In Italy, a country that’s home to numerous small, specialized companies making exotic sports and racing cars, few can compete with SVA in their combination of obscurity with exotic engineering. Turin’s SVA flourished briefly at the end of the 1940s and produced at maximum two cars and a few more chassis. Yet the dazzling design of one of them, a single-seater, well-deserved its presentation by leading publications around the world.
SVA can best be viewed as a spiritual offshoot of Turin’s Cisitalia. That company, brainchild of industrialist and passionate car enthusiast Piero Dusio, created a sensation with its thrusting initiatives at a time when Italy’s major carmakers were struggling to recover from the privations of the wartime years. With its 1,100-cc single-seaters and sports cars Cisitalia was a shining star, attracting the best drivers of the day including Germany’s Hans Stuck and the unforgettable Tazio Nuvolari.
Dusio’s first automotive initiatives were going well, attracting worldwide attention and sales with sports cars using Pininfarina bodywork on multi-tube frames and modified Fiat engines. But he wasn’t satisfied. It had always been his dream to build and compete with a proper Grand Prix Formula One car. In this he had the support and encouragement of leading driver/engineer Piero Taruffi.
At the time, Formula One was for 1½-liter supercharged cars and 4½-liter cars with unblown engines. Most successful were Maseratis and Alfa Romeos with the smaller blown engines, seriously elaborate cars with some 300 horsepower. Taking them on would be no small undertaking.
One of Dusio’s engineers, Giovanni Savonuzzi, argued that it would be essential to build a winner. He suggested: “Why not try to find some of the German engineers who did the pre-war Grand Prix cars?” To his surprise Dusio did find them: a cadre of Porsche engineers in Austria who had designed the famous rear-engined Auto Unions. They desperately needed paying work.
Soon money was flowing out of Cisitalia to the Porsche engineers at their wartime hideaway in Gmünd. A first estimate of 20 million lire to build the cars was quickly passed as Dusio ordered even more projects for sports and Formula Two cars from the Germans—whose key people were in fact Austrian. Thirty million had been spent before work even began on building the cars.
In a heated meeting that he called, Giovanni Savonuzzi expressed serious misgivings about the project, saying that it could easily cost Dusio 100 million lire. “I don’t care,” was Dusio’s answer. “I may go broke but I must have the Grand Prix car!”
For Savonuzzi this was the final straw. As well he was less than thrilled with some Austrians who made it their business to represent Porsche in Turin. On the first of October 1947, he left Cisitalia. His work there had been of great significance. Starting with an undeveloped design by Dante Giacosa, he brought its 1.1-liter single-seaters to race-readiness.
Working in 1/10 scale, he created the low, wide modern sports car configuration that was perfected for racing by Vignale, with fins influenced by Savonuzzi’s knowledge of aerodynamics, and by Pininfarina for Cisitalia’s touring sports cars. He also invented a new muffler design that became the basis of Carlo Abarth’s business and fortune.
Before his Cisitalia days, Giovanni Savonuzzi had been the manager of Fiat’s experimental aircraft-engine department in Turin. In the chaos of post-war Italy this didn’t offer attractive prospects. Thus he took notice when a Fiat manager mentioned that Piero Dusio was looking for engineers. When Dusio interviewed Savonuzzi, the engineer suggested a salary triple what he was making at Fiat. “I’ll give you ten times as much!” boasted the industrialist. And to “ease the change from Fiat” he threw in a bonus of 300,000 lire and a company car.
Savonuzzi joined Cisitalia in August of 1945. Having worked there for more than two years under these conditions he was not badly off when he parted company with Dusio. Another leaving Cisitalia around the same time was Virgilio Conrero. Technician more than engineer, Turin-born Conrero had also been employed in Fiat’s aero-engine sector. He began employment there in 1935 and from 1939 to 1943 was in the Italian military, also concerned with aviation engines.
In 1948, the trajectories of these two men converged at via Madama Cristina 88 in Turin. This was the site of the Officine Elettromeccaniche di Vincenzo Leone, established after the war by the eponymous Leone. He had invented and was building and selling a novel power unit for mopeds and small motorcycles. It had a single horizontal cylinder with a vertical crankshaft, driving a chain through bevel gears. Thanks to higher efficiency than the usual drives, Leone’s was a popular prime mover.
