915096 not an Ala Spessa in origin?
Nobody has mentioned it yet here so I will remind that "Ala Spessa" means "thick wing", "wide wing" or "large wing". (edit: Thanks to gtv2000 for an additional "precision" here.)
915096 was almost certainly not yet built when the other "Ala Spessa" cars were racing on the Targa Abruzzo.
To make things clear, I like cars. I like cars that function as cars should and I really don't care if others wish to label a car simplistically with terms like "good" or "bad" or "real" or "fake" or "replica" or "reconstruction" or whatever. To me, they are all good cars ... if they function as cars should and give us some visceral pleasure upon viewing and/or use. That said, when I view a car with the idea of learning something from it, my perspective shifts to "How much can I learn?" as well as "What would I like to learn?".
What would I like to learn? As much as possible about how the car was originally built and thereby gain insights into the people who did the work and the time-period in which the work was done. This can be simplified perhaps to ask simply "What was the purpose?" and then "How did the builders respond?".
How much can I learn? That depends on how much is left of the original car and also the context in which a car (and its parts) is presented.
If I know that a car that I see today has been built from parts and then reclothed, then I know that there are very likely historical lessons only in the parts themselves. There may be some historical lessons in someone else's interpretation of how to build a "Touring" or "Zagato" body, but I can't actually sense the build characteristics of any original Zagato or Touring builder in the part and how it was worked. This kind of thinking makes it a bit difficult to "judge" a car that has been modified heavily or even rebodied over the years and then restored to an original configuration but which lacks the original stuff in the restoration. Very nice, but no real lessons to be learned from that work.
If I believe a car could be "original" but too many anomalies show up early on in a car's presentation, then I start to believe that the car has perhaps been too well-used or modified to convey more than a sense of the original. But, that use can give a sense of history that is also very pleasing and we risk losing "what is" when we convert it to "what was". Some of what we have seen represents "what could have been", especially if we do not know "what was". Still, sometimes there is simply not enough to go on and decisions have to be made if it is to become a car again.
Whether there were two or three "Ala Spessa" cars is something we would certainly like to answer, but the world doesn't seem a worse place if we consider that there might be one evocative car existing now that never did before. It is perhaps a bit of a shame to have lost the representation of what 915096 might have been as an "original" car in the process, but I do not know that this happened in order to make the car as it sits today. It might be that the original car became non-original long ago? It may be important to the owner or a potential buyer to understand that, after reviewing all the information currently to hand ("915096" was a "berlina") plus the probabilities implied by what we know (915091, 915092, 915093 being race cars built just in time for the so-called "Mille Miglia in April of 1940) and the fact that the "Ala Spessa" style of bodywork had already been surpassed on those cars means that there is very little chance that there is anything historical to be learned from the "Ala Spessa" style body currently fitted to 915096. This means that 915096 is evocative of two or three earlier cars, but not of its own origins. Now, in 50 years, we might look back and find something historic in it for reasons we do not currently consider important! That would be history of today mingled with history of some 60-70 years earlier. In 100 years, people may "shake their heads with wonder" or perhaps "shake their heads and wonder" at any of this stuff, "original" or not?
Still, 915096 is a cool car and I would welcome a chance to have a look at the car in general as well as (hopefuly) the component parts that are hidden by the body so that I might feel that I'd actually learned something from the car and its parts.
Carry on.
