Count Giovanni Volpi on creating the Breadvan and GTO (excellent read for collectors)

In 1961, I met Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata at the Gran Prix of Germany at the Nurburing. We were both age 25. He later arranged for me to purchase a new SWB direct from the factory for $4100, My annual Air Force pilot salary was $3600 and I declined. I shared with Giovanni the boards comments about the Breadvan in another thread. He replied, and authorized me to share this letter with all of you, to set the record straight on the Breadvan.

Dear Gary,
Thank you for the chat lines you sent me about the old Breadvan. Let me then make some sense, through you, for the authors of those chats:

The Breadvan was not designed by Carlo Chiti but by Giotto Bizzarrini, the inventor and constructor of the prototype GTO.

Second, if Bizzarrini had stayed at Ferrari and would have made an evolution of the GTO the following year, he would have made the Breadvan.

The point was to be faster, never to look pretty. The prototype GTO, which was only a transformed SWB, was considered so ugly by the Ferrari workers that they baptized it The Anastasia, a derogatory expression for ugly women in Modena jargon.

The Breadvan was made in an emergency as Ferrari recanted on delivering me the very first two GTO’s because of the ATS affair.

He (Enzo) called one day saying “You’re a traitor, forget the GTOs.” We never spoke again until 1980.

I called Bizzarrini who had already left ATS because of frictions with Chiti, who was intent on corridor jockeying, and he said “No problem, we can do a lot better.” And he did.

I left ATS soon after with Gardini (still the object of a Ferrari press black-out), the former Ferrari commercial manager who built both Ferrari and its image as much, if not more than Enzo Ferrari who ‘tolerated’ production as an unavoidable medicine.

ATS soon went belly-up. Chiti had managed to be king there, but the owners couldn’t tell the front end from the rear end of a car. They just fancied them ready-made and that is not enough.

Believe it or not, the drawings of the GTO, technical and style wise, were made after the car was built. The SWB was obsolescing, Bizzarrini knew it, and Ferrari asked him to make something, whatever he wanted, but on the cheap.

Bizzarrini locked himself with four or five mechanics in a side garage in the Maranello compound and tinkered with the only thing they had, a SWB. Cut, file, hammer and scrape, they came up in short time with the sorry-looking Anastasia.

The body was hammered in-house, no one had designed it. It only followed logically around what was there. But the car was faster because of the nose, the lower frontal profile and last but not least, the different inclination of the windshield, probably its principal feature.

The Californias were the first to tilt the windshield and easily gained speed on all previous models. It was as simple as that.

Ing. Alberto Massimino did it on the LWB California and years later built for me the first Serenissima, with Gardini.

The GTO was also somewhat lighter than the SWB and the dry oil sump which lowered the engine, lowering the center of gravity, and the 5 gears made it handle much better.

Bizzarrini left (was fired with all his colleagues) Ferrari very soon after, and the Anastasia’s lines (there are pictures around of the unpainted car) were slightly smoothed and the spoiler was added. Only then, when the car was finished, did someone make a drawing so not to seem incompetent.

Bizzarrini had three rules to this day. Distribute weight properly; be as light as possible within security, as low as possible, and present the least resistance to air. Nothing else.

Therefore, the Breadvan was the front-engine equivalent of a rear-engine car. We took the engine 12 cm. back (unlike GTOs), fitted 6 twin carbs (like GTOs) and diminished chasse on the front wheels unlike GTOs. The same engine push-back was done on the Tri. We could not procure a 5-speed box but 150 kilos less and almost no paint, which was a burden at the time, compensated that.

The engine was excellent as Gendebien (the former SWB owner) was always given about 30 horses more than the other SWBs (no wonder he won so often).

The body was designed by Bizzarrini, and not by Drogo who only executed it mostly on our premises as the car was needed there for other urgent work. I saw up to eight men in and under that car at the same time with arms and legs sticking out. We were not told about one mistake though. The main drive shaft had not been properly balanced by an outside workshop, just by a trifle.

At Le Mans ‘62 the organizers tried to prevent us from racing. First they said the car was not decorously painted. So we added a little. Then they were not happy because it did not have a rear wiper although the rear end would hopelessly be fuel, oil and rubber smeared after three laps by the Prof. Kant pushing-effect. We fitted one from a Topolino or a military Jeep.

Very pissed, not knowing what else to pretend, after that they would not let us into GT class. Chinetti was relentlessly putting oil on the fire because his precious GT clients could not match our lap times and might have questioned his influence (to favor them), the organizers were obediently at Ferrari’s service, and if we had insisted further we would not have raced although we would have won hands down at the Sports Tribunal.

