The amply proportioned Vincenzo Lancia was a double hero, if you will. He was a successful racing driver with over 20 victories to his credit and cars bearing his name won classics like the Mille Miglia, Targa Florio, Carrera Panamericana and, as part of the Fiat group, world rally and endurance racing championships.
The son of a wealthy soup canner, Lancia was born on August 24, 1881 at Fobello, Italy, a few kilometers from the Swiss border. Vincenzo was a lackluster student at Turin Technical School and dropped out when he was 17. For some time, he had had his eye on Giovanni Ceirano, who rented a stable in Turin owned by Lancia’s father Giuseppe, where he made bicycles before moving on to building cars. Vincenzo badgered his father so much that the brow-beaten Lancia senior persuaded Ceirano to employ him—and that is where Vincenzo learned his engineering basics. Fiat was founded in 1899 and bought the Ceirano company as a going concern. They appointed young Lancia their chief test driver, from which he graduated to the factory Fiat racing team, where he joined aces of the day like Felice Nazzaro and Alessandro Cagno.
Lancia won the 1904 Coppa Florio, run over a triangular Brescia-Cremona-Mantua-Brescia road circuit, in a 76-hp Fiat and was well in the lead of the 1905 Gordon Bennett Cup, in which he recorded the fastest lap of 52.6 mph, until his Fiat spluttered to a halt and Léon Théry shot past him in a Brasier to take the win. Lancia was in tears as his teammates Nazzaro and Cagno also raced by to come home 2nd and 3rd—if Vincenzo had not retired in a cloud of steam he could have won and given Fiat a prestigious 1-2-3. Lancia had a series of near misses at the Targa Florio. He led the first event, in 1906, until a leaking fuel tank put him out of the race, which was won again by his teammate Alessandro Cagno. He came in 2nd to Nazzaro in 1907: that was the year Lancia also won the eliminator for the Kaiser-Preis, a knock-off of the defunct Gordon Bennett Cup, organized by the Automobile Club of Germany on the Taunus circuit. But Nazzaro beat him to the draw again and won the race and a huge, decorative German trophy. Vincenzo was well ahead in the 1908 Targa Florio, when he stopped on the third and last lap to change a suspect wheel—which later turned out not to be suspect! The delay cost him victory and he again finished 2nd.
Motor racing was not the only thing on Vincenzo Lancia’s mind at the start of the 20th century. He was toying with the idea of following in Felice Nazzaro’s footsteps and building his own cars. A notion he turned into reality in 1906, when he formed a partnership with fellow Fiat employee Claudio Fogolin and established Lancia & C. And that was when Vincenzo blossomed into a true automobile engineering entrepreneur—he bubbled over with original ideas and began making cars that created new trends and that were light, quick, reliable and agile. A whole stream of them appeared, including the 18-24 HP, Delta, Theta, Kappa and Lambda, the vehicle for which Vincenzo made an exception. The Lambda was the world’s first production car of unitary construction, had four-wheel braking, independent front suspension and a 2,000-cc single overhead camshaft engine. Even though Vincenzo was dead against costly motorsport as a manufacturer, he weakened when the Mille Miglia was announced in 1926 and entered a works team of six Lambdas for the first Brescia-Rome-Brescia marathon in 1927. He reaped a meager reward—a 3,000-cc class win by Gildo Strazza, plus 4th and 5th overall. Strazza would go on to score a 3rd overall for Lancia in 1928, plus three more class wins.
Vincenzo was even loath to call any of his products sports cars and, apart from those early forays into the Mille Miglia, kept away from motor racing. But privateers had different ideas and hoards of them entered little 1,194-cc V4 Lancia Augustas for the 1936 Targa Florio. The event was run over two laps of the Piccolo Madonie road circuit, one that cries out for good handling and reliability rather than the brute force of raw power. Augustas took the first four places, the win going to Costantino Magistri. Vincenzo had won the Targa at last, even if as a manufacturer rather than a driver.
Heavily overweight for almost all his adult life, Vincenzo Lancia had a heart attack and died on February 15, 1937, after which his son Gianni took over the company, but his attitude to motorsport was completely different. His cars, many designed by the great Vittorio Jano, would go on to win the Targa Florio in 1952, 1953 and 1954; stage their famous 1-2-3 in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana and win the 1954 Mille Miglia, in which Lancias also took another 10 class wins. Riding this wave of success, Gianni decided to jump in with both feet and compete in Formula One. He commissioned Jano to design and build the beautiful Lancia D50, which was late arriving but began its competitive life in the 1955 championship, driven by Alberto Ascari, Gigi Villoresi and Eugenio Castellotti. Ascari drove his D50 into the Monte Carlo harbor that year and died four days later trying to sort out the rear-end handling of Castellotti’s Ferrari sports racer at Monza. The loss of the great Milanese driver and his company’s waning finances, further weakened by his top heavy and highly expensive motor racing program, meant Gianni Lancia agreed to Fiat’s request to cede his entire F1 operation, including six D50s, to Scuderia Ferrari. Lancia was then taken over by Fiat, ironically, the company with which Vincenzo began his motor racing career.
Lancia cars continued to be made by the Fiat group and covered their famous name with glory in the second half of the 20th century. Juan Manuel Fangio won the fourth of his five F1 world titles in a Lancia-Ferrari D50, Fulvias the 1972 International Rally Championship, Deltas almost a dozen world rally championships in the ’80s and ’90s and Montecarlos won the 1979 and 1980 World Endurance Championship for Makes.
