On a rare sunny day in late spring, on empty roads in Wiltshire, this car was a complete delight. It handled well, was very comfortable, had plenty of interior space and went well enough.
So it should have done, it’s a Lancia, derived from the world-famous Aurelia but, in its very quality and bearing, therein lies the genesis of the end of Lancia as the company owner Gianni wanted it to be.
The full title of this car is Lancia Aurelia B50—or not, but we’ll come to that later—Pininfarina Cabriolet, and therein it encapsulates so many of the problems that, frankly, Lancia brought upon itself. However, it is impossible not to repeat that this is a great car, as are all Lancias of this period. The problem was, at the time, the company was acting with what can best be described as a large dollop of naivety. Or maybe it was just trying to cover every corner of the market.
It is impossible to overestimate the effect of World War II on the manufacturing base of Italy. Factories and towns were wiped out as the pendulum of the conflict swung from side to opposing side. Once the Allies had invaded the south of the country in an effort to retake German-occupied territory, a country that had already been pounded by the weapons of one side, was repeatedly attacked again by the others and Northern Italy was particularly severely hit.
It was reckoned that Alfa Romeo would be incapable of ever resuming car construction again, such was the destruction wrought upon its factories, and the same could be said for a lot of those in Turin.
Despite all of the destruction going on around them, however, by 1943 Lancia felt confident enough to recall its technical and experimental teams from Padova, where they had been evacuated, to Torino, to start thinking about where the company should be once the fighting was over. It was flat out building trucks and commercial vehicles at its plant in Bolzano, so the idea of starting design and development work on a superior car for after the war may seem optimistic, but that was the way Gianni Lancia wanted to go, despite the fact that the company actually had little spare cash for development projects.
It was obvious that, successful as it may have been, the pre-war Aprilia would need to be replaced with a more modern model come the end of the war, and Lancia needed to be ready. With the brilliant engineer Vittorio Jano on board, in charge of the experimental department, and Francesco di Vergilio on the technical side, the latter started looking at ways of utilizing and developing a V6 engine for the new car.
A vee angle of between 40 and 80 degrees was decided upon, and eventually 60-degrees was considered best. By 1947 an Aprilia was running with a 1589-cc version of the engine, and it proved successful and reliable. By 1949, capacity had been increased and the fruits of all the engine work were finally revealed to the public at the Turin show of 1950 when Lancia proudly unveiled the Aurelia. The car featured a pillarless body and unitary construction, inevitably with Lancia sliding-pillar front suspension.
This first example of the model was the B10 sedan, and its V6 was up to 1754-cc. By 1958, there had been 20 further models based on the Aurelia chassis and our featured car here is but one of those. This huge number of variants can, in retrospect, be seen as another part of the jigsaw of reasons that together contributed to Lancia’s failure and later sale to cement magnate Carlo Pesenti in 1955.
Our car is a B50; when the first B10 sedan was announced, Lancia decided to cover its traditional coachbuilt market with a slightly longer version of the car, but available as a chassis only. Pinin Farina was the most prolific manufacturer of bespoke Lancias, and this relationship dated back to the very start of the Torinese carrozzeria in June 1930. Battista Farina had become stultified working with his family at Stabilimenti Farina so he decided to break out on his own, and his first commission was a Lancia Dilambda for the Queen of Romania.
Battista’s main problem was lack of money, but an Aunt helped him with that and then Vincenzo Lancia told him that if he did start up on his own, he would provide him with work. This connection between what became Pininfarina and Lancia was to become as strong a bond as the later Ferrari/Pininfarina relationship that exists to this day.
So, we can say that a B50 Aurelia such as this would have been fitted with the 1754-cc V6 developing a weedy 56 bhp at 4000 rpm. It would have had a four-speed gearbox in the rear transaxle, and would have had sliding-pillar front suspension and an independent rear featuring Lancia’s patented semi-trailing arms and coil springs. There was a B51 available as well, the only specification changes being 185 instead of 165 tires and a different final drive ratio—you can see how Lancia was beginning to create cost problems for itself.
The owner of this car, serial Lancia man Adrian Rudler, has collaborated with expert Wim Weernink, and research reveals that 484 B50 chassis were made between 1950 and 1952, of which 265 were bodied by Pinin Farina as Cabriolets—but they were not all the same. They were all slightly longer than the sedan at 2910-mm against 2860-mm. What is more remarkable is that they were offered for sale in the period factory brochures.
All these cars were right-hand drive, or left-hand drive in Lancia-speak because, according to them, a car with the steering-wheel on the right was for left hand drive markets!
It is clearly possible to see how the coachbuilt market simply faded away as the 1950s got into their stride. The total number of chassis-only Aurelias made by Lancia comes to 780. Of these, the B50/1 of 1950-’52 account for the previously mentioned 484, while the subsequent B52/3 of 1952-’53 totalled less than 200, with the final separate-chassis model being designated B55/6 in 1954 totalling only 14 cars. The writing had been on the wall.
