Sergio Scaglietti, who died at the age of 91 on November 20, was the son of a carpenter who became Ferrari’s body stylist par excellence. Today, the cars he fashioned by hand in the ’50s and ’60s are worth tens of millions of dollars each.
Scaglietti was a painfully modest man who, after being feted by an admiring crowd at the Pebble Beach Concours in the early ’90s, told his sophisticated audience, “I just did my job.” This is the man who shaped such masterpieces as the 1958 Ferrari Testa Rossa and Ingrid Bergman’s 375 MM, built the 250 GTO and many other Ferrari racing cars including sports prototypes.
Scaglietti was born on January 9, 1920 in Maranello, the fabled home of much of Italy’s motoring exotica, and after leaving school at age 13 he went to work at a local garage repairing accident-damaged cars. The place was opposite Scuderia Ferrari, so it wasn’t long before the Commendatore cast his eye over some of the younger man’s work. After a tryout fixing a Ferrari mud flap, Enzo channelled an increasing amount of more demanding work to Scaglietti, and such was its volume that the 31-year-old panel beater opened his own Carrozzeria Scaglietti in 1951, after which the two men became close friends and constant collaborators.
Scaglietti’s road car work was split mainly between constructing Ferrari bodies of his own design and those of Pininfarina. He always worked in aluminum, using his panel-beating abilities to create what were effectively a series of one-off, handmade, often radical designs. He shaped each example by beating sheets of his preferred medium over sandbags, guided, as he often said, by his own eye, good taste and aerodynamic knowledge.
The coveted Scaglietti & C. badge eventually started to appear on the cars designed and built exclusively by the modest Sergio, including the fabled Testa Rossa (below), which had a major influence on car design and is a model that continually appreciates in value. For instance, a 1957 prototype of the car recently sold at auction for a record $16.4 million. Another of his bespoke masterpieces is the Ferrari 250 GTO, of which only 36 were built in the early ’60s. They now change hands for almost as much as that Testa Rossa.
Scaglietti sold his carrozzeria to Ferrari in the ’70s, but still managed the firm until he retired in 1985. In 2004, at the behest of Ferrari president Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the company launched a new four-seater grand tourer called the 612 Scaglietti as a tribute to the great artist. At the news of Sergio Scaglietti’s death, the flags at Scuderia Ferrari were lowered to half-mast as a gesture of respect and remembrance.
by Robert Newman
