Leonardo Fioravanti

‘I designed the Daytona – in a week’

I designed the Daytona at home during my free time, in about a week. Back then, in December 1966, I was a young designer at Pininfarina, and I had been credited with designing the production version of the Dino. Today I can claim to have designed 11 Ferraris, and I oversaw another 18 during my years as CEO at Pininfarina Studi e Ricerche.

I started to think about a replacement for the 275 GTB/4 when I shared drives in one with Pier Ugo Gobbato, Ferrari’s general manager, on journeys between Turin and Maranello. It wasn’t the great car we tend to remember today. Side and rear visibility were terrible, a great minus for a racer such as myself; the aerodynamics were not so good and even the shape wasn’t the best.

The problem was that the 275 was then still a young car and nobody would have accepted any effort to replace it so soon. But when all my sketches were ready, the full design drafted with all the correct views, I entered the the offices of Sergio Pininfarina and Renzo Carli. They quickly looked at it, exclaiming that I was crazy, that a ‘new 275’ was not in the programme of either Ferrari or Pininfarina.

But then, instead of ripping it up, they went on looking. They decided to show it to Enzo Ferrari and, a few days later, they came back with the news that Ferrari’s engineers were checking the project.

Then I knew we were safe because I’d kept the basis of the 275. And what happened next was important: we skipped a stage and went on directly with the one-to-one scale drawing, an unusual procedure. When that was ready, Enzo Ferrari himself came to Cambiano, and for the first time I was invited into the meeting too.

He walked slowly around the model, then looked at me and asked if I was happy. I was shocked that he talked to me and replied that, to avoid it looking like an Opel, with the wheels too far inside the wheelarches, we should widen the track by at least 5cm each side. He looked at me with a spark in his eyes and replied, allowing me a 6cm increase in total! He knew what I wanted, but he knew I did not have the courage to ask for it.

From then on, everything developed very fast. I used only 5cm of the six he’d allowed, to avoid any problems with the engineers

in Maranello, and my only other challenge remained keeping the Plexiglas cover for the front lights.

I was able to prove to the Italian homologation office that the Plexiglas and the frame holding it were of no detriment to the strength of the headlamps, and their laboratory tests confirmed that I was not lying! But in America we had to adopt the pop-up versions because of the minimum required height of the headlamps.

I never thought then that I would still be talking about this car more than 50 years later but I was sure it came out well when, at the Paris motor show launch, I saw it close to the Dino. I thought the Dino, the first modern mid-engined Ferrari, was shaded by the traditional 365 GTB/4.