Dino Verde

A very unusual color, but it is a factory shade!  Verde Germoglio. This is one of the few GT4's I have ever seen besides my own that has the double badging in the nose, which was done at the end of the Series 1 cars.

Skinned Sharknose

The sublime Sharknose 156 Dino F1 car shows off its ingenious Carlo Chiti mechanicals.  The car was an extreme departure from Ferrari orthodoxy. So much so that when it won in a dominant fashion, Enzo felt threatened by the very men who created it for him, touching off one of the most cataclysmic political shakeups in Ferrari history. Chiti and his team resigned en masse to start ATS.  Chiti would later go on to run Autodelta and assure his place as a legend in Italian motorsport.

No Caption Needed

hat tip to Rob

GT4 in the making

I discovered this photo of a 1:1 scale maquette of the Dino GT4 in a book recently, and was quite excited, as I had never seen this photo before.  It's interesting to note the more flamboyant treatments of the air intakes and outlets when compared to the more restrained final design.  Gandini also did well by adding the additional character line along the flank of the final car to break up the vertical mass of the body. That line is absent on this early study. The elegant and subtle hood creases on the final car are also not yet defined on the unadorned nose area.

The production rear end treatment and bumpers are also far more delightful and nuanced than this maquette, meaning, I would assume, that this is one of the earliest full scale models made. Note that the maquette is described as a clay model, but I believe that Bertone and the other Italian design houses worked primarily in plaster models at the time, with clay being more prevalent in Detroit.

Last Drive of the Season?

Let's hope we can get a few more fun days in before the salt trucks come out...

Photo credit: Motoring con Brio