Photos courtesy Barrett-Jackson.
Zero point two-zero, or better than the Tatra T77 and almost as good as the GM EV1. That’s the coefficient of drag rating for the 1960 Pininfarina X, one of the most aerodynamic cars built and one of the oddest, thanks to its diamond-shaped wheel layout. It also makes it the most aerodynamically efficient vehicle to cross the block at next month’s Barrett-Jackson sale.
Other prototypes and even production cars used the unconventional diamond layout over the years. Sunbeam produced a hundred or so around the turn of the century, Wolseley and Voisin had each proposed such a vehicle before World War II, and a California tinkerer named H. Gordon Hansen designed and built his own Gordon Diamond by 1947, but all for different reasons. Hansen, for instance, designed his largely as a safety car and figured that the best way to fit a perimeter bumper to a car was to rearrange the positions of the wheels.
Alberto Morelli had an entirely different purpose in designing the Pininfarina X, as Karl Ludvigsen wrote in Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car #53. A professor at Turin’s Polytechnic University, Morelli had a deep interest in aerodynamics as they applied both to aircraft and to automobiles. Coachbuilder Pininfarina (known as Pinin Farina up until 1960) approached Morelli and asked him to apply his research into something practical: an extremely efficient, low-drag family sedan.
The diamond layout that he chose allowed a narrow cross section at the front that widened toward the middle and tapered away toward the rear, an ideal aerodynamic shape, he argued. The front wheel would thus steer, the middles would serve as outriggers and the rear would drive the car. He chose a 43hp 1,089cc four-cylinder engine and four-speed transmission from a Fiat 1100 to power it (installed at an angle behind the right rear quarter panel and driving the rear wheel via a V-drive apparatus) and suspended it with synthetic rubber at each wheel. The fins at the rear, according to Ludvigsen and Morelli, had nothing to do with American automotive fashion; instead, they actually helped to counter the loss of stabilization that came as a result of the highly aerodynamic shape.
Pininfarina built Morelli’s concept, tested it extensively, and even drove it up to 90 MPH, about 20 percent faster than a stock Fiat 1100 was capable of. The company displayed it at the Turin Auto Show in November 1960 and at Brussels in 1961. Battista Farina reportedly shopped the X around to carmakers to see if they would built it, but found it a tough pitch. Perhaps that had something to do with Pininfarina asking Morelli to follow up the X with the Pininfarina Y, a two-door car with a similar aerodynamic shape but with a conventional rectangular wheel layout. That car, which was based on a Fiat 600 D and debuted at Turin in 1961, rated a coefficient of drag of 0.27 – better than pretty much any car on the road at the time, but not nearly as efficient as the Model X – seeming to prove that Morelli was onto something by selecting the diamond layout.
As for the X, it remained in Pininfarina’s possession until 2007, when Pininfarina’s museum sold the unrestored car. Three years later, collector car dealer Aero Toy Store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, began to offer the X for sale, first on Hemmings.com for $1.35 million and shortly after on the company’s own site for $3 million. The X now will cross the block with no reserve.
Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction will take place January 10-18. For more information, visit Barrett-Jackson.com.
UPDATE (17.January 2015): The Pininfarina X sold for a price of $330,000.
UPDATE (3.February 2015): We see that Hyman now has the Pininfarina X for sale at an undisclosed price.
UPDATE (5.May 2015): Hyman has set the asking price of the Pininfarina X at $595,000.