So, we went into Prototypes and those were exactly who we were in the race with. In the first laps the Breadvan was already out of sight from the GTOs and the lead kept building up. She was with the rear-engined Ferrari protos.

Dan Gurney was on our TRi 61, which had just won Sebring with Bonnier-Bianchi, doing wonders. Jo Bonnier first lost places, Gurney got them back several times. All was going so well and at the 4th hour the Breadvan’s drive shaft gave in. Some time later one of the TRi’s half shafts broke. But that’s Le Mans for you.

Carlo Mario Abate, the best Italian driver of his time and one of the best in the world, was on the Breadvan with Colin Davis. He had tried a normal GTO in Italy, but after the Breadvan’s pre-race trials at Le Mans he said, “With this car you can paint!” so precisely it was doing everything he wanted.

A few months later, at the Ollon-Villars hill climb race, two GTOs withdrew when they saw us arrive, this time in GT class. Abate came in 4th, behind Jim Clark in an F-1 Lotus 21, Bonnier in a Porsche 8 cylinder F-1, and a wild Vaccarella in our Tri 61.
Racing is a bit like the theatre. You work hard and with enthusiasm at home and when the starting flag goes down you’re kind of out of it and have to let the cards fall, there isn’t much you can do (in endurance races).

All I can say is that the Breadvan, mostly it’s making in less than 14 days and then its superb performance was by far the most intimate satisfaction of my racing years. And, I guess, also Bizzarrini’s for his own reasons.

In 1966 the Ford J was copied from it with a rear engine.

Why should it (Breadvan) be destroyed? For money that is not even guaranteed? To become one more of well over 100 SWBs? With a new, therefore fake SWB body?

The line suddenly seems quite thin between real and fake. If found out in the art business this would lead to handcuffs. Indeed, this is only about money, not at all about cars.

Later I used the Breadvan as a road car, looking during the long trips for some Ferrari to humiliate. It wasn’t fair, though. Those who had the money usually couldn’t drive them. That was before the freeways and it was a dream to drive it on normal roads without speed limits, especially in France who has by far the best paving.

On the road, there were also the Gunther Sachs episode and some days later the black and stripes painting by Agnelli who thought it looked like a funeral car (I was not there, and it was Sunday and the pot of paint was finished).

After a couple of years, as the very last thing anyone in the ‘business’ imagined was that the price of those cars would go up instead of down as it always did, I sold it (Breadvan) at $2,500 for a Dodge Polara wagon adding money. It could always be bought back for less later on and would free the space now.

The dealer kept it almost a year before someone deigned to buy it. Believe me, if anyone in the so-called business had imagined the future no one would have sold the cars.

I rotated 6 GTOs in pairs and was very happy to sell them for the buying price, as they were still competitive and so did everyone else, no exceptions. I even had a Porsche (the egg) F-1 destroyed because it was more expensive to haul it back to Modena from the factory. Maybe someone at Porsche did not finally do it, but that would be another story.

I sold the TRi 61, another great road car as reliable and simple as a Volkswagen like the Breadvan, in 1984 to Ralph Lauren for $450,000, a record price then. It didn’t seem serious to still travel at times, or go to the movies, in that way. I never understood why that very same car, one of 2 integral TRi 61 (the other was technically destroyed), being the biggest Ferrari winner ever, was worth less than any GTO of which there should only be 27 copies around although there are quite a few more, fake and with everyone’s connivance.

Later, I got a press clipping saying that one of my GTOs had sold in Japan for about $ 15 millions. The reason why people are willing to pay so much for something they will never really own, as the reason of being of those cars and their use has vanished with time, really beats me.

Really owning those cars is similar to still feeling them and doing with them what cannot be done anymore. In other words, we – I still own them, even if they’re sold. If I bought a stagecoach I would never experience what it was like, because the time has gone and whatever the reenactment wouldn’t even get me far from what it was.

You know that, Gary, you own your F-100 and your F-105. They may have given you trouble at times but you did both some great and serious things with them. With the Skyblazers and in Viet-Nam. That is why you own both those planes and the real human experience. That is also why you don’t need to fly them any more.

Gentlemen collectors, use those millions for something else if they burn your fingers. Good things like helping others, really helping people you might even know, because they do exist, with names and surnames, or make something useful with them. You’ll be proud of both acts and I don’t mean tax deductible gimmicks. That is not real giving. Giving has no strings.
Unless you buy those cars just for the money which makes it business and a cold (but volatile) speculation like any other.

One more thing: Real women aren’t picked up anymore with cars, or planes or yachts for that matter. It is culturally obsolete, and the intrinsic quality of the eventual ‘pick-up’ is inversely proportional to the price of the vehicle.

Best,
Giovanni (Volpi) August 2005

 

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