Piero Drogo was behind perhaps the the most exquisite competition sports car ever seen. But few know how the racing driver came to create the Ferrari 330 P4. Matt Bishop tells his story
Its curves hammered by hand, this Ferrari 330 P4, at Monza, was the pinnacle of the rolling works of art from Carrozzeria Sports Cars of Modena
The centenary of Piero Drogo’s birth is not an anniversary that has generated headlines, nor is it likely to. Indeed, the fact that his name is not a household one even among motoring and motor sport enthusiasts is perhaps precisely why it deserves to be marked here and now. Motor sport and motoring history naturally reserves its brightest spotlights for those who won championships and major races, or founded eponymous road-car marques, while those whose achievements were subtler, and whose influence seeped into the sport and the industry rather than proclaiming itself, are quietly filed away in specialist books and fading memories.
Yet Drogo remains fascinating for two compelling reasons. First, he was a race driver of genuine ability, one who could acquit himself with distinction in formidable machinery against stout opposition. Second, and ultimately more significant, once he had hung up his helmet he became one of the most gifted coachbuilders of the post-World War Two era, shaping aluminium with such masterful precision that his creations have long since transcended their original purpose to become rolling works of art with eye-watering price tags duly attached.
Drogo was born on August 8, 1926, in Vignale Montferrato, a small village about 40 miles (64km) east of Turin, the son of a farmer, and he grew up in circumstances that hardly promised a future involving either the racing or the building of exotic automobiles. However, after the war, history intervened. Like many Italian families seeking opportunity in South America during turbulent times in their homeland, the Drogos emigrated to Venezuela. There, beneath southern skies, the displaced teenager discovered not only a new country but a new enthusiasm. Once the world’s attention had shifted from warfare to reconstruction, motor sport blossomed again with remarkable vitality. In Venezuela, Drogo found himself irresistibly drawn towards competition, showing a fair turn of speed and a good deal of mechanical sympathy as he embraced his new hobby.
He took a while to find his racing feet, but by the mid-1950s he was beginning to make a name for himself. Early in 1956 he won the Premio Nacional Ciudad de Maracay driving a Mercedes-Benz 300SL, and later that year he finished second in the Copa Rio Guayas in the same car. In November 1956 he finished eighth in the Venezuelan Grand Prix in a Ferrari 500TR, the first Ferrari to carry the famous Testa Rossa designation owing to its scarlet-coloured cam covers. In January 1957 he and Julio Pola finished seventh overall — and first in class — in the Buenos Aires 1000km in the same Ferrari 500TR, and in the same event the following year, the 1958 Buenos Aires 1000km, he and Sergio González finished fourth overall — and again first in class — in a Ferrari 250TR Spyder Scaglietti.
Piero Drogo with a Ferrari 250 LM outside Carrozzeria Sports Car Modena
Even so, and despite those very creditable showings, rubbing shoulders and sharing tarmac with the best drivers in the world had shown Drogo that although he might be a good driver he would never be a great one. Returning to Italy in 1958, aged 32, he allowed his instincts to begin to extend him beyond the driving of race cars to the fettling of them — an activity that he intended to fund a few more years of racing. Accordingly he sought and found employment as a mechanic with Stanguellini, the celebrated Modenese sports and race car constructor whose workshops served as a finishing school for generations of gifted engineers and technicians.
His racing career thereafter unfolded respectably rather than spectacularly, but again he was able to take part in big races alongside great names. In the 1958 Le Mans 24 Hours he shared a privately entered Ferrari 250TR with Alfonso Gomez Mena, but engine failure ended their run after seven hours. The race was won by Olivier Gendebien and Phil Hill in a works Ferrari 250TR/58. The following year, 1959, he and Mennato Boffa raced a Maserati A6GCS/53 to a fine fifth place in the Targa Florio, sharing those perilous Sicilian roads with Phil Hill, Wolfgang von Trips, Jean Behra, Tony Brooks, Olivier Gendebien, Dan Gurney, Cliff Allison, and the only woman in the field, Anna Maria Peduzzi.
Drogo and Mena’s No12 Ferrari 250TR at Le Mans in 1958
Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Drogo finished eighth in the 1960 Italian Grand Prix
Motor/LAT
Then came the 1960 Italian Grand Prix, which the British F1 teams boycotted, citing the fragility of their cars and the dangers of Monza’s banking. The organisers were anxious to encourage locals to find ways to enter the race and bolster the field, and so it was that Drogo surprised the F1 glitterati by starting and finishing a world championship-status F1 grand prix. Better still, he brought his Scuderia Colonia Cooper T43 home in eighth place, albeit five laps behind Phil Hill’s winning Ferrari 246 F1. Perhaps that was enough for him — for at the close of that 1960 season, still only 34 years old, he put away his helmet for good.
Unlike so many drivers of the time, he was neither killed, forced into retirement by injury, nor driven to it by disappointment. Instead he recognised his limitations, he raced where he had always dreamed of racing, then, having done so, he followed a route dictated by what he had now come to realise his greatest legacy might be. Together with Lino Marchesini and Celso Cavalieri, in November 1960 he established Carrozzeria Sports Cars of Modena, a workshop dedicated to producing exquisitely crafted, lightweight, aluminium bodies for sports cars and race cars, above all Ferraris. Sheets of aluminium were meticulously coaxed into compound curves by Drogo and his fellow craftsmen, whose hammers struck not with brute force but with care and precision, every panel shaped intuitively by eye, touch, and a desire to produce automotive beauty.
