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By Andy Kress Sure, what could be better? My friend Nick Fonte had asked if I'd help out and drive one of his family’s cars to Tutto Italiano — a Fiat Abarth 695 SS. Nick brought the Maserati A6 GCS. It is a 1949 purpose-built race car — one year younger than I am, and in much better shape. It’s a magnificent car, in magnificent condition — the absolute definition of post-war Italian (European) road racing — a real race car. This particular one had a long career — it started racing in Brazil through the ‘50s, then back to the UK for a while, then California. Ven bought it in 2004, and did the Mille Miglia in it in 2005. It is street registered; it is fast. Starting it is always a process — a few raucous attempts, and then it catches with tons of noise — mechanical and exhaust. At Tutto Italiano, it always draws a crowd. The Maserati is an exciting ride. Even in the Fiat, I could hear it howl when Nick got on the throttles. Jeez, that car screws when you stand on the gas! 2.0L, straight 6, 3 DCOs, dual overhead cam, dry sump lubrication — as good as it got in 1949, and for a long time afterwards. Nick says that the way this car is geared it’s good for maybe 120 MPH, but you get there in a hurry. Not sure I want to go 120 with my elbows a foot off the pavement! The Fiat Abarth 695 SS is a completely different smoke. It’s another icon of post-war Italian road racing — for the little man. Based on the (original) Fiat 500, it was built and tuned at the Abarth factory (as opposed to built up from parts by aftermarket tuners). First, you sit in a very small space with your knees under your chin. The pedals have a very weird arc to travel. The clutch is hair-trigger with no feel. It has race-style straight-cut gears (so no synchronizers) and a gearshift lever that waves around like a limp noodle. You need to double-clutch up and down the gears. If you do it right, with fingertip pressure on the shifter, it pops into gear with a little click. If you get it wrong (verrrrry easy to do), there is a clank that travels up your arm and to the base of your spine. It hurts just to hear it, never mind feel it through the shift lever. (Don't ask me how I know.) Brakes — mezzo — well, not much, actually, which is okay, really, because… Throttle — sheesh — hard to believe there is any. Due to necessity, the gearbox has short, short ratios. With the throttle flat on the floor, there’s all sorts of noise (always noise), commotion, and action — double-clutching and rowing of levers. After a little while of that, you look at the speedometer and you are going 36 MPH! And the noise! The muffler had not been repaired after it blew all the batting out on the Abarth's last outing to Tutto. Wow, it is loud — and unpleasant, with a ragged buzz edge to the giant volume. It’s hard to believe that those two little cylinders can make that much noise. The Abarth is hot inside, even with the engine in back. The suspension travel is very short — when you hit road bumps, dips, pavement gaps, etc. the car slams down hard. I had an indicator lamp pop off the dashboard after one little episode on Route 9 (and yes, it went across the whole lane and I couldn’t avoid it). Oh, yeah — no seat belts in this roller skate, not that they would do you much good if it came to that. Before the ride, I asked Nick what would be a safe RPM limit. “I don't know,” he replied. “6K?” I pressed. “I don't know, but probably better not.” On the ride in, we were on Route 128 for a short time. 5K RPM = 60 MPH (and probably an optimistic Italian speedo reading at that). This sure made for a long ride in the right-hand lane! After the ride in, I asked Nick how much power the engine makes. His long answer: This engine, at 695cc, is punched out an extra 200cc over the stock Fiat 500 engine. It was built by Abarth (not an aftermarket paste-up). Then, when Ven bought the car, the engine was sent to Gozzoli in Italy (a big-time Italian speed parts vendor and engine builder) for a rebuild. After much money and time had passed, they got the dyno sheets in and did the conversion from metric to SAE: 38 HP. Nick said he was so shocked that he thought he must have done the conversion wrong. Tried it again: 38 HP. 38 rompin', stompin' cavalla! But the stock 495cc Fiat engine that the car was based on made 18 HP, so I guess it was "worth it". With the clutch action, I had a very hard time getting the thing to start from a dead stop with anything that looked like normal driving. It was pretty embarrassing, really. Fortunately, with 38 HP it’s hard to get into real trouble, no matter how spastic you might appear (or actually be). However, there was one moment when it looked like it might all go horribly wrong. As we came to the registration tables from the back entrance, we were at the top of a very steep and long hill, waiting. A silver Ferrari 330 pulled right up behind me. I mean, right up behind me — puts the nose of his car right where the Abarth's rear bumper should have been. What goes through these guys’ brains totally eludes me. I used the e-brake to make sure I didn’t roll back — an exciting moment until I got the thing underway (pretty smoothly, thankfully). On the ride home, I got the clutch/shift thing pretty well sorted, and felt good about that. I also discovered that, if your throttle foot isn’t flat on the floor, the position is so bad that leg cramps ensue in short order. Fun as it was, I was glad to get out of that car. Speaking of 18 HP Fiat 500s, there was a Fiat Giardiniera there, with four adults in it, towing a mini Fiat 500-sized trailer, "driving" up the hill past the museum. I believe that, if you go to the Italian dictionary and look up “ottimismo”, they have that picture under the definition text.
I must say, after I got past all the anxiety and got a handle on
actually driving the Abarth, it was a lot of fun. And one thing I
haven’t mentioned: It is right off the scale in the
attention-getting category. Don't own or drive one of these if you
are shy and retiring. There’s no such thing as under-the-radar with
this car — not a good car for the Whitey Bulger type.
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(Click on the thumbnails below for a larger view, and then
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