Chevrolet corvair testudo
The Chevrolet Testudo (‘turtle’) was the very first car Giorgetto Giugiaro was given a free hand to design. It was in 1962, two years after he began working for Nuccio Bertone. Late that year, a 1962 Chevrolet Corvair Monza arrived at Bertone. This car (vehicle identification number 20927W207657, built in Chevrolet’s Willow Bank plant) was not the first Corvair shipped to one of the Italian Carrozzeria – Battista Pininfarina having shown his Corvair Speciale in 1960. General Motors’ stillnew chief designer Bill Mitchell saw sales potential for the radical Corvair in Europe. Evidently, he believed that custom examples at the glittering European motor shows would advance its cause. Mitchell, of course, was a great lover of Europe and its cars. He owned a Jaguar E-type and just months before Corvair number 20927W207657 arrived in Turin, he had proudly shown the Buick Riviera – by no means the first American car with a European model name – but perhaps the most thoroughly European-influenced Detroit design of the first two postwar decades. Giugiaro's challenge was to retain the Corvair mechanicals and present them in a sports car design to intrigue the world – perhaps the concept car would even make it into production. when the Monza arrived in the studio, its wheelbase was shortened from 108 inches to 95. The very young Giugiaro said that his vision was of a whole new shape that merged the two typical views of a car, the plan view and side elevation. The result was absolutely fresh and proved to be quite influential. It has been called the grandfather of the Porsche 928 (1977), while AMC designer Dick Teague has said he was inspired by the Testudo when conceiving the 1975 Pacer.
Giugiaro completed the project in two months and he and Nuccio drove the car from Turin to Geneva for the March 1963 Salon. When they arrived, Giorgetto washed the car himself preparatory to its going on display. Afterwards, he (although he told Retromotive he no longer remembers this since it was nearly 60 years ago!) drove it back alone. During the outward journey, he said, once they had passed Modane in France, it began to snow. But they didn’t use the wipers because the fast angle and perfect curvature of the A-pillarless windscreen made the snow slide off.
Following the Testudo’s success in Geneva, it remained the property of the company and was used for advertising and promotional
purposes around the world. Giugiaro has always been very fond of his first show car and borrowed it from Nuccio Bertone when he got married. Also, he used it privately during his summer holidays. Of course, he drove a great array of cars in those years and noted that the Testudo was – somewhat – underpowered and didn’t sound too pleasant. He spoke of the unimpressive ‘small, little noise’ of its air-cooled engine. This is where we need to consider the Corvair Testudo in the context of high automotive fashion in 1962. Significantly, this rear-engined concept car has an especially long curvaceous bonnet. The impression given is of a powerful front-engined machine with the only clue to its true configuration being some delicate cooling vents at the rear. Although Jack Brabham had already won back-to-back world championships in 1959 and 1960 driving rear-engined racers, it’s definitely the case that the trend towards rear- and, later, midengined sports and GT cars had not arrived when young Giorgetto Giugiaro tackled Bertone’s Chevrolet Corvair program.
Ferrari’s first mid-engined (known as rear-engined in the day) machine was the 1960 246 P F1, in which Phil Hill would win the 1961 world championship, and
the rear-engined LM250 would make its debut in 1963. Thus – cutting-edge F1 cars apart – rear engines were, in 1962, still mainly the province of economy cars like the Volkswagen Beetle, Renault R8 (Wheels inaugural Car of the Year in 1963) and the Corvair.
It would have been difficult for any of the Carrozzeria to have defied this trend, even in 1962. In Europe, the big fashionable sedans and coupes of the era included the Mercedes-benz 220S/SE ‘Fintail’, the fabulous Citroën Diesse, the Fiat 2300S, the Borgward Six and the Jaguar Mark X. The 911 was still in future tense and the 356 seemed markedly outmoded. Conversely, if there seemed to be a new trend in mechanical configuration, it was to keep the engine in the front, but mount it transversely to drive the front wheels – a-la Issigonis!
