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A little
history...
By Dimitri Musafia
Vincenzo Lancia,
pictured to the right in 1908, began his career as a race car driver for
Fiat. Subsequently, his creativity and individualism led him to
automobile building. His first car, confusingly enough, was called the
"Alfa". In time, the Lancia marque became known and respected
for technological advancement and quality. Vincenzo Lancia held patents
for now-ubiquitous design features, such as the unitized body.
In the 50's, if you were a middle- to upper-class Italian, you were
probably either an Alfista or a Lancista, meaning you were an
ultra-staunch supporter of either Alfa Romeo or Lancia automobiles. That
didn't mean of course you had to own one, indeed in post-war Italy few
could afford anything at all with four wheels. But along with the
newfound prosperity stemming from the ruins of war (and the Marshall
Plan) was the need to identify with a creed, and the motorcar provided
the very excuse.
Lancia opened the hostilities, so to speak, in 1950 with the
introduction of the Aurelia, named after the Italian Highway 1
originally built by the Romans. With it's elegance and comfort, the
latter enhanced by the adoption of a V6 engine (patented by Lancia), it
rivaled the Citroen 11 - better known as the Traction Avant - in poise
and distinction. Alfa Romeo countered a few months later with the 1900
("millenove") which was soon used also as a police car, thus
becoming perhaps Europe's first Sport-Sedan. The line had been drawn,
and the Lancisti stood for elegance and class, while the Alfisti were
all-out for performance.
The 1950 Lancia Aurelia B10, and the B20 Coupe
model, ancestor of the Gamma Coupe.
Along with the
economic boom, the Sixties also saw an increase of social unrest, and
from 1968 to 1970 continuous strikes plagued factories and drove many
firms to bankruptcy. The madness eventually culminated with the March of
the Fourty Thousand, when 40,000 white-collar employees and
"bourgeois" marched side-by-side in highly industrialized
Turin, heralding an end to the hegemony of the labor unions and for a
general return to a sense of equilibrium before the entire country was
ruined.
Both Lancia and Alfa Romeo suffered severely in that period, Lancia
especially because Gianni Lancia (son of the founder Vincenzo) had
previously spent fortunes in road racing, in vain hoping it would have a
return in image for the factory. As a result, both marques were on the
verge of leaving their workers in the streets. While Alfa Romeo had been
acquired by the Italian State (whose disastrous management was to put
the company up for sale 12 years later) Lancia entered the industrial
orbit of Fiat.
The 2000 Coupe, Pininfarina-designed
evolution of the Flavia Coupe, model
which preceded the Gamma.
The Turin manufacturer, itself strapped for cash,
hurriedly put together a new Lancia model lineup stemming from the Beta
in 1972, reclaiming the pre-war tradition of naming the cars after
letters of the Greek alphabet, and stuffing Fiat engines and components
under the hoods. The Beta model, which diversified from the initial
sedan to a coupe, spider, sport-wagon, and even a mid-engine sportscar,
was a good success but the traditional Lancisti were aghast at the
nonchalance with which lowly Fiat parts were used behind a Lancia
nameplate.
In 1975, in an effort to once again ignite enthusiasm for the Lancia
marque, the Fiat engineers, coordinated by Sergio Camuffo, re-exhumed
the horizontally-opposed engine of sixties' Lancia Flavia model and
called upon the famed Pininfarina to design a new auto with a
continental appeal: it was to be named the Lancia Gamma.
The Gamma berlina (sedan) and the Coupe
Aimed
squarely at the market occupied by Mercedes and BMW, the Gamma had the
ambition of becoming the Fiat Group's prestige auto, and was presented
in both sedan and coupe versions. No parts were to be interchangeable
with any Fiat model, thus contenting the Lancisti of yore. Originally
intended to have hydro-pneumatic suspension (by Citroen), the French
government vetoed the transfer of technology to a "foreign
power" and the Gamma ended up with four-wheel McPherson struts à
la Lancia Beta.
