Fifty-Two Years Later, We Catch Up with One of Our Former Cover Cars

Car and Driver was birthed in April 1961, successor to a publication called Sports Cars Illustrated. Two months prior to the first issue of C/D hitting newsstands, SCI had a cover that was unusual and memorable. The photo wasn’t of an entire automobile, just the driver’s side; it’s a forward-looking shot from above, highlighting the interior of a show car built by Pinin Farina, which was about to get a name change to Pininfarina. We called the car “the last of the red-hot Alfas”; you can read the original story here. As it turns out, it was a car in the last of its five lives.

Trudge through history and you’ll find the car to be affixed to a number of monikers, but we’re going to call it an Alfa Romeo 8C 3000 CM Disco Volante Superflow IV Pinin Farina Coupé for the sake of, er, convenience. (How’s that for a name compared to Q50, MKZ, or ATS?)

The “8C 3000 CM” portion of the car’s title references a small series of Alfa race cars from the early 1950s that were powered by a 3.0-liter straight-six. Meant to take on the likes of Ferrari, the cars only had one noteworthy finish, Juan Manuel Fangio’s second place in the 1953 Mille Miglia. Disco Volante—the name roughly translates from Italian as “flying saucer”—refers to two series of Alfa race cars, including the 8C 3000 CM and a bit of classic 1950s paranoia.

Pinin Farina brought all this together, getting the Fangio chassis and using it as a test bed for four concept designs. First came Superflow I at the 1956 Turin auto show. Prominent features included fenders and a canopy done in Plexiglas—the latter with gullwing window openings—and tail fins that were a signature design element of the era. Six months later, the car turned up at the Paris auto show and was christened the Superflow II. This evolution adopted a more-Ferrari-esque nose and metal fenders, but Plexiglas was used to mold the tail fins. By March of 1959, Plexiglas was passé. The tapered-to-the-tail design born headrests that stretched rearward, and the car’s overall shape had evolved to presage Alfa’s forthcoming Duetto sports car. Come the Geneva show in early 1960 and the headrests were gone, replaced by a large transparent top with a sliding roof panel. Adding still more to the name, the words “Super Sport” were on featured prominently on the dash.

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Alfa shipped the show car to the U.S. to gauge opinions about the design and left it here. Pinin Farina’s creation lived in Colorado for a number of years, once on a used car lot, and later adorned with a for sale sign asking $9000. After years with a collector in Germany, the Alfa is again in the U.S., cared for in the Redondo Beach, California, shop of Steve Tillack. He was the car’s guardian at the 2013 Pebble Beach Concours, where the Alfa won the Vitesse award for its combination of speed and elegance.

Unsurprisingly, Tillack and his team spent the day answering questions about the car. What was a surprise for the crew was the number of people who remembered the Alfa from the cover of Sports Cars Illustrated 52 years ago—apparently we weren’t the only ones.

Source: CarAndDriver