The Trinity

Bertone’s legendary concept cars pay a flying visit to Phillips in Berkeley Square

Bertone’s trio of landmark Alfa Romeo BAT concepts pay a visit to London

Bertone’s groundbreaking Alfa Romeobased BAT (Berlinetta Aerodynamica Technica) concept cars of the Fifties paid their first visit to the UK since 1994 in a special gallery display curated by Phillips at its Berkeley Square HQ on November 20-23.

Alfa Romeo BAT 5, 7 & 9

‘The designer of these cars, Franco Scaglione, was young at the time, unrestrained by prior experience, and was given a brief by Nuccio Bertone to explore the limits of car design,’ says researcher Alex Easthope, who helped curate the exhibition. ‘In the Fifties, especially in America, aeroplane-style elements like fins and wheel spats were making their way into consumer design – not just cars, but everything from fridges to couches.

‘So there was a prevailing interest in aircraft as a theme. But Scaglione’s training as a designer had been in the aeronautical sector, and he’d never even been to the US at the time, so the first of these cars, BAT 5 [rear], is essentially a blend of classically minimal European elegance and genuine aircraftderived aerodynamic thinking. The inwardcurving rear fins with their ventilation slots create an effect similar to modern spoilers.

‘Nuccio Bertone drove BAT 5 to the 1953 Turin Show, but BAT 7 [centre], the 1954 Turin car, was much more challenging to build, and was still being finished in the back of the lorry en route to the exhibition centre. The real tragedy of these cars is a near-total lack of documentation, brought about because there was no clay-modelling stage. Scaglione’s coachbuilders went straight from paper into metal, solving problems by trial-and-error as they went along. But they were very much Nuccio Bertone’s idea, created in a hurry to show what Bertone could do. BAT 7 actually has a drag coefficient of 0.19 – lower than any modern production car, even a Tesla. But the rear aerodynamics would just make it too impractical to drive on the road because there’s almost no rear three-quarter visibility.

‘BAT 9, the last car, was done to deliberately realise the BAT series as something closer to a production car, although the Giulietta SS prototype – currently in Corrado Lopresto’s collection, the car that won at Villa d’este last year – is the true bridge between BAT 9 and the real world. In reality BAT 9 would have been impossible to build in series – the window glass doesn’t properly fit the curve of the frames, for example. Nuccio Bertone and Franco Scaglione also reasoned that the car’s broad dimensions and split rear windscreen wouldn’t have been acceptable on a road car, but not long afterwards the Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray borrowed them both.’

The firm that supplied the 1900 chassis had free rein to experiment too. ‘As part of the Italian state-run Finmeccanica at the time, Alfa Romeo was awash with government money and limitless resources, and such a gesture was seen as supporting the Italian coachbuilding and car industries,’ says Andrew Banks of Alfaholics.

‘Such cars were almost a public service in Italy in the Fifties.’