► Pininfarina celebrates 85th anniversary
► Concours celebration features its greatest cars
► Part of motor festival in Turin in June 2015
Pininfarina celebrates its 85th anniversary this year. Naturally, you wouldn’t expect the fabled design house to let that pass by without throwing a bit of a birthday bash and the video below showcases a few of its greatest hits for a special display in June 2015.
Part of the wider Parco Valentino outdoor car festival in Turin, a selection of Pininfarina’s prettier designs will line up for a special concours competition at the evocatively named Valentino Castle. Here’s a whistle-stop tour of Pininfarina’s greatest hits.
What kind of cars are we talking about here?
There’ll be the Cisitalia 202 (above) for starters, the car that really got the Pininfarina legend started in 1947. Not only pretty but forward-thinking too, were it not for the split windscreen the two-seater coupe would look like a design from the ’60s, not the ’40s.
It’ll be joined by the Ferrari 212 Inter convertible, the first Ferrari to be designed by Pininfarina. Almost every Ferrari since has been penned by the Turinese firm, including the one-off Enzo-based P4/5 (below) created for wealthy collector James Glickenhaus in 2006. That’ll be there too.
Besides a few other Ferraris, including the 612 Scaglietti K (another one-off special), there’ll also be a host of Alfa Romeos including the ultra-rare 6C 2500 Speciale and rather less rare, but still lovely, Graduate-spec Duetto.
There’s no word yet on whether the Daewoo Tacuma will make an appearance.
Did you mention there’s a competitive element, too?
Of sorts; as part of the general back-slapping, a jury will pick one of the cars as ‘Best in Show’ (for ‘the car that more than any other expresses the timeless beauty typical of the Pininfarina signature’) and another as ‘Most Elegant Car’ (the one with ‘the most elegant and refined shape’).
Among other design gurus, the jury includes Flavio Manzoni (Ferrari design director, and UFO doodler in his spare time), Karim Habib (head of BMW design – we pinned him down for a guided tour of the CSL Hommage concept recently) and Pininfarina’s design director Fabio Filippini, who ought to know what he’s talking about. Either way, Pininfarina wins.
Do you have a favourite Pininfarina design? Let us know in the comments below. And in the meantime, check out this two-minute video of the 2015 Concorso d’Eleganza Pininfarina – with some of the company’s greatest hits gathered together.