A good story ...
11/14/2018
... doesn't always have to be true. But let's imagine the designers and tinkerers at Pininfarina, who in 1968 created a new super sports car, a late successor to the Ferrari 250 GTO, from nothing in a short space of time. Well, not quite out of nothing. The basis was a chassis supplied to Pininfarina by Ferrari. A racing car chassis with an F1 three-liter V12 engine.
The result was the Ferrari 250/P5, which caused a sensation at the 1968 Geneva Motor Show because, with its curves and spectacular headlights as well as the furrowed rear end, it looked completely different from the creations of other designers and coachbuilders who had already committed themselves to the wedge shape.
Well, the idea of building a gentleman racer as a successor to the 250 GTO in series production came to nothing. However, Pininfarina used the design ideas from the P5 for another creation called the Alfa Romeo 33/2 Prototipo Speciale. Even P5 sheet metal parts are said to have been reused, while the original P5 was no longer needed. The Alfa Romeo prototype made its first appearance at the 1969 Turin Motor Show, but turned out to be a dead end, as the wedge-shaped era had finally dawned at the end of the 1960s.
If you search the web, you will find another apparent piece of the puzzle in this story, namely the whereabouts of the chassis that sat under the P5 skin. This was installed in the Ferrari 212E Montagna, you can read there.
Unfortunately, this story can hardly be reconstructed, because not only does the Montagna have different dimensions, but you also have to wonder whether Ferrari would really have used an old prototype chassis to build the racing car with which Peter Schetty ultimately became European Hillclimb Champion.
It would have been a good story, but it can hardly be proven on its own ...
Incidentally, the aforementioned Ferrari 212E Montagna (pictured is the original bodywork that still exists today, which was transferred to a different chassis at the time) also had an eventful life, but that is another story and will be told another time.
The story of the Ferrari 250/P5, on the other hand, can be read in the upcoming Zwischengas annual magazine 2019 , which will be published in mid-December 2018 ...