Adrian Rudler’s B50, chassis number 1443, was first laid down at the factory on Saturday March 17, 1951. The chassis was completed by the 20th and it was available for sale by July 18. It was despatched to Pinin Farina on July 28th. Interestingly, it was originally fitted with a B10 1756-cc engine, but this and the transaxle were changed at the factory before sale to a B21 2000-cc unit offering upward of a more useful 70 bhp. Thus, theoretically, it could be referred to as a B52.
On May 15, 1953, the car was registered NO 29828 in Beltrani di Omegna, to one Attilio Edoardo. He kept the car for a year, then sold it to Amleto Sala of Milan, who re-registered it MI 276425. It is thought that, at this point, the car moved from dealer to dealer in Milan, as a month later it was transferred to Adriana Maiocchi and then, only ten days after that, it was transferred to one Adele Zorlone.
By December 10, 1955, 1443 had found a long-term home in the hands of Giovanni di Filippo Cagiati in Rome and was duly re-registered once again, this time as 241036 Roma. After seven years’ ownership, it moved briefly into the custody of Janet Samuelian Aidala, who only kept the car for four months before moving it on to famous Economics professor Richard Murphey Goodwin on April 17, 1963. Only two months later, Goodwin had taken up a position at Cambridge University, took the car with him, thus it was re-registered in the UK as 922 EER.
Ten years later, Professor Goodwin had returned to Italy and the car was acquired by a Brian Fenton in Northamptonshire, and due to its now rough condition, was taken off the road in 1973. Little was done and it moved on again, in 1983, to Aurelia Consortium member Anthony Smallhorn. A year later, it was in the hands of Lancia aficionado Ron Francis, who finally started the car’s much-deserved restoration. However, even this proved to involve a long procrastination and so, finally, the partly finished project was taken up by Adrian Rudler in 2008. After two years hard graft, the car was finally ready and, standing in the warm bucolic sunshine, it all seems worth the wait and effort. Finished in its typical Lancia blue metallic, it looks magnificent.
As the 1940s turned into the ‘50s, Pininfarina was looking ever more intently across the Atlantic to the U.S. market, and much of the design is more than a nod in that direction. First impressions are of a solid, dependable look, again typically Lancia. The very rare sight of a 2000 badge on the car gives the game away regarding the factory engine upgrade, while the U.S. market would no doubt have appreciated the roomy interior with what appears at first sight to be a bench front seat, but is in fact two split seats separately adjustable. There is room, in a pinch, for six with the roof down although, considering that used to be a popular marketing point of the period, I have often wondered where anyone got that number of people to go with them on a regular basis.
It’s time for me to climb in and set off on 30 miles of varied country road. I thought that the car would be ponderous, but nothing could be farther from the case. The steering feels nicely weighted once under way and there is little play in the massive white plastic steering wheel’s movement. I had visions of the four-speed transaxle, operated by a slender lever on the column, being at least erratic, if not difficult in operation, but once you get the feel of where the slots are, it can be whipped around as quickly as you wish. Not that that is the point, this is clearly not a sports car, but it is a fast tourer and with more than adequate brakes to deal with the performance. With a retail value of well over £120K, I was not going to take any chances, but 1443 felt as if it really wanted to be going much more quickly than I was prepared to take it.
As always with a Lancia, the ride was positively magic-carpet. The car disposed of road irregularities with disdainful ease, while always purring with its distinctive V6 exhaust note. The Aurelia’s V6 was the first such production unit, and it went on to power many a successful competition B20 GT up to 2500-cc in capacity.
With Adrian at the wheel the car literally picked up her skirts and flew. As previously stated, this is no sports car but, sinuous roads can be dispatched easily at a cruising gait of around 70 mph—and the occupants stay unruffled within.
In the end, the world caught up with cars like these bespoke Lancias, and what little profit (if any) Gianni Lancia was making on them soon became swallowed up in his desire for racetrack fame with his fabulous D series sports cars and the D50 Grand Prix car.
One of the last of these chassis-only Aurelias, however, became the genesis for Lancia’s next big car, introduced under the Pesenti regime, when Pininfarina constructed the Florida body kit. That car evolved into the Flaminia and from then on, for good or bad, Lancias moved ahead into the modern world.
A huge thank you to Adrian Rudler, who has decided to sell 1443 to finance his next Lancia project, for my time with the car; it exudes that indefinable sense of enjoying all the benefits of a previous age while being modern at the same time.
Thanks also to European Classic Cars. For more details contact: [email protected].
SPECIFICATIONS
Chassis: B50 platform chassis constructed by Lancia
Body: Constructed by Pininfarina on Lancia chassis.
Suspension: Lancia sliding pillars at front. Independent with Lancia patented semi-trailing arms and coil springs at rear.
Brakes: Hydraulic drums. Inside the wheels at the front. Inboard with the differential at the rear.
Wheelbase: 2910-mm
Track: 1300-mm
Weight: 770-kg B50/1 chassis
Drive type: Engine-speed propeller shaft to rear transaxle.
Engine: 1991-cc V6
Power: 70 bhp standard car
Carburetion: Solex 30 AAI twin choke (standard car)
Bore and stroke: 72-mm x 81.5-mm
Transmission: 4-speed in unit with differential at rear
