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I had posted this just before AlfaBB outage, and as it has not been restored, I post again. A way to boost this thread, as it somehow fell asleep since the outage.
About the tubular chassis issue. I think it’s worth quoting a few sentences from Busso’s book, as I re-read it in preparation for a more complete obituary to be published. Here are the quotes, translation is mine (p80 sqq.):
“The was much ado about Colombo’s Disco Volante […]. But for Satta and I, there were several issues on which we disagreed […]. The width of the car, caused by the fenders fairing the wheel down to the hubs, was excessive, worth only to grasp the last km/h on the straight. For a normal road use, it was too wide, and the extra 30-40 cm compared to a traditional car would have been better spent in an increase of the track. […] But for us the major drawback was the use of a live axle, albeit it had the ‘magic’ BMW location. Also the re-work of the 1900 block with aluminium instead of iron was odd, for a small series, as the cost of such a small batch exceeded the worth of a few kg saved”
“It was not difficult for us to convince the Direction to insist on the subject of a sports car, with suitable corrections, […] concentrating the operation on the largest engine.”
“As an assistance for designing the chassis of the car was the coachworkers group headed by Ivo Colucci; I was entrusted the mechanical part, engine, transmission, suspensions, steering and brakes” He then lists some features: enlarged to 3.5-litre, dry sump, 6-horizontal carbs, 282HP and 33kgm torque. 5-speed gearbox from the 3000 project, front suspension from the 1900 and DeDion with low roll axis, in line with the front suspension one.”
“Bodied by Colli, it came out as a nice coupé, but immediately criticized by the testers as allowing poor visibility. It weighted 1000kg, one hundred less than the C50.”
“It first hit the road on Feb. 3rd, 1953, still with the 3-litre engine, and immediately Sanesi rated the car as unbeatable”
A first comment of mine: the Colli Coupé, with all its specific mechanicals and its specific chassis was ready before the 3.5 engine, so it’s unlikely that the Disco 012 could have been fitted with a 3.5. That would make no sense, since the 3000CM was designed as an improvement of Colombo’s shortcomings.
Further, Busso explains that all three cars suffered the same chassis failure. Actually Fangio’s was just short of the terminal breakout. His front wheels indeed had already got some “independence”, but it was up to Bonini, entrusted the next day to bring the car back to Milan, to hear the fatal “tac” meaning the total failure, while he was steering at standstill to get out of the parking place. Instead, he states that the Le Mans retirements were due to errors in machining and assembly of the cars, caused by the overload of work at the time, dealing with the “750” and the Romeo van. The decision to enter a single car at the following races was intended as a way to lighten the burden of work of the workshop. Busso then gives Sanesi’s accident at Spa as a driving error, occurred when overtaking under hard rain.
Kling’s accident at Nürburgring, this is an interesting point, is said: “Kling […], while training for the 1000km race, happened to hit a rabbit in the middle of the windscreen: went off road without physical consequences”.
My comment: we have discussed before this point, and Busso’s tale doesn’t fit Kling’s own. I guess that Kling’s witness, written in times closer to the event, is more likely than Busso’s late reconstruction. I would expect that Busso’s recollection include that the chassis weakness should have been corrected after the MM, and he won’t reckon that the same inconvenient happened again after modification to the cars. Now, keep in mind the dates: Sanesi wrote off a car at Spa on July, 25th. Kling another a few days later (I have not the date, but the training was not yet the official pre-race qualifications, and Busso gives it as “still in July”, but yet after Spa). On September 6th, Fangio wins the Merano race with a single spider 6C300CM. We know that Fangio himself destroyed another Spider the previous week, during practice at Monza. So the two Spiders were ready at the end of August.
It’s unlikely that Kling’s car was converted into one of the Spiders in such a short time, more so even if it had actually been affected by the infamous chassis failure. If one remembers that in Italy, August is holiday time and all factories are closed, it’s not very likely either that the Spa car was one of the Spiders, but it could be, if the car was not too badly damaged. We have no document on this point, but I would rather go for a Spider project started earlier, maybe directly after MM, as a mean to correct both the chassis inconvenient and the visibility issue.
Anyway there were two surviving Colli Coupé bodies after the 1953 summer: 212039MI (0125), Bonnier’s car, as it’s now evidenced that Bonnier got a fully bodied car; and 212038MI (0128), the spare car at Merano, as it can be read on the reg. plate. The second spare car at Merano, intended for Carini, could thus be 0125 if we assume that the Colli coupe bodies damaged/destroyed were not repaired. Those cars are thus unlikely the crashed ones at Spa and Nürburgring.
We have no clues on the Spider crashed at Monza, but Fangio’s winning car sports a reg plate later than the Coupé batch, which follow each other: 222370MI. That means the car was registered later, and we know that Alfa Romeo was more likely to fit the same plates on several cars instead of re-registering existing cars, so I would conclude that it’s a new chassis, not a LM car rebodied.
Back to Busso’s text: (on Merano’s victory)”For me the Merano victory’s joy was somewhat spoiled by the fact that, for understandable reasons of image, the Direction accepted that the press insisted calling my car ’Disco Volante’. The interest for a sports car, possibly with several engine capacities, was still strong […] It was decided to insist with the 3500. It was not easy for me to convince Satta to have the chassis redesigned by my men. Hruska played a decisive role as he supported my request. The building of a prototype chassis was entrusted to GILCO, and for the bodywork we hired Touring. All that happened in December, 1953. The cost of a multitubular chassis would have been high, and production would not have gone beyond a few dozen. We then started thinking of something smaller, both for engine capacity and complexity, possibly coming back to the old scheme of a chassis with main side tubes.” The first thing is the 3000PR, the second one the Sportiva. This is Busso’s own opinion on the dispute about calling “Discos” the CMs.
Now, and it was my main point about this post, there’s another version, shorter, of Busso’s text, published in the volume 3 of “Archivio Storico Alfa Romeo”, published in FeB. 2000. Here we read (pp. 86-87 – about Sanesi leading the MM early stages):
“He was eventually stopped by a failure of the chassis, the same on which caused Kling’s retirement when leading in Rome. Same thing was about to happen as well to Fangio, who, still in the lead in Florence, had to slow down to eventually finish 2nd in Brescia. The failure of the chassis, that was not a design of ours, was not the only one that year for those cars.” Then he follows with the same sentence as above on the Le Mans retirements.
This leaves us with two questions: 1) who had really designed the flawed 6C3000CM chassis and 2) who has actually written and/or edited Busso’s original text for his book.
On the first question, I would say that the hypothesis most probable is that he refers on one side to the work of adapting the original, Colombo’s, Disco Volante chassis to the CM spec, entrusted to Colucci & colleagues, who didn’t intervene on the front end; in the second quote, he possibly wants to charge Colombo, without direct reference, for the responsibility of the failures. Otherwise, there’s a clear contradiction between two Busso’s texts. The reference to “not the only failure that year” could as well refer to Kling’s accident, but it’s not explicit.
The first question I don’t know, but I have to stress that, as often, Busso’s book has been poorly edited, with a lot of huge errors in the picture captions (one for all: a cross-cut of his latest V6 in the fifties’ section captioned: “Cross cut of the 12 valves 6C designed by Busso that first ran on the bench in 1949”). As Busso kept a daily scrapbook from the 40s, there are a lot of very precise references to dates and facts in his book, but strangely enough, there are also blatant errors. I guess we have to blame the editor, not Busso, for that.
NB: I’ll be away a few days and without internet, so excuse my forthcoming silence just after I’ll have given a bump to the thread.
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