A motorsports enthusiast, Vincenzo Leone competed in the 1947 Mille Miglia with a roadster using Fiat 1100 components constructed in his own workshops. These were comprehensive, including a Froude dynamometer. Leone was more than amenable when Savonuzzi and Conrero suggested that they base themselves at the via Madama Cristina with the aim of building racing cars.
Their first effort was a “Leone” sports car on a wheelbase of 86.6 inches, using torsion-bar suspension at front and rear. Its engine was the ubiquitous Fiat 1100 with twin downdraft 36-mm carburetors, tuned by Conrero to develop 60 bhp at 5,500 rpm on the 80-octane fuel then available. Given an envelope body, the Leone won its class in the 1948 Bologna-Raticosa hillclimb and was a Mille Miglia competitor in 1949, with Conrero as riding mechanic. Rebodied with cycle fenders, the Leone continued competing through 1951, latterly with an Ermini twin-cam engine.
Meanwhile, Giovanni Savonuzzi launched a much more ambitious project. He was contacted by a Californian who saw potential in an Italian-built car that could compete in the midget races that were hugely popular throughout America in the post-war years. While the Kurtis-Offy was dominant, with its unblown engine of 105 cubic inches, the rules allowed supercharged engines of 50 cubic inches or 819 cc. Here was an opportunity for an Italian engineer with supercharging know-how. Savonuzzi had acquired plenty of the latter in his aeronautical activity and in his familiarity with Porsche’s work on the Grand Prix Cisitalia.
“Why the clients turned to Savonuzzi remains a mystery,” wrote historian Alessandro Silva. They were the “Leyfield Co. of America”, which in the decades that have since passed has become a phantom entity. Perhaps it was a contact dating back to an American acquaintance of the engineer Dante Giacosa, who had discussed with Savonuzzi, just before the war, the possibility of a Midget with a Fiat 1100 engine.
“For the realisation of the project,” Silva continued, “Savonuzzi and Conrero formed the GOBI company—an acronym of unknown interpretation—based in Aosta’s Pont-Saint-Martin. The choice was perhaps dictated by Conrero’s Aosta Valley relations.”
An initial batch of ten cars was planned for construction at Vincenzo Leone’s Turin premises. There Savonuzzi, Conrero and engineers Francesco Marocco and G. Garbin bolstered their cash flow with servicing work on Cisitalias and other cars while planning the Italian-style midget. Savonuzzi and his colleagues well knew all the expert producers of components that flourished in Turin thanks to the needs of Fiat.
In his first complete car design from scratch, Giovanni Savonuzzi pulled out all the stops. Here there was no question of using recycled Fiat components. The frame was a fabrication of manganese-chrome-alloy steel with perforated box-section side members and an integral pan under the cockpit that added stiffness. While this was stare-of-the-art, it was surprising that Savonuzzi did not adopt the tubular space frame that had served Cisitalia so well.
Steering was by high-placed rack and pinion while front suspension was parallel-wishbone with the upper arms operating longitudinal torsion bars. By Italian standards an advanced feature of the single-seater was its use of telescopic dampers at a time when rotary Houdaille dampers were favored. At the front these were mounted inboard and operated by an extension from the upper wishbone—actually a single arm.
The concept of an inboard rocker had been introduced by Maserati on its 4CLT/48 in the spring of 1948, but it actuated a coil spring, not the damper. Dampers at the rear were concentric with coil springs, another feature well ahead of its time.
Rear suspension was by a de Dion axle patterned after the design used in 1937-39 by Mercedes-Benz. Each hub was guided by a long trailing arm, a layout, which required a coupling at the centre of the de Dion tube lest the tube act as an anti-roll bar. Lateral axle location was by a system of links below it.
Savonuzzi offset the midget’s frame-mounted differential to the left to permit the driver to be seated low to its right, requiring different-length half shafts. The input shaft to the limited-slip differential went under it to a pair of quick-change gears at the rear, a feature intended to appeal to the midget market, allowing fast ratio changes for different tracks. The offset of the driveline to the left gave a modest weight bias in that direction to suit anti-clockwise racing.
