From here to infinity  Words and images by Peter Collins

You are walking in the streets of Turin in the 1950s when you catch sight of something in the corner of your eye. It’s not so much something obvious as a shape that shouldn’t really be there. In a millisecond you catch a glimpse of something that could have been in War of the Worlds or 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.

Alberto Morelli was out and about.

Designers and engineers had been well-aware of the problems of fluid movement past solids for hundreds of years. Da Vinci’s many designs alone made this clear and just the simple problem of designing river-bridge abutments to allow water the smoothest passage without building up dangerous pressures on the structures, had occupied hydraulic and aerodynamic engineers for a long time.

Movement through water and movement through air represent much the same problem, so it is no surprise, in retrospect, that the first notable Italian streamliner, the Castagna Alfa Romeo car of 1914, built for Marco Ricotta, looked like a drop of water travelling in reverse. A Professor Panetti had established an Aeronautics School within Turin Polytechnic back in 1912 and by 1950 two engineers, Alberto and Pietro Morelli, were beginning to think in terms of what would happen if the theories of gliding and cars were brought together. Alberto had already set an Italian distance record of 300 kilometres in a glider of his own design and so, by 1952, he started on his first car.

Featured here is his 1956 M-1000 in dark blue with conventionally-spaced wheels and with bulbous screen. Alberto drove it more than 30,000 kilometres and it may well look like a ‘50s Fiat Multipla dressed up to go record-breaking round the Monza bowl, but in fact there was a lot of innovative thinking involved. The windscreen was plexiglass, the door-handles retractable to cut down on drag and the rear-mounted engine was fed cooling air through a Naca duct. All these ideas came from aircraft and helped endow M-1000 with a Cx – the coefficient of aerodynamic penetration – of 0.295. This was tiny compared to the average figure generated by the mobile brick walls on the road at the time.

All the tunnel work had been done using models and when Pininfarina picked up the aerodynamic baton and started running with it they realised a full-sized tunnel was needed and thus their Grugliasco facility was born. Pininfarina’s first contribution, with Alberto still consultant, was the famous vehicle with rhomboidal wheel arrangement, the PF-X. This was followed by the PF-Y that was a cleaned-up M-1000.

Pininfarina’s CHR Special Energy Project of 1978 ended up having vague similarities to a current Maserati QP holding its breath in. Into the 1980s, Giugiaro furthered the practicalities with his almost timeless Lancia Medusa and bits of plastic sprouted from various strategic places on production Fiats in an effort to allow air to flow unimpeded over their bodies.




Meanwhile, Alberto came up with the Rhomboidale in 1992, furthering Pininfarina’s theme of thirty years before, but in the understatement of Ing Sergio Limone, a former pupil of Morelli, “It was unstable.”

And so the research continues....