prestigious collection for this article.
Appendix
The Disco Volante “narrow hip” drivers and races
Piero Carini: 2nd in the Coppa Sant'Ambroeus on 11-01-1953, 10th in Messina on 25-07-1953, 4th in the Coppa Intereuropa on 11-09-1953
Pietro Palmieri and Francesco Matrullo: withdrawn from the 12 Ore in Pescara on 16-08-1953
Goffredo Zehender and A. De Giuseppe: withdrawn after 8 hours at the MM on 16-04-1953
Soldani and Vivaldo Angeli: 11th at the 10 Ore in Messina on 07-7-1953
Nicola Musmeci: 8th in the Coppa D'Oro in Siracusa on 10-10-1954, position not known at the 1954 Catania-Etna
Luigi Bellucci: 2nd in Avellino on 12-07-1953, 3rd in the Giro di Calabria on 02-08-1954, withdrawn at the G.P. Supercortemaggiore in Merano on 06-09-1953 (won by Fangio in the 3000 CM)
Jean (Willy) Ducrey took part in several races during the 1954-1955 season, 3rd in the uphill race in Cote de Planfoy (F), withdrawn on the Bremgarten Circuit (CH), position unknown at the Gran Prix d’Orleans (F) on 05-06-1954, position unknown at the uphill race in Kandersteg (CH) in 1959.
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