While the midget was to have a simple two-speed gearbox for American racing, a five-speed transmission with twin-disc clutch was planned for a European version. The latter potentially had either a 750-cc unsupercharged or, using similar components in a flat-opposed eight-cylinder, 1,100 or 1,500-cc. The largest size, when supercharged, would have had Formula One potential. Another market difference concerned the wheels, which were 15-inch for European road racing but planned to be 12-inch for the USA to suit the tires that were customary for midget racing. Brakes had finned drums with air-cooling scoops at the front.
The drive line was offset to the car’s left thanks to the design of its engine, which had four cylinders inline disposed horizontally to the right. Thus, the crankshaft was on the left, aligned with the propeller shaft. Crankcase, block and cylinder head were all of aluminum alloy, made like many other components by specialists in the Turin area well known to Savonuzzi. The block and head had separate cooling circuits with no interconnection through the head joint. This facilitated the best possible sealing of the joint, vital in a high-boost engine. Cylinder liners were wet steel.
Envisioning revs in excess of 8,000, Giovanni Savonuzzi couldn’t rely on that era’s plain bearings. Instead he specified roller bearings for the bottom end. Those for the five main bearings ran in cages while free rollers were used in the rod journals. This allowed the connecting rods to have one-piece big ends. The design required a built-up crankshaft, for which Savonuzzi devised and patented his own solution. This was described by The Autocar as follows:
“All crankpins and main bearing journals are turned as separate components and each of the crank webs, with its counterweight, forms a separate element. With the short stroke and large bearings there is a heavy overlap between each crankpin and its main-bearing journal. This is made up by machining away the main journal to accommodate the end of the crankpin. Both meet inside a figure-eight aperture in the crank web, where they are secured by a through bolt giving a simple, robust structure.”
At the front of the 202-pound engine a gear train drove its accessories, including a horizontal magneto, and its twin overhead cams. The drive to the latter from the gears was through Oldham couplings. This both eased head removal for maintenance and allowed changes in alignment. The cam lobes acted against finger-type followers.
A unique feature was the use of four hairpin-type valve springs in a cruciform pattern to close each valve. Savonuzzi adopted this solution so that each spring would be subjected to a lower level of stress to compensate for the poor spring steels that he was obliged to use. The patent showed that space under them was available for the use of a silicone-rubber cylinder to act as a damper. Exhaust valves were sodium-filled for cooling.
Bore and stroke of the four were 68 x 56 mm for 813 cc. Induction was through a vane-type supercharger of Centric design, the type of blower that was used by the Porsche engineers for their Formula One Cisitalia. Although bulky, it was chosen for its internal compression, which gave high efficiency. Driven by the front-end gear train and drawing from a single carburetor, the blower produced a boost of 1.4 bar, 20 p.s.i.
During some 150 hours of dynamometer testing ‘we had many troubles,” said Savonuzzi. “We started burning pistons. We found a casting defect in the cylinder head that was causing preignition. After that we began to get good output.” The four was ultimately credited with 148 bhp at 8,200 rpm using methanol fuel, specific performance that was consistent with Formula One cars of its era. The chassis carrying it had a wheelbase of 76.0 inches and track of 46.1 inches. The SVA’s weight was quoted as only 827 pounds.
Giovanni Savonuzzi designed an aluminum body for the racer that Rocco Motto built in his Turin workshop. It had neat apertures for engine access, a minimum of louvers and a cockpit subtly offset to the right. When the editor of Switzerland’s Automobil Revue, Robert Braunschweig, visited the workshop in May of 1950 he was struck not only by the car’s technology but also by its bodywork.
“If there should ever be a Concours d’Elegance for racing cars,” the influential editor he told his readers, “the palm will probably fall to this vehicle. Though not unlike the last Mercedes-Benz racing cars, this Lilliputian high-speed automobile probably has more successful proportions and such sensitively rounded lines that every sports enthusiast will collapse with ecstasy.”
“The body is one of Motto’s finest masterpieces in the racing-car sector,” said a book about his career. All the car’s components, said historian Alessandro Silva, “as is usual with Savonuzzi’s creations, were very compact and aesthetically magnificent.” So much so, in fact, that photos of them were clipped from magazines by this author and posted next to his desk in high school.
In the autumn of 1949, details of the midget were made public. At that time the mysterious Leyfield were still interested. Soon thereafter, however, they decided not to proceed. Although they met their financial obligations up to that stage, the project had to be suspended.