Aerodynamically enhanced ‘Breadvan’ was running ahead of Ferrari’s 250 GTOs at Le Mans in 1962, before it retired with a broken propshaft
Klemantaski Collection/Getty Images
No single creation better illustrates that intuition than the Ferrari 250GT SWB ‘Breadvan’ of 1962. Originally it was an act of rebellion, conceived when Count Giovanni Volpi’s Scuderia Serenissima found itself denied Ferrari factory support and Volpi’s design engineer Giotto Bizzarrini responded with delicious ingenuity. Using the magnificent 250GT SWB as his foundation, he reimagined the car aerodynamically, after which Drogo’s craftsmen translated a bold theory into a shimmering reality. The result was shocking when first revealed, and perhaps it still looks that way today. Its elongated roofline continued rearwards almost horizontally before ending abruptly in a chopped-off Kamm tail, giving rise to the irreverent nickname by which it is remembered, although I would be surprised if anyone has ever used one to deliver bread.
If the Breadvan demonstrated that Drogo and his craftsmen could give visual form to aerodynamic innovation, the sports prototypes that followed revealed an atelier capable of clothing mechanical perfection in shapes that have never ceased to quicken the pulse. Among the most gorgeous was the Ferrari 330 P3, unveiled in 1966, a car that seemed to belong not merely to the future but to an aesthetic ideal that motor sport has spent the subsequent decades trying and largely failing to recapture. It sat impossibly low, its every line flowing with liquid inevitability from pointed nose to tapered tail. Nothing about it appeared superfluous. Its voluptuous wheel arches rose like tensed muscles beneath taut skin, while its delicately curved cockpit canopy gave the impression that the driver was sitting within a drop of mercury. Beneath those unforgettable forms lay a sophisticated tubular chassis, independent suspension, and Ferrari’s glorious 3967cc V12 engine, whose mechanical aria combined cultured refinement with thunderous urgency.
If the 1966 Ferrari 330 P3 represented the opening movement, the Ferrari 330 P4 of 1967 was the symphony completed. To many eyes — and it is difficult to argue otherwise — it remains the most beautiful racing sports car ever constructed. Beauty, of course, is a dangerously subjective concept, yet there are occasions when consensus becomes so overwhelming that subjectivity begins to resemble fact. The P4 was as curvy as the P3, its every intake elegantly incorporated rather than artificially added, while its broad tail was simultaneously delicate and purposeful. Its V12, revamped by Franco Rocchi, was more powerful and even more tuneful than the version that had powered the P3. In the hands of Lorenzo Bandini and Chris Amon the P4 won the 1967 Daytona 24 Hours, and two months later the same two drivers drove it to victory in the Monza 1000km.
Drogo’s artistry was not confined exclusively to Maranello. The Iso Grifo A3/C, emerging from a fertile collaboration between Giotto Bizzarrini, Giorgetto Giugiaro, and Iso founder Renzo Rivolta, was an altogether different kind of beast, yet it too bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Carrozzeria Sports Cars, for again it was constructed by Drogo and his merry men. Closely related, yet somehow even more special to my eyes, was the Iso Bizzarrini GT5300, also a Drogo project, and if you have seen and heard one racing in the TT at the Goodwood Revival, as I have, you will probably love it every bit as much as I do. Sometimes you just cannot beat the combination of elegant Italian coachwork and a guttural small-block Chevy V8.
There is an irony, and a cruel one, that a man who had spent much of his life creating machines of such grace should himself meet an end so brutally devoid of it. In April 1973, aged just 46, Drogo was killed when his Ferrari 250 California collided with an unlit broken-down truck standing unattended inside a dark tunnel on the A1 Autostrada del Sole between Florence and Bologna. To my mind there is something peculiarly haunting about that image. Motor sport deaths, dreadful though they are, befall drivers knowingly taking heroic risks, particularly heroic in the era in which Drogo raced. But Drogo’s death came instead in ordinary darkness, in the ordinary confines of an ordinary tunnel where neither his skill nor his experience counted for anything when ranged against the absence of light. One imagines the screeching thud of the impact – and its echo off the tunnel walls – swallowed almost immediately by an eerie silence, leaving only once beautiful metal suddenly and savagely twisted into something hideous and deathly.
And here is a final thought, if you will forgive me for sharing it. Perhaps tunnels are metaphors, albeit deceptive ones, for they invite us to focus on darkness when their very purpose is to lead us towards light. Well, for Piero Drogo there was no light at the end of that tunnel, for it was the darkness that did for him.
And now, almost exactly 100 years after his birth, he remains absent from every ‘best of’ list of race drivers, and understandably so, but every time a Breadvan, a P4, or a Bizzarrini appears at Goodwood and seems almost impossibly perfect, please allow his presence quietly to return to your mind. It lingers for me in the reflections on those cars’ hand-beaten aluminium, whose beauty emerged slowly and laboriously, one patient stroke at a time.
At work on the Iso Grifo A3 at Carrozzeria Sports Cars
