Recently I wrote about the new Hot Wheels model of the Bertone-designed Lancia Stratos Zero, a legendary concept car I'd wanted to see in diecast form for most of my life, and I got to thinking. Long ago I had a Corgi model of the Alfa Romeo Carabo, another extremely influential Bertone concept car… if that existed, what other famed concept cars of that era had been released? Quite a few, it seems:
So I went to ebay, and found what I could that was affordable and not too destroyed. In order to keep it affordable and available, it's all a bit played with, but mostly in OK condition, easily enough to get a feel for these cars. We'll start with the Carabo. This car has the distinction of being the first ever to feature scissor doors, predating the Countach which Marcello Gandini at Bertone also designed and reused the concept on, but thanks to the attention it got it also basically introduced the idea of the 'wedge car'. Prior to this, the high-end sports car had been curvy and sensuous, and the mechanical, angular, louvre-happy look was a new direction entirely, and caused a sensation in 1968 when it was first shown, in metallic green; even today it looks much more recent than 1968, and I've seen it used on the cover of more than one Synthwave album where it fits right in. While not intended for production, only as a styling exercise, it was built on an Alfa Romeo P33 chassis and like most of the concepts of the time was a fully functional, viably roadworthy car. So much of this design went on to influence what supercars looked like, it's a really vital design to know in the evolution of car design.
This model was part of a Corgi series called Rockets, which came with a 'tune up key' that you could insert in the base and twist to pop off the chassis, which allowed me to use a small flat-head screwdriver to do the same and swap out the typically nasty Corgi wheels for some HW ones, which look a lot better, without all the usual hassle of drilling out the rivets (this is often particularly annoying on Corgis as they frequently use domed rivets that are a nightmare to centre a drill bit on). The chrome green and grey lower section look great, and quite closely resemble the real car, which is named for Carabidae beetles which have very shiny green carapaces with orange parts.
Another Corgi Rocket model that popped up when I searched was the Bizzarini Manta. Bizzarini is a lesser-known Italian carmaker, and most of what they made was sports racers (Matchbox made a beautiful Moving Parts Bizzarini 5300 racer recently which I'm hoping to get sometime), but in 1969 they hired the then-new Italdesign studio, headed by legendary designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, to create the Manta. It has a 3-seat cabin with the driver in the centre, pre-empting McLaren's use of this idea in the F1 by nearly 30 years, features a unique venetian blind-like front thingy that can be opened for better city driving visibility and closed for high speed driving, and was built on a retired P538 Le Mans racer chassis, with a 5.3L Chevrolet V8 in the back, forward of the rear axle. The design was the first 'one-box' GT car, with engine, passengers and (in this case entirely theoretical) luggage sharing a single volume, cemented the future of Giugiaro and the Italdesign studio, and like the Carabo still looks futuristic and hard to locate in time.
The real car was briefly silver but quickly got a bright turquoise gloss repaint - the Corgi version is metallic and a lot darker, but still looks good. This one had even worse wheels than the Carabo, and worse, had oversize ones that gave it oversized arches, which in turn made it hard to find appropriate replacement wheels - these are from a Majorette, I'm not that into them and may well replace them later - but they are an improvement on the train-like originals, trust me.
Having found a legendary Bertone and a legendary ItalDesign, I then set out to find a legendary Pininfarina, and to my shock, succeeded. For a long time the Pininfarina design agency were the only ones used by Ferrari, and in common with many, they often used retired racing cars as the cores of designs they relied on to showcase design talent and thus drum up business, and that's the origin of the Ferrari 512 S Modulo. Pininfarina and Bertone were rivals, and in 1970 when Bertone showed the extreme, space-age Stratos Zero, the Modulo was Pininfarina's answer. Where the Stratos Zero evoked the technology of spaceflight, the Modulo evoked the technology of science fiction, arguably even more ludicrously extreme with its sliding canopy, cutaways for the tops of the wheels and mirrored top and bottom shells complete with false windows on the lower sides. The panels to the rear of the side windows were retractable cooling ducts for the engine bay, much like the 'bat wings' on the Lamborghini Murcielago.
I'm really happy to have a model of the Modulo, but it comes with a twinge of disappointment - it's frankly kind of goofy. Every photo I've ever seen of the Modulo is a low-angle shot that makes the most of its flying saucer-esque profile, and these do not reveal quite how much the car looks like a bar of half-used soap from a higher angle, but holding a diecast of it does; its rounded corners and straight sides just aren't quite as attractive in three dimensions, and allegedly the car was so low-slung that it was hard to see out. While it was a fully running car, it seems clear that the Modulo was made focusing on styling ideas over usability.
Corgi came through again with this yellow version which has somehow retained its original sticker representing the car's rear window with engine cooling holes. Even though the car was originally black and is most often pictured in its later white colour scheme, the yellow works too, at least now that I've added the black panels. A kit car version was featured in the often overlooked but surprisingly good early Tommy Lee Jones movie Black Moon.
