Lancia, one of the most famous and evocative of all the major automotive brand names, has just arrived at its centenary. To celebrate this milestone Italiaspeed is presenting an exclusive 15 part history of Lancia. 

Despite the cessation of the sportscar campaign, Gianni Lancia’s decision to press ahead with the company’s involvement in motorsport was not made without dissent in some quarters. In The Shield and Flag, Nigel Trow notes that, “There was always a certain internal opposition to Gianni’s expensive racing programme and the increasing costs of commercial expansion and the (newly-commissioned Lancia skyscraper) must inevitably have caused friction within the administration.” It was argued by some that with the factory at full capacity, an investment in extra production capability may have been a wiser investment. On the other hand, however, having come so far with the investment, Gianni may have reasoned that it was folly to pull out just at the point of a potential return; and there was no reason to suspect that the success of the production side of the business was to fall away any time soon. 

Thus Lancia took the decision to commit to a full involvement in Formula 1. In fact, some sources suggest that design on the new single-seater had first commenced at the close of 1952, alongside the development of the sports racers, although the decision to press ahead with the programme would not come until August 1953. Given Lancia’s size and the extent of the engineering talent available, it is no surprise that many of the same names appear on the roll-call for both programmes. According to Chris Nixon in Rivals: Lancia D50 and Mercedes-Benz W196, responsibility was assigned to Ettore Zaccone Mina on the engine side, Luigi Bosco for the transmission, and Francesco Faleo for the chassis, suspension and brakes, with overall responsibility for the project assumed by Jano. In this context, Zaccone Mina observes that, “Jano was the leader of the team, but he was not THE designer!  No one person was responsible for the overall design of the car...these things all came out of discussions between us, with Gianni Lancia making the final decisions.” The manager of Scuderia Lancia, Attilio Pasquarelli, would also turn his attention to the new programme. 

With the 1954 Formula 1 season heralding a change of regulations, allowing naturally aspirated engines of 2.5-litre capacity, the new Lancia racer was one of two cars (the Mercedes-Benz W196 was the other) designed specifically to fit the new formula. In typical Lancia fashion, the D50 contained engineering solutions which were genuinely innovative for the period. All-up, the car weighed just 610kg – lightness had been a priority for the designers, with the elimination of excess weight through unneeded structural elements extending to the fact that the bottom rails of the chassis doubled up as oil pipes. The engine, too, was ahead of its time – unusual in employing a V8 layout, the first such in post-war Grand Prix racing. An all-alloy 2.5-litre quad-cam unit originally rated at around 230 bhp – a modest amount by the standards of the day – it featured carburetion by four twin-choke Webers (soon changed for Solexes), surge-proof hairpin valve springs, twin Marelli magnetos, lightweight finger tappets beneath asymmetrical camshafts, a close-contoured dry sump and externally-stiffened block. 

The most noteworthy feature of the compact V8, however, was in forming a load-bearing part of the car, more than a decade before the Lotus 49. As a bolt-in component, the tubular upper wishbones of the front suspension (sprung by a single transverse leaf) attached to the cylinder heads, whilst a spaceframe linked it to the transaxle at the rear.  As with the rest of the car, detail engineering abounded throughout, such as the front end’s inboard dampers, actuated via drilled rocker arms. 

The concept of the engine forming a structural part of the car was not new, but in the D50 it was taken to a new level – the tubes which ran underneath the engine did not significant stress under load, and only served to support the chassis if the engine needed to be removed from the car. For all that, though, Graham Howard has suggested that the importance of the engine as a stressed member is over-emphasised: “While the bolt-in engine undoubtedly helped chassis stiffness and saved a marginal amount of weight, Jano blithely left the spacious cockpit bay quite open on the top surface. If we were to imagine Jano thinking his car over, we could easily see him recognising that he was trying to get the tightest possible bodywork wrapped around an irreducible cross-section of V8, and then deciding to make the engine work for him, rather than against him. After all, bolted-in engines had been used as cross-members in the pressed-steel chassis days of the ’20s...(in short, it) looks more likely to have been Jano making a virtue of necessity.” 

The 90-inch wheelbase was identical to that of the Maserati 250F and most other competitors, and the track (49in) was likewise in-line with the rivals’ measurements. As L.J.K. Setright notes, however, “the D50 looked wider because, with the engine and driveshaft inclined at 12 degrees to the car’s longitudinal axis, the driver (with the shaft passing from right to left across his left hip) sat lower than most”, which reduced frontal area. The steering system designed by Gillio was also unusual – it had a very short shaft, designed to minimise inaccuracies caused by torsional movement, connected to the steering box which joined to a vertically-set bell crank, operated by a split track rod.  In practice, says Trow, “it proved light and accurate...it also did away with the need for heavy universal joints.” 

