The wheels of (requisite content) former Alfa-person Enzo F.

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

George Graves, responding to a Michael Smith provocation, writes "Maybe, but
there are some cars that I simply cannot imagine without them. Can you see any
50's or early 60's V-12 Ferrari without wires?"

Have to admire the precision of the chosen dates, neatly slicing off 1949 and
1965. I know little about Ferraris, but among the 166 Ferraris several of the
early road cars apparently had steel discs with riveted alloy rims; Count
Marzotto (the father of the four brothers who were so prominent in early
Ferrari racing history) had a few, including one of a couple of Touring-bodied
166s he had which took the Coppa d'Oro di Villa d'Este (i.e. first prize at
Italy's most prestigious concours) in September 1949, and there was also a
steel-disc wheeled similarly early Michelotti-designed Stabilimenti Farina
bodied Ferrari 166 which, except for an awkward grill, could have been
mistaken for one of the Pininfarina Cisitalia 202s. (The Cisitalia 202 had
wires, and are usually shown with exposed wires today, but early photos often
show rather ornate wheelcovers completely concealing the wires.) At the other
end of George's time-frame Batista (Pinin) Farina's personal 1965 Ferrari 275
GT wore alloys which were a conservative precursor of the Alfa Turbinas -
shallower ribs a bit more widely spaced, but with the same basic architecture
of an alternation of rectangular apertures between the outer ends of alternate
pairs of ribs- very handsome, and certainly reflecting Farina's tastes and
imagination. The 1966-67 GTB4 seems to have worn very understated alloys which
were twins of the archetypal Alfa plain dish and sequence of round holes,
which were then followed by the first of the ubiquitous five-spokers, and from
there on it was Katie-bar-the-door, alloys galore as fashion expressions,
which one could argue the wires on Ferrari (and other) road cars had been.
Nothing wrong with that, of course.

Enjoy yours,

John H.
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