aj81spider wrote:
Fiats are beautiful, but I find they are very fickle about loving you back. Mine likes to test me in new ways all the time. "Do you really love me? Then you won't mind this leak that you thought you fixed three times before!" "Will you still love me if a two hour job to change the tie rods turns into two days?"
Of course once you start driving then you forget all those things!
I find that I love Paloma in a whole new way now.
Back when I first got her, she was a critical part of my life, she made me who I was. But now, my life is immeasurably more complicated than it was when I first got Paloma. Now I have a young child, two adult children, a couple companies, financial obligations like I could have never imagined back when I was a kid.
But back when I was a kid, I didn't work on her much because she didn't need much. I rebuilt the engine, screwed with the points and rotor as needed, changed the plugs, I changed the clutch once, I let the garage mechanic do that one, it was pretty cheap to have Fiats professionally repaired in the 1980s. I rebuilt the engine myself because it was a project with my dad and I, I'm not even sure if she really needed it that bad, I think it was more a chance for my dad and I to do yet another engine rebuild, after the Chevy Vegas, after the Studebaker President, after the Ford Pinto, after the '57 Mercury, after the Simca even ... Lord have mercy, that Simca, what a mess that car was.
But the 1800 overhead cam Fiat engine, it was a remarkable innovation of the era, it was straight up one of the sexiest engines on the road at that point. It made the British engines look like American engines made when the union was on strike. And it made the American engines look like American engines ... sure, good enough, but not necessarily works of the art.
But when we pulled the head on the Fiat, I just remember my dad's mouth dropping, he was simply flabbergasted by the beauty of the cooling channels, the careful machining, the innovation. The Italian engines were designed and built by people who loved engines. And the 1800 engine was a sight to behold after American engine design didn't change all that much since WWII. Yeah, there were lots of bolt-ons, and innovations, but the basic design itself, essentially a Model T flathead four, with double the cylinders for the American luxury cars, or even half for the economy cars of the era, like the 2-cylinder Crosby that my dad rebuilt long before I was born. That Fiat engine was something genuinely new; it was an economy car engine that achieved a level of performance not by manhandling it like the Americans, or over-cycling it like the British, or even over-machining it like the Germans, or just eliminating the errors like the Japanese. The Fiat 1800 had a level of performance form normal manufacturing and extremely high-quality design.
I recently learned that in fact it was a Yank who designed the 124 body for Pinninfarina. He was a college student in Industrial Design, took an internship in Italy, a few years flash in front of his eyes, and next thing he knew, a farm kid from the Midwest somewhere had designed the most iconic Roadster designs in the history of economy cars. Legend has it that Pinninfarina first offered the design to Alfa, who turned it down, at which point Fiat saw stars and snatched it up ... the equivalent of getting Forsberg, Ricci, Hextall, Huffman, Simon and Duschesne for a single Eric Lindross. Somehow, Fiat got this design, and on that they built an empire on which they would modernize manufacturing, get Bertone designs. Would Fiat even still be around as the megalith today without the homerun of the 124? It's hard to imagine it today, but the 124 Spider was EVERYWHERE back in the 1970s, any average high school parking lot had half a dozen there. It was an economy car, and it sold for economy car prices. The kind of people who bought a 124 weren't the kind of people who could afford to put a lot of money into them. But they didn't need that much ... yeah, some of the other Fiats are incredibly hard to find now because they were built like crap and just didn't make it. But the reason there are a still a fair number of these Spiders around is because it was actually a well-made car. Even in 2021, I've read that some people on FiatSpider.com use their 124s as their daily drivers.
Fiat hit a home run with the 124. And they knew it even more so when Alfa starting selling those Romeos and Mercedes started selling their roadsters ... all those people wanted a Fiat, she was the sexiest thing on the roads. My Paloma stood out like a sore thumb in those crowds of wannabe roadsters, she had the correct proportions. She didn't have that big stupid gouge out of the side like the Alfa, she didn't have those ridiculous long lines of the Mercedes. Her twin hood bulges may not have been necessary, but the form followed the function, and the function was that this car had one of the most advanced economy car engines on the road. Those twin cams had a purpose.