More unconventional thinking was to be found at the rear of the car – although it shared with the Maserati and Ferrari a de Dion rear end and transaxle configuration, the D50 was alone in grouping the clutch with the gearbox and (ZF limited-slip) differential, as exemplified on the roadgoing Aurelia. This did not stem merely from a desire to be different – the solution improved the gearchange quality by eliminating the inertia of the propshaft on the gearbox input shaft. The transmission itself was a five-speed unit, with synchromesh on the top four gears. Early in the design process, a sequential gearbox had also been envisaged, although such a feature would never see the light of day; the same fate would also befall the similarly-envisioned direct fuel injection and driver-engaged four-wheel drive.  Inboard brakes, as seen on the marque’s sportscars, were also rejected, although it is generally stated that this was due to a lack of space; the resulting outboard items were twin-leading-shoe drums all around. 

But even minus these innovations, the D50 stood out – as with the sports racing cars which preceded it, it was different to the hordes, just different enough to be ‘acceptably Lancia’. To most observers, nowhere was this more evident than in its extraordinary, forward-looking appearance. With outboard pontoons filling the space between the wheels on either side, the D50 certainly looked unique – short and squat, David to the Mercedes-Benz W196’s Goliath (although as noted above, this was largely an optical illusion). The panniers were not a new idea, but had remained dormant since the principle was employed on Henry Seagrave’s 1929 land-speed record breaker, Golden Arrow, and then on a few Austins and Singers at Brooklands in the 1930s.  On the Lancia, however, they served a dual function – in addition to their aerodynamic virtues (filling what would otherwise have been an area of turbulent air and reducing drag), they served as fuel tanks.  With a third tank placed at the rear, behind the driver, this allowed for the weight distribution to be kept constant around the middle of the wheelbase throughout a race – an important consideration when the difference in weight between the start and finish of a race could be as much as 300lb. 

Publicly presented for the first time at Turin’s Caselle Airport in February 1954, what sort of car the D50 was is perhaps best summed up by Howard, who wrote that, “compared against the pure-engineering style of the Mercedes, Jano’s Lancia was clearly in the Italian heritage – it was a 1950s evolution of all the things considered to be best for an Italian racing car. By no means is this meant to suggest the D50 was outdated, because by Italian standards it clearly was the most advanced car of them all, and indeed on lap times it was superior to the Mercedes as well. But where the Mercedes combined at one stroke, desmodromic valve operation, true space-frame chassis, and above all massive technological and financial commitment, Lancia embodied traditional thinking further developed.” 

That presentation and shakedown in January had been accompanied by an announcement that Alberto Ascari and Luigi Villoresi had left Ferrari to join the new équipe. But while the car was originally entered for the first European round of that year’s World Championship, the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, held in June, it proved a no-show, along with the other hotly-anticipated newcomer, the Mercedes-Benz W196. However, while the Germans made a successful debut at the next round of the championship in France, Lancia again failed to show, a pattern which would be repeated for the rest of the championship – crowds at Silverstone, the Nürburgring, Bremgarten and Monza would all be disappointed. 

Gianni Lancia finally gave the go-ahead when at a private test session at Monza following the Italian GP, Ascari had managed a record lap of 1:56.0, three seconds faster than Fangio had managed in the streamlined W196 and that amount faster than Ascari himself had managed with a Ferrari. The car’s innovative nature was certainly responsible for a good chunk of the delay, with the engineers taking their time to resolve the numerous challenges involved, including a complete redesign of the engine’s valvetrain. It also didn’t help that Lancia was operating without the vast technical resources at the disposal of the Stuttgart operation, or indeed that the limited resources which were available had to be shared with the ongoing development for the sportscar programme.  But when the car finally made its belated debut at the final round of the championship, the Spanish GP at the Pedralbes circuit in October, it was obvious that the extra development time had been well-spent. 

After a dominant performance in practice, Ascari claimed pole position, a second faster than Fangio’s Mercedes-Benz, with Villoresi in the second D50 qualifying fifth. In the race itself, Ascari simply drove away from the field, taking the lead after a couple of laps and establishing a 20-second lead when he was forced to retire due to an oil-drenched clutch after only 10 laps, caused by a faulty casting (Villoresi had already long since retired with brake problems). The performance, including setting the fastest lap, was impressive enough to drive Rodney Walkerley, writing in The Motor, to describe the Lancias as “rockets on wheels”. 

In fact, apart from the new car’s obvious potential, there was another reason for Ascari’s pace. The Italian had started the race on half-tanks, planning to build enough of a lead to come in and refuel, on account of the car’s small fuel tank not being able to hold enough for a full race distance.  But it had another consequence. Despite the attention to detail paid regarding the effect of the fuel-filled panniers on handling, Jano’s team had not fully resolved the handling issues evident when their drivers were on the limit. With the pontoons housing the bulk of the fuel load, the car’s weight distribution was, to say the least, unconventional. This in turn gave it very low polar moments of inertia in yaw and pitch, but a high one in roll, “calling for firm suspension and making it interesting that the rear dampers were connected by a balance beam so as to be ineffective in roll”. This solution would make for jittery handling on a full fuel load and was a problem that Lancia themselves never fully resolved, although it is noted in The Racing Car: Development and Design by Cecil Clutton, Cyril Posthumus and Denis Jenkinson that modifications were incorporated, aimed at reducing the cornering power of the rear wheels. In the original car, the cornering power of all four wheels was almost identical, “with the result that the driver had little warning of the limit being reached until he was spinning off the road”. It has been hypothesised that the equal-length, parallel wishbones employed by Lancia may have contributed to the problem, by not allowing for a small amount of negative camber on the heavily-loaded outer wheel. 

