Moretti cars

[Scott Fisher <sefisher@domain.elided>]

Greg Stewart asks about Moretti cars; Jack Hagerty may also chime in on
this one -- I still have (somewhere...) a reprint of an old Road & Track
road test on a Moretti that Jack gave me years ago.

There was a Moretti coupe at the Historics this weekend, and I
photographed it; I'll have to see if the scanner still works and put up
a picture.  They are, as you recall, small displacement racers and GT
cars from the mid-1950s.  They're particularly beautiful, too, almost
perfectly proportioned, so much so that until you're quite close, you
don't realize that they are in fact smaller than, say, a Frogeye Sprite
or a Fiat 850.  And since I'm just completely nuts about teeny little
cars, I'm simply smitten with Morettis (and Sprites and 850s, for that
matter).

While I believe Moretti originally used Fiat engines and drivetrain
components (heavily modified for performance), they eventually took
advantage of the high degree of casting skill available in northern
Italy to make many of their own parts, including at least the cylinder
heads and possibly other engine components.  The Moretti I saw on
Saturday had a lovely, tiny, twin cam cylinder head inside its engine
bay.  

Moretti are a member of the set of cars sometimes known collectively as
"etceterini" -- a slightly impertinent shorthand term for the various
Italian niche manufacturers (basically, any carmaker smaller than
Maserati) of the Forties and Fifties.  Moretti, Bandini, Siata, Nardi,
Cisitalia, and even OSCA (started up by the Maserati brothers after they
sold their company) are a few names you can occasionally see at vintage
races; most of them were lightweight, "streamlined" cars (that is, lithe
flowing shapes that certainly *looked* like they'd slip through the
wind, whatever their actual aerodynamics may have been), based almost
always on on production Fiat components that had been modified,
sometimes heavily, for sporting use.  And on the subject of niche
manufacturers, it's worth revising an old joke for this specific
subject:

Q: What do you call two Morettis parked under a tree?
A: The National Convention.

I expect that more information is probably to be had on the italian-cars
digest; for details on subscribing, see the Web page:

/italian-cars/

- --Scott Fisher

------------------------------