Lancia Beta Montecarlo
Lancia Beta Montecarlo
The Lancia Beta Montecarlo was not just a great piece of styling and marketing, it also marked the point where Pininfarina went from being merely a designer and manufacturer of cars to an entity capable of engineering them completely. Although when the project began, the car was intended to be a Fiat.
With production of its 124 Coupé coming to an end, and the Bertone-designed replacement for the smaller 850 Coupé and Spider taking mid-engined form in the X1/9, Fiat sought to upscale the concept around the Aurelio Lampredi-designed 2.0-litre twin-cam engine.
Initially known as Project X1/8, before being renamed X1/20 once the X1/9 took shape in 1971, the design and development of the new car was entrusted completely to Pininfarina, following the whole-car approach Paolo Martin had taken with the 130 Coupé.
Working in tandem with Giorgio Pianta and Lampredi himself at Abarth, Martin created the entire monocoque shell of the X1/20 as well as its cleanly-chamfered shape. A rally-ready prototype was created, featuring a Fiat 130 V6 amidships, which Pianta successfully blasted to second place behind Jean-claude Andruet’s Lancia Stratos on the 1974 Giro d’italia. However, away from the rally stages, rapid changes were afoot. An international oil-supply crisis had struck in late 1973, driving up the cost of petrol and gutting the market for cheap, big-engined sports cars. The premium-brand market, with its wealthier clientele, was less badly hit and generated bigger profits, so the decision was made to make the X1/20 part of the Lancia Beta range, which already used Lampredi’s engine.
Martin restyled the nose of the new car, now christened Montecarlo, to incorporate a jutting bumper and a Lancia badge within a rhomboid grille. Pininfarina also pioneered a new construction technique – the front and rear windscreen and threequarter windows were bonded to the bodyshell, effectively making them part of the structure and stiffening the chassis further. Martin drew attention to this by choosing not to embellish the window trims with chromed strips. The car was launched in 1975.
Although its teething troubles are well-documented, particularly the brake-locking issue that led to temporary suspension of production for 1979, Pininfarina’s first full piece of engineering work was a triumph. Stylistically too, Martin shifted the wedge ethos into a more cubist period for the Eighties – there’s an awful lot of Montecarlo in the blocky, chamfered, grilled lines of Leonardo Fioravanti’s Ferrari 348.
‘Pininfarina pioneered a new construction technique, effectively making the windows structural’