It has been suggested, notably by L.J.K. Setright, that although it ran on Pirellis, the best tyres then available, the D50’s handling characteristics required tyre technology not developed until 1960 to be fully exploited. Regardless, writing with the benefit of hindsight, Setright offered a different explanation for the unpredictable behaviour of the early D50s, centering on the linkages locating the de Dion axle beam. The paired radius rods providing fore-and-aft location on each side of the chassis, he writes, were “actually rather special...convergent and unequal in length...the lateral location was by interaction between a slot and a peg on the axle, and finally the telescopic rear dampers were linked by a balance beam so that they had no effect in roll, damping the transverse leaf spring only in the bump mode.” 

It was a novel solution, but although it sometimes worked, it sometimes did not, and it was this unpredictability which garnered the D50 a reputation as a difficult car for all but the very best drivers to get the most out of – and sometimes, even the likes of Ascari could not be sure which way the car would react. The reason is clear enough if we take Setright’s suggestion and focus closer attention on the radius arms.  As he puts it, whenever the car rolled laterally (as in cornering or a single-wheel bump), “the arms would try to twist the dead axle beam, which would react as though it were an impossibly stiff anti-roll bar. Maybe that was why the dampers’ contribution to roll resistance was excluded, but it was also necessary to put flexible joints at the rear ends of the radius arms and these had their own parasitic effects on springing and damping. When compressed, they would react after a finite but unpredictable delay, urging the axle back whence it came, and this might just have been a manageable characteristic were it not for those pontoons full of fuel on each flank of the car.” With a full load, the effect was to give the whole sprung mass a very high moment of inertia in roll, “making the car as a whole slow but emphatic in this motion when everything else in it was designed to make it quick and corrigible.” 

All of this helps to explain why, in the early stages of its career, the D50 was exceptionally quick in practice or when running with a small fuel load. With a reduction in both rolling moment and roll couple, as well as a lowered centre of gravity closer to the roll axis, the car became, “as prompt and predictable in roll as it was naturally in pitch and in yaw.” 

With the cars modified over the winter break and now dubbed D50A, Lancia headed to the non-championship Argentine GP in January 1956 with positive hopes, having recruited Eugenio Castellotti from their sportscar programme to drive a third entry alongside that of Ascari and Villoresi. The cars never displayed the handling balance evident at Barcelona, however, with Ascari spinning six times in practice.  Curiously, it did not seem to affect their overall pace unduly, with Ascari second-quickest in practice behind Gonzalez’s Ferrari, and Villoresi 11th. But the unpredictable handling would again bite in the race, with Ascari crashing out of the lead on lap 22, and Villoresi doing likewise a few laps later in Castellotti’s car, which he had taken over after his own car broke a fuel line on lap 12. 

The Valentino Grand Prix, on a street circuit in the Parco Valentino in Turin, marked the next appearance for the Grand Prix Lancias and on home ground the cards finally fell the D50s’ way. A couple of months had elapsed since the Argentine debacle and the time had been used to further develop the cars; the factory was rewarded with pole position and victory for Ascari, fending off challenges from the Ferrari and Maserati teams, backed up by Villoresi and Castellotti coming home in third and fourth, split by Roberto Mieres’ Maserati. At another tight and bumpy street circuit – Pau, in France – Ascari looked set for another win when a brake pipe broke. After repairs, he finished fifth, behind Villoresi and Castellotti in second and fourth.
 

A further street circuit outing in Naples a month later yielded first and third for Ascari and Villoresi. The omens, for both pace and reliability, were thus promising for the clash, in late May, with the might of Mercedes in Monaco, the first time the principality had held a Grand Prix since 1950. The lineup was boosted by the addition of Louis Chiron, who had won the Monte Carlo Rally at the wheel of an Aurelia B20 the previous year. The cars had also undergone a further round of revisions, majoring on the oil cooling system. Practice was encouraging, with Ascari setting the fastest practice lap, equal with Fangio, and lining up alongside him at the front of the grid. Castellotti would start right behind his team leader in fourth, with Villoresi seventh and Chiron in 19th. After the mêlée of the first few laps had settled down, the order ran Fangio from Moss, leading the two Lancias of Castellotti and Ascari. The Italians were under pressure from Jean Behra’s Maserati, who eventually found a way past both on lap 17.