Only after a building contractor from Aosta expressed interest was it possible to complete the first car. Savonuzzi and Conrero founded a new company to undertake the project. This was the Società Valdostana di Automobili or SVA, highlighting the contributions of the Valle d’Aosta.
Clothed in Motto’s exquisitely attractive body with a low grille, it was tested by Virgilio Conrero and Swiss racer Rudi Fischer. In fact, wealthy Zurich restaurateur Fischer seemed to be a white knight for the SVA, but he returned to Ferraris after the car let him down on the first lap of a race at San Remo early in 1950—the piston problems again.
Then the SVA was prepared for the Aosta-San Bernardo hillclimb, only to have controversy flare up with the backer about its readiness. Giovanni Savonuzzi did his best to prepare it but the car failed to compete and the contractor withdrew.
On his own Savonuzzi entered the SVA for a circuit race at Alessandria. He asked the mechanic to drive it the 105 miles to the event from Aosta, perhaps hoping to bed the engine in. It survived the trip, only to retire with a burned piston after a single lap. No other entries of this unique all-SVA car are known. The SVA chassis survives, in a distressed condition, in the collection of Milan’s Edoardo Tenconi.
SVA produced enough components to be able to sell two chassis to customers. Bologna’s Pasqualino Cazzato acquired one, powered by a 750-cc Giannini engine. Equipped with lamps and cycle fenders it competed in the 1950 and 1951 Mille Miglias but without success. Using an 1,100-cc Ermini engine in another SVA chassis as a single-seater, Turin’s Ugo Puma won his class in his home-town event, the August 7, 1950, Susa-Moncenisio hillclimb.
Turin enthusiast Puma figured in another Savonuzzi project, a postscript to the SVA years. “I decided that I didn’t want to do any more racing cars,” the engineer recalled, “but I got talked into it.” With Formula Three for 500-cc cars gaining in popularity, Puma had the idea of using Moto Guzzi’s racing Bicylindrica, a 120-degree vee-twin producing 50 bhp at 8,000 rpm. This was appealing enough for Savonuzzi to put aside his reservations and pen another racing-car design. Not officially an SVA, it became known as the “Falcone” in tribute to a popular Moto Guzzi model.
Typically, for Savonuzzi, the car he created was a little jewel, a mini-Formula One car. In a frame of twin oval tubes he placed the Guzzi twin at the front with one of its cylinders pointing straight forward as it did in the motorcycle. To permit a low seating position the input to the differential from the Guzzi engine’s integral gearbox was through a transfer case that dropped the propeller shaft. This proved to be the Achilles Heel of the Falcone.
Rear suspension was again de Dion with radius arms, this time locating the tube laterally with a block sliding in the rear of the differential housing. Springing was by longitudinal torsion bars, concentric with rotary Houdaille dampers. Tubular dampers were used at the front, where coil springs controlled parallel wishbones. The steering box was located behind the engine and connected by a drag link to a three-part track rod. With an exhaust megaphone on each side, the slim Falcone had a front entry for the engine’s cooling air. “In the purest Savonuzzi style,” said historian Silva, “each part was carefully designed and finished. The car was in fact a small mechanical jewel.”
Ugo Puma entered the Falcone for the Filippini Trophy at Monza in May 1951, but it was judged unready to participate. Its next appearance was at Turin’s Valentino Park in April of 1952 in a race accompanying a Formula One event. Though Puma got off to a snappy start from a good grid position, the circuit included a level crossing over streetcar tracks. Snagging on the rails, the bottom of the transfer case was broken with complete oil loss and retirement the result. With Formula Three never catching on in Italy, no further history of this exquisite little car is known.
By 1952, the activities of SVA were winding down. Its end came in 1953 when Giovanni Savonuzzi took a senior post with Carrozzeria Ghia. This brought him into contact with Chrysler, for whom he later worked on gas-turbine engineering. His colleague Virgilio Conrero set up his own business, Conrero Autotecnica & C., as a preparer of engines and builder of sports-racing cars. His shop, which was destined to become a hub of fascinating activity, was on the same via Madama Cristina where Leone and SVA had flourished so briefly and excitingly.
The SVA racing car has been a theme for the author since its creation. He wishes to thank Dr. Alessandro Silva for valued assistance in providing additional information. Many illustrations are from the Fondo Savonuzzi in the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile Torino. Others are from Ludvigsen Partners.