While the Gamma sedan was built in the Lancia factory in Chivasso, near
Turin [According
to Wim Oude Weernink's book "La Lancia", Berlinas were made at
Via Vincenzo Lancia - there's a picture of the production line on page
306 of the second edition] the coupe was actually built in the designer Pininfarina's
prestigious atelier at the rate of about 10 per day, and the presses
used to form the bodywork were the same as those used for the Ferrari
400, to which more than a passing resemblance is borne.
Sadly, haste to bring the product to market resulted in insufficient
testing, and a few congenital design flaws plagued the Gamma from the
very beginning. The all-aluminum "flat four" engine had a
tendency to overheat and the twin-cam valve timing system with separate
timing belts was a source of frequent problems, requiring replacement of
the belts well before suggested mileage. In addition, whereas
Pininfarina had done a magistral job of designing the coupe, the sedan's
styling was somewhat bloated and didn't receive universal favor. Lastly,
the automatic transmission, the manufacture of which was licensed by the
English Automotive Products to an Italian industry and fitted to many of
the Gammas that sold on foreign markets, commercially speaking, was an
authentic coup de grace due to it's inherent fragility.
Fiat/Lancia engineers were inexplicably slow to correct the mechanical
problems, and most of them were finally resolved only with the
introduction of the much-improved Series II model, in 1980. But by then
it was too late. The reputation of unreliability of the earlier models
tainted beyond hope the sales expectations of the Series II, and
production of the Lancia Gamma was halted in 1983.
The 1980 Gamma Coupe Series II
For this reason,
many projects, such as the Lancia Montecarlo with the Gamma 2,5 liter
engine, or the splendid 1982 Gamma Scala, T-bar Spider, Olgiata, and
restyled Coupe never made it into production.
At the International Auto Shows of Paris and
Birmingham in September-October 1982 Pininfarina made one last attempt
to revive the Gamma model, introducing the Scala (a four-door version of
the coupe), the T-bar spider, the Olgiata "Shooting Brake" (or
sport-wagon) and slightly restyled coupe.
The third series, here represented by official
Pininfarina photography in front of their R&D facility, never
reached production.
Pictured here are two extremely rare images of a
1984 prototype Gamma "tre volumi", i.e. with separate trunk,
which likewise never reached production. These are among the first
images published of this automobile.
As the Gamma became difficult to sell new, the
depreciation of used ones increased accordingly. Many Gammas languished
unsold in open-air used car lots, where the sun tended to fade the
upholstery and unglue plastic parts exposed too long to the elements. As
a result, the vast majority of them ended up being junked prematurely in
order to reclaim the valuable aluminum from the engine block.
While the Gamma sedan was ponderous and relatively
unattractive, the Coupé, designed for Pininfarina by Aldo Brovarone,
who also contributed to the styling of the Ferrari 308, was lithe and
elegant. Vaguely resembling the Mercedes 450 SL but far more stylish,
much of it's heritage lives on in the subsequent Pininfarina-designed
Cadillac Allanté. Front-wheel drive, fully independent suspension and
the low-gravity center horizontally-opposed engine allowed for handling
and road holding that was defined "astonishing" by the English
car magazine Motor.
The engine, in 2-liter or 2.5-liter dress (2.0
liter only for the Italian market, due to a punitive fiscal treatment of
those automobiles that dared exceed 2,000 cmc), was balanced and smooth,
delivering more torque than power and offering excellent performance for
the time, with a top speed of over 120 m.p.h.. The interior of the
Series I was rather a tribute to late-seventies automotive styling
taste, but with the Series II it became far more refined, with exclusive
Ermenegildo Zegna upholstery standard and Conolly leather seating (the
same used by Rolls Royce) offered as an option.
The highest point of development of the production Gamma Coupé was
reached with the 2.5-liter Series II version in 1980, finally featuring
fuel injection (Bosch L-Jetronic). Only 1,209 of the Gamma Coupé 2500
I.E. (an abbreviation standing for iniezione elettronica) models were
produced from 1980 until 1983, although it remained officially available
well into 1985. An estimated 400 are still in existence world-wide.
Copyright D. Musafia 2001
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