Probably, the most stylish rear-engined production cars in the 1962 world were the Porsche 356, the Corvair itself, the Beetle-based Volkswagen Karmann-ghia and the Renault Floride. It never seems to have been on the agenda for either Bertone or Pininfarina to emphasise the rear-engined configuration of their Corvair concept cars. Indeed, Pininfarina produced three, beginning in 1960. The studio’s most convincing Corvair was the
1962 coupé (debut, Paris Salon), a design closely related to the Fiat 2300 Lausanne. Both concepts are notably elegant and feature long bonnets – you would never know one had the engine in the rear and the other did not.
Fascinatingly, Giugiaro’s first project of which he had sole charge was done right on the cusp of the coming of a new glamour for rear-engined sports cars – pioneered gloriously by Pininfarina’s Ferrari 250LM and, in 1966, the Lamborghini Miura. In the summer of ’63, Giugiaro took the Testudo on a test drive with his girlfriend, who later become his wife. They went to Garessio to visit his parents. (His mother Maria was a seamstress and his father Mario, a painter and decorator.)
I left my place of birth, Garessio in the province of Cuneo, when I was 14 to attend an art school in Turin. I have lived in this city, which I have fallen in love with, ever since. But Garessio still means a lot to me. Then, they continued to the nearby Ligurian Sea, to a town called Alassio, to visit friends. In that emphatically premobile era, Giugiaro decided to attract their attention by angling the adjustable headlights at the second floor, while honking the horn. Within moments, a small crowd of people looked out of their second-floor windows at what must have appeared to be a UFO!
He recalls that even in 1963 there weren’t all that many cars in Italy and the Testudo aroused amazement and admiration wherever it went. The glasshouse was perhaps unprecedented in the automotive world and the entire car stood just under 42 inches in height (yes, we know!) at 106cm.
The windscreen opens complete with the ‘doors’, like some kind of folding shell or carapace. The name Testudo is commonly mistranslated from the Latin as ‘turtle’, but it means ‘tortoise’ or ‘tortoise shell’; the prefix ‘testa’ translates to ‘shell’ or ‘earthenware vessel’. The true origin of the Bertone Corvair’s Testudo name is a wheeled screen with an arched roof, used to protect besieging troops – a cover of overlapping shields was wheeled up to a wall used by the ancient Romans to protect an attacking force. Fittingly, the emblem used on the car is handmade in brass and coated with gold. About two years after designing the Testudo, Giorgetto Giugiaro went to Carrozzeria Ghia as design director, before founding his own Carrozzeria Italdesign in 1968.
The Testudo today belongs to Giugiaro and it is part of his personal collection. Before he bought the car, it was housed in the Bertone museum in Caprie, near Turin.
It was one of the first to be auctioned off and was acquired by a private collector. When Giugiaro learned of this sale, he contacted the buyer – who, understanding the emotional importance of the Testudo for its creator, was happy to resell it to him. It has been publicly shown in recent years.
In September 2017, it was used for the press launch of the prestigious Grand Basel classic art car fair in Switzerland, the event being scheduled for the following year. Then, in 2018, Giorgetto Giugiaro celebrated his 80th birthday by displaying the Testudo at the Geneva Salon, alongside his newly-created GFG Style Sibylla – his first and his latest designs side-by-side.
Later the same year, the car was requested by the Musee National de la Voiture, Compiegne, where it was exhibited for four months as a symbol of Italian design of the 1960s.
In April 2019, Giorgetto and son Fabrizio exhibited the Testudo in the Valentino Classic 2019 Park Elegance Competition, in Turin, where it won first prize in its class.
The Testudo is currently exhibited in the GFG Style private museum, the design atelier founded in 2105 by Giorgetto and Fabrizio in Moncalieri, near Torino, where 40 Giugiaro cars are displayed.
GIUGIARO COMPLETED THE PROJECT IN TWO MONTHS, AND HE AND NUCCIO DROVE THE CAR FROM TURIN TO GENEVA FOR THE MARCH 1963 SALON.