Asa RB 613 Roll-Bar - Mini-Ferrari in Corvette look
07/18/2024
How sweet! Someone has fitted fixed headlights behind Plexiglas to their Corvette C3 to make it look more like a Ferrari. They even thought of matching Pirelli tires on central locking wheels.
What at first glance looks like unsuccessful small-series tinkering turns out to be - unsuccessful small-series tinkering. Albeit somewhat differently than initially assumed. In fact, the small sports car with the Coke bottle line was closer to a Ferrari than a Corvette - which, at the time the photo above was taken, still had to wait a year and a half for its lemonade bottle hips.
Instead of a Europeanized version of America's number one sports car, the little runabout presented at the 1966 Geneva Motor Show was a derivative of the Asa 1000 GT- the small coupé that had its origins in the "Ferrarina" presented in 1959. The plastic bodywork was designed by Luigi Chinetti Junior, whose father successfully fielded Ferraris in endurance racing with his "North American Racing Team".
The most striking feature of the design was the roll bar in a roof end like the Ferrari 250 LM, which gave the Asa offshoot its name: RB for roll bar. This supposed overemphasis was entirely justified, as the roof section between the windshield and the bar was removable, making the RB 613 one of the first "safety convertibles". The number in the name was made up of the number of cylinders and displacement in deciliters in the old Ferrari manner.
Like its big brothers from Maranello, the Asa RB 613 was also used by NART in motorsport. For example at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966, where François Pasquier and Robert Mieusset had to retire after an accident on the 51st lap. The women's duo Suzy Dietrich/Donna Mae Mims fared better, finishing 25th in the 1967 12 Hours of Sebring.
It was the last small success for Asa before the company had to close at the end of 1967. Until then, Carrozzeria Corbetta had only produced four examples of the "Roll-Bar": three RB 613s and a model with a 1.8-liter four-cylinder engine, which should have been called "RB 418" according to its own logic, but was never called that and was originally intended for the US market. Would the "Roll-Bar" have been a success there? At least it would have had the right look for it. No Corvette was built longer than the C3
