To mark the change from the V-10 to V-8 engines for 2006 Formula 1 season, an exhibition of famous 8-cylinder cars is to open at Maranello’s Galleria Ferrari just before the start of the F1 championship in March. And they will not all be Ferraris, either.
The show will include two Alfa Romeos and a Lancia. One of the Alfas is the incredible Bimotore with which Tazio Nuvolari set new class B (5,001-cc to 8,000-cc) speed records on the Italian autostrada that runs from Florence to the coast on June 15, 1935. He averaged 321.125 km/h in the Bimotore for the flying kilometer, 321.428 km/h for the flying mile, and clocked a top speed of 336.252 km/h. The other Alfa is the little Mantuan’s 8C 2300 that he drove to victory in the 1932 Grand Prix of Monaco. The Lancia is the D50 in which Juan Manuel Fangio won (with some behind-the-scenes help from Peter Collins) the 1956 Formula 1 World Championship.
The Ferraris that will make up this exhibit will include the 248 SP powered by Ferrari’s first 8-cylinder engine, John Surtees’s F1 world championship-winning 158, the unraced Harvey Postlethwaite-designed Formula Indy car of 1986, right through to the recent 430 Challenge.
The exhibition will continue until the end of April. Opening hours will be from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
By Robert Newman
