Photos by Brian Henniker, courtesy Gooding.
While Luigi Chinetti Jr. has likened some of the Ferraris that passed through his family’s dealership as mere tools used for winning races, he described his 1966 Ferrari 365 P “Tre Posti” as “more like a sculpture…it’s a work of art.” Fitting, then, that the car will join a host of other spectacular cars as part of the upcoming Dream Cars exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Chinetti should know best the Tre Posti’s aesthetic sway. His family has owned it for all but a couple years since Pininfarina built the three-seater, and he’s been able to take it in pretty much every day for the last four-plus decades. It wasn’t Chinetti’s famous father who commissioned it, however. Instead, somebody at Pininfarina – either Sergio Pininfarina or Aldo Brovarone, the company’s director of design – took it upon himself to build a road car from one of Ferrari’s V-12 mid-engine chassis, something that Enzo Ferrari had refused to do up until that time.
So starting with chassis 8971, a 4.4-liter mid-engine competition chassis similar to the 330 P2 and 365 P2 that Chinetti’s North American Racing Team campaigned with success in 1965, Pininfarina bodied the car in aluminum and gave the car its most defining feature: three-across seating with the driver situated in the center. Special cast aluminum wheels, a roll bar, a dry-sump lubrication system, and the single center-mount windshield wiper all hint at the Tre Posti’s racecar underpinnings, but the black leather seats, red carpet, chrome bumpers, and full glass roof give it just enough road car civility.
Pininfarina built another Tre Posti – chassis number 8815 – for Fiat head Gianni Agnelli, but it was chassis 8971 that toured the world for much of 1966 and 1967, appearing at Paris, Earl’s Court in London, Brussels, Geneva, and Los Angeles. While Enzo Ferrari didn’t take Pininfarina’s bait on the Tre Posti itself, the mid-engine Dino would appear a couple years later with some of the Tre Posti’s design influence and Ferrari did eventually relent on mid-engine V-12 road cars with the 1973 365 Boxer Berlinetta.
As for chassis 8971, Luigi Chinetti Sr. bought it in May 1967 for $21,160 – $9,600 for the chassis and $11,560 for the body – or about $148,000 in today’s dollars. According to Luigi Chinetti Jr., his father sold it that fall to a banker named Marvyn Canton for $26,000. Canton found it difficult to drive in New York City, however, so he returned it to Chinetti Motors in March 1968 in exchange for a 365 GT 2+2. Chinetti, in turn, sold the Tre Posti a couple months later to Jan De Vroom for a little more than $18,000. De Vroom didn’t keep it much longer than Canton, and after he returned it to Chinetti that fall, the Chinetti family has held on to it ever since.
Though not for lack of trying. Luigi Chinetti Jr. attempted to sell chassis 8971 at Gooding’s Pebble Beach auction earlier this year, and while it netted plenty of publicity, Chinetti turned down the $23.5 million top bid for it.
Those who missed their opportunity to see the Tre Posti in person at Pebble Beach, however, will now get the chance to see it when it joins the assemblage of one-offs, prototypes, and other unique cars that form the Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas exhibit. Though the exhibit has closed its summer-long run at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, it will re-open this coming summer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
According to exhibit curator Ken Gross, all but one of the 18 vehicles that participated in the exhibit at the High (including the 1953 GM Firebird I, one of Bill Stout’s Scarabs, the 1947 Norman Timbs Special, and the 1970 Lancia Stratos HF Zero) will return in Indianapolis. The only one not to return – the Pininfarina-bodied 1970 Ferrari 512 S Modulo – has since been sold to collector James Glickenhaus, who has stated that he intends to convert it into a road-going car. The Tre Posti, then, will take the Modulo’s place in the exhibit.
“I think it’s a nice fit for the exhibit,” Gross said. It’s a Ferrari, it’s a Pininfarina, it’s something dramatic. It’s a little bit earlier than the Modulo, and it’s not a wedge shape like the Modulo or the Lancia, but its styling elements were picked up in subsequent Ferraris.”
Gross, who said that Indianapolis is likely to be the exhibit’s final stop, noted that about 180,000 people visited the High Museum of Art for its initial run. “These exhibits go a long way toward silencing the few critics who say that cars don’t belong in an art museum,” he said.
The Dream Cars exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art will take place May 3 to August 23. For more information, visit IMAMuseum.org.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1EpnPIi
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