Completed - a beautiful Fiat Dino we restored some years ago - back for a visit

We did a partial restoration on this car a few years ago. It included changing the paint color to metallic blue, as well as some mechanical restoration. Now, it's back for a small amount of bodywork, as well as a few more mechanical solutions. It's a beautiful and VERY rare car. When Enzo Ferrari sold the majority share of his company to Fiat in 1969, the deal gave him critical funding to maintain production of his boutique street cars and support his beloved racing department.

Fiat's incentive was control of the most prestigious Italian brand and engineering & manufacturing capacity to make some boutique cars of their own. The Fiat Dino was the first of those, piggybacked off Ferrari's development of a new V6 twin-cam engine for their new entry-level car, the Dino. Ferrari specified an all-aluminum engine, beautiful pininfarina-designed bodywork and a sophisticated mid-engine design with independent rear suspension. (The engine had been an earlier collaboration between the two companies to provide Ferrari with sufficient numbers of a production car to homologate a needed new engine for Formula 2 racing).In their cars, Fiat cut costs by later casting the same engine block in iron, broadened market appeal by engaging pininfarina to design a simplified two-seat roadster and Bertone to do a 2+2 coupe, both employing much simpler front-engine placement and conventional rear suspension initially.

Key to their pricing target was Fiat's economy of scale, being able to sell greater numbers of a less expensive car that utilized a lot of in-house Fiat components, whereas Ferrari's Dino reflected its more sophisticated engineering and lower production in a substantially more costly car.