Returning to Bertone and staying with Corgi, there's also this 1969 Autobianchi A112 Runabout Barchetta (misspelled on the base as "barghetta") by Marcello Gandini. Barchetta is an Italian word for a small boat that is sometimes applied to open cars without glass, but in this case it was particularly apt: it's inspired by racing powerboats of the time and at early stages of the design, this car was intended to be amphibious, leading to the open, doorless form, the high rear-mounted headlights and high ground clearance, but this idea was later dropped. It was based on the chassis of the popular Autobianchi A112 supermini, and shared the tiny car's 1.1L inline 4, so was in a different class from most of the others here, but like the Modulo was mostly intended to showcase ideas. The production Fiat X1/9 was ultimately based on this car's design, and elements, particularly the form of the front wheel arches and the spoiler, were used on the production Lancia Stratos. I wouldn't call it a lovely car, but it looks fun for living a life in warm, beachy climes.
This casting was apparently recycled as a Wonder Woman car at some point, and is often found with a WW sticker on the front. It was also cast by Matchbox, and there seems to be a 1:32ish Corgi version too. I must admit to being confused as to why this car in particular was so widely produced. But it must have its fans, as Bertone recently made a modernised version.
Another Bertone, but Matchbox this time: the Lamborghini Marzal from 1967. Designed as a four-seater using a 2.0L straight six that was basically one side of a standard Lamborghini 4.0L V12, Bertone aimed to complement the grand tourers Lamborghini made, but it was not really a serious try at a production model so much as a piece of promotional art that was aimed at shocking the motoring press into giving Lamborghini attention at a fraction of the price of advertising. That said, it also formed the basis for the later design of the more conventional but still Lamborghini-weird Espada. In the Marzal's case the whole car is based on a hexagon motif, an idea that later worked out well for the Countach too, and is almost entirely glassed-in (this model has a metal roof, assumedly for stiffness, but the real car's roof was fully glass), necessitating a full air-con system. Its gullwing doors skip the b-pillar entirely and run the length of the silver-upholstered cabin, and the hexagon-shaped louvres on the back are particularly distinctive. It first appeared at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix, driven by Prince Ranier III and his wife Princess Grace, best known as Grace Kelly; the suspension was still a work in progress at the time, so the car did a parade lap of the circuit with an anvil in the boot to level the car.
Matchbox made this model way back in the day, choosing crimson instead of the more conservative silver the car was debuted in, or the white it later wore. Like a number of '70s castings, it was also reissued in a variety of colours (including this green) in the form of a Super GT, Matchbox's late '80s budget line, with further reduced window area, full-black windows that hide its lack of interior and all hint of what it really was scrubbed from the base, presumably to evade copyright issues.
The last thing in this group is a bit of an outlier: the Nissan 126X concept from 1970. Relatively speaking I know a lot less about this, but it's another piece of the strategy Japan's carmakers used to signify the country's industrial maturation in the eyes of the world. The Toyota 2000GT had launched to wide acclaim a few years before, Nissans were beating Porsches in races, and at the Tokyo motor show of 1970 many marques including Toyota, Mazda and Nissan addressed the matter of forward-thinking design. Toyota showed the EX-7, Mazda debuted the RX500 and Nissan this, a 4-seat gullwing wedge with a rear-mid straight six mounted sideways and driving all four wheels - or at least that's the idea, as I'm not sure this was actually a functioning prototype. This was nonetheless kitted out with a steering yoke rather than a wheel but the most interesting and innovative feature was a series of coloured lights up the front of the car intended to signal to other motorists what the car was doing, with red for braking, yellow for constant speed and green for acceleration. I don't honestly love this car, but of all of them it might be the only one that tries not only to look futuristic and showcase design, but also evolve how people drive.
Nissan was exporting under the Datsun brand at the time, which I assume is why Matchbox seem to have named it Datsun 126X despite the Nissan text visible on the rear quarter in period shots of the car. Rather than the pleasing lightly metallic blue-grey two-tone of the show car, Matchbox in their infinite wisdom seem to have opted for a yellow over orange two-tone with amber glass, which looks surprisingly all right but is not a patch on the much classier original colour scheme. This has also been released with flame stickers on the yellow and, like the Marzal, in various colours as a Super GT.
All these weird and wonderful designs are one-off show pieces that have only one true job: to inspire. These are quite literally imagination made concrete and tangible and sharable, and the supercar concepts of the late '60s and early '70s are in my view what make this era the golden age of the concept car. It's cars like these more than any that gave me the enthusiasm I have for car design and which inform how I look at all cars, but especially rarities I'll very rarely if ever even see, let alone have a chance to drive. In some cases, finding diecasts was my introduction to the existence of quite a lot of cars, and it felt to young me like admission to a secret hidden area of car knowledge; the Carabo I remember reading about but, in the pre-internet wasteland of the '80s, I had no idea what it looked like until the Corgi fell into my lap. This bunch right here are the root of why I collect diecasts and write this blog, and there are more to find! Sometimes people write these types of car off as pointless, but to me they are an absolute necessity if you want a healthy car industry that makes people want to buy cars. These cars are made to move you in a less conventional way, and that's why these worn old toys from before I was even born are some of my very favourites.