Lampredi arguably designed the single greatest rally engine in the history of the sport with that Twin Cam. And here we are, it's 2021, and the automobile industry has put out engines with lots more power, better balance, better efficiency. But even in 2021, when you turn over Lampredi's twin cam, there is an honesty to that sound that no after-market exhaust sound enhancers can replicate. The sound of of the Lampredi Twin Cam is the combined sound of one woman who weeps with despair in Paris, and one who weeps with joy in Dakar.
And I have that fucking engine. It's in my economy car that I bought in 1980-something, with money that I saved from scooping ice cream at the Baskin Robbins off of the Valley Highway on Colorado Boulevard. Minimum wage back then was $3.35 an hour or so an hour, and I made $2 an hour, eventually I made $2.10 an hour. And that was enough to save up for a couple years until I turned 17 and buy my dream car. Yeah, it was the dream car of the elite and the wealthy too, but because it was cheap, they couldn't let it be their dream car. So they dreamed about the Fiat 124 with the Lampredi Twin Cam, but they bought the Mercedes, of the Alfa, or maybe the Lancia if they were high, or perhaps the Maseratti if they had just inherited some dough, or the Triumph if they couldn't afford any of those but still heard the Lampredi Twin Cam notes in their dreams.
And that was why my dad and I rebuilt that engine, I suspect. Because he wanted a look inside the legendary Lampredi Twin Cam. We pulled off that head, he looked inside and I remember the look on his face was not unlike the look on my son's mother's face when they first pulled him out of her and showed him to her; liquidity ... a face that melts with the sheer beauty of what's in front of it. The Lampredi Twin Cam gives us who love advanced engine design that look, heaven help us, it's the look of a mother who sees her baby for the first time. It's an engine design.
Aurelio Lampredi. What can we say about the man? He learned the art of of designing advanced engines from Caproni. Italian aircraft may not have been able to win WWII, but they were able to win the hearts of a generation of men and women who flew after the war. Lampredi cut his teeth designing aircraft engines, and then WWII was suddenly over, and the American Titans of Industry said to Caproni, "please, no more war stuff for a while, can you put Lampredi in on the cars?" So Lampredi dutifully moved over, he didn't seem to care, it was just a different application. You see, Lampredi didn't seem to car much about cars, boats, planes, hovercraft ... he cared about engines. What the machine did with his torque once it came out of his drive shaft, that's THEIR business. But from the moment that carb said "here you go" to Lampredi's engine and gave it that puff of air and fuel, it was all Lampredi from there out. He did what the Americans said could not be done without expensive components. He did what the Germans said could not be done without expensive manufacturing. He did what the British said could not be done without a lineage. He did what the Japanese said "hold on, how did you do that?"
And all of a sudden, us Yanks could buy a legendary roadster, for the cost of what some soda jerk could make for $2 and hour. Yeah, the Spider put Fiat on the map. The others? Seat? Simca? Saab? Volva? They all had to take their own way, but none of them would launch them into the stratosphere like Fiat. And of course, what they are now is not quite what they were then. Mazda even had to hand them the new Spider out of nothing short of obsessed fandom over the Spider by the Miata's designers. (Can you imagine the Miata meetings, them trying to reverse engineer the entire Spider from wheel-bearings to bonnet? No wonder the Japanese engineers have to get drunk every night; they were given the task of reverse engineering the Spider, and it took them twenty years to figure it out!)
And here we are, FiatSpider.com. We each have one or more of these legendary machines, these time capsules of what life used to be when a normal person could inject the most advanced engineering on the planet into their life for a relative pittance. We all love our Spiders, and they love us, except when they don't, right AJ81? When they test our love? Paloma never tested my love. I have to give her that, I owe her that truth. But the truth is also that I have tested her love. But now I'm going to make up for it. This is my second time around with Paloma, and I'm going to treat her as the woman she is.
