A design great rarely credited for his masterworks, which include the Cisitalia 202, arguably the first modern GT
WORDS DELWYN MALLETT
ON 21 JUNE 1947, 151 cars departed Brescia for the start of the first post-war Mille Miglia. Among them was a five-car team from the fledgling Cisitalia company: three 202MM roadsters and two MM coupés, one of which was an extravagantly finned, aerodynamically advanced streamliner unlike anything yet seen in a motor race. It was the work of a relative newcomer, Giovanni Savonuzzi, who had joined Cisitalia as technical director from Fiat’s aviation division in August 1945.
Savonuzzi was born in Ferrara in 1911. His father died in the First World War, but Giovanni was able to complete an engineering degree at the prestigious Turin Polytechnic. Graduating in 1939, he was soon employed by Fiat in aerodynamic and turbine research.
During WW2 and Italy’s realignment with the Allies, Giovanni’s younger brother, an antifascist lawyer, was murdered by the SS in the so-called Caffé del Doro Massacre. Along with other Fiat employees, Giovanni was contacted by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intelligence agency to gather information useful to the Allies. He was given a pistol to protect himself. A few years later, it became useful in an unexpected and non-ballistic way.
With the end of the war in sight, industrialist and amateur racer Piero Dusio persuaded Fiat’s Dante Giacosa to design a simple and affordable Fiat-based monoposto for the post-war resumption of competition. Dubbed ‘Cisitalia’, the project was well under way by the summer of 1945 and Giacosa returned to his job at Fiat, proposing Savonuzzi to replace him. With his eye set on volume production, Dusio tasked Savonuzzi with designing a sports car and a road car derivative based on the tubular frame and mechanicals of the single-seater D46 (Dusio 1946). The result was the Cisitalia 202.
The three racing coupés eventually completed were uncompromising competition cars with narrow pared-down cabins developed in the Turin Polytechnic wind tunnel, but Savonuzzi also drew a more civilised and practical road version. As with all Cisitalias, the bodywork was subcontracted and, in the case of the 202 road car, it was assigned to Pinin Farina. The result was a sublime interpre
