If you say Porsche, I say 911.
It may not even be your favorite Porsche but it is, without a doubt, its most iconic model and the one that most of the time first comes to mind when we think of the Stuttgart brand. Two round headlights at the front, curved shapes and a coupe drop at the rear.
Although Porsche’s design lines seem to have played with this design all their lives, the truth is that It hasn’t always been like this. And the sixties and seventies were the best example. They were the years of the Mercedes C111, the Lamborghini Countach or the Lancia Stratos, among many others.
And Porsche did not resist the wedge format either. As you can see in this link where you have the entire evolution of the company’s models between the 60s and 2000s, models like the Porsche 924 or the 928 were partly inspired by those shapes.
But the model that came closest to what was proposed at that time was the Porche Tapiro.
A story with a Spanish flavor
Giorgetto Giugiaro is known for being one of the most relevant car designers in history. And in that story enters, without a doubt, the wedge format.
In the decades of the 70s and 80s, Giugiaro He designed and constantly perfected his wedge format, repeating it ad nauseum. The most repeated examples are the Lotus Esprit, the BMW M1 or the DeLorean DMC-12 (yes, the one from Back to the Future). But they are by no means the only ones.
At just 30 years old, Giugiaro was already a renowned designer and in 1968 he founded Italdesign, a company focused on automobile design that would be commissioned by Porsche to carry out a different prototype. It had merit because the late sixties were the years of Italian designers who, drawing on Marcello Gandini’s Alfa Romeo Carabo, constantly applied the famous wedge design.
The prototype was born from the Porsche 914 that was completely renovated. The car maintained the wheelbase but did not retain much else. The Porsche Tapiro was eight centimeters longer and another ten centimeters wider. The height was also lowered by another ten centimeters. The icing on the cake was the opening of the doors in the shape of a gull wing.
All this turned the car into a completely new model that seemed directly from the future. The intention was to demonstrate that the wedge design could be replicated in average sports models since it seemed forbidden to supercars, as explained in Motor1.com.
The car was first shown at the Turin Motor Show in 1971 and caught the attention of attendees for its central structure that acted as a hinge for the doors but also for two other shots of the body that gave access to the interior of the engine. . When all the compartments are open, it gives a truly spectacular and curious image, as indicated in the image itself. Italdesign.
The car, however, did not reach production. Or, at least, a model did not arrive that inherited its defining forms, so it gradually fell into oblivion. The built unit was shown at the Barcelona Motor Show, where it was shown to the public with a 2.4-liter boxer engine taken from a 911S and modified by Bonomelli Tuning to get 220 hp of poweralthough as explained in Teamit is not entirely clear.
What there seems to be less doubt about is the future that awaits the exposed unit. The Porsche Tapiro toured for three years but customer interest seemed to be focused exclusively on the 911. Without the interest they needed to launch this evolution of the Porsche 914 into production, the prototype began to lose meaning.
And on that tour he arrives in Barcelona, where a Spanish businessman manages to get hold of the car and uses it privately for his daily use. Shortly after, the unit goes through a sale and ends up in the hands of the Argentine composer Waldo de los Ríoswho lived in Madrid.
De los Ríos achieved a great impact with his Hymn of Joy to be sung by Miguel Ríos but also by works such as the Curro Jiménez soundtrack. De los Ríos, however, suffered from serious depression, persecuted for hiding his homosexuality while he was married to the Uruguayan journalist Isabel Pisano.
Depression, in fact, led him to suicide but in those last years of his life he enjoyed the Porsche Tapiro. An illusion that would last until his fire. Although there are versions that point to revolts at the end of the dictatorship or an accident, as in fact read on the Italdesign website, everything indicates that the vehicle combusted while driving through the Casa de Campo in Madrid.
In Team They explain that it was not unusual for the Porsche 914/6 from which the prototype was derived caught fire. It was more or less common for the triple-body Weber carburetors fitted to this model to overflow due to a problem with the floats. The fuel reached the car’s wiring and combusted.
Looking at the image that opens the article we imagine that this is what really happened. The car was stored in the back of the composer’s home in Madrid and remained there even after his suicide. It was then that, when Giugiaro found out that what was left of the car was still in Spain, he bought the remains and took them to Italdesign, where the car came to be displayed again.
Fotos | Italdesign
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