Story and photos by Robert Little
(Read Part 1)
(Read Part 2)
(Read Part 3)
Constructing the World Famous 33TT12 Chassis and body
“Descendants of the Italian Renaissance”
The very heart of race car fabrication are the artisans who mold and shape raw materials with their bare hands …transforming metal into valuable and highly unique works of art; all in a day’s work for these exceptionally skilled individuals.
This segment of “Inside the Walls” goes to the very core of Autodelta – featuring those men I choose to term “the true Descendants of the Italian Renaissance” – creating some of the most emotionally captivating and fastest moving pieces of art we as mere mortals have ever seen.
The photographs you are about to see are among my most highly treasured, recapturing the hours, days and weeks spent on the shop floor with these men, who were entrusted by Ing. Chiti to execute his aspirations to perfection.
And that they did.
In fact this entire website series “Inside the Walls” has been dedicated to those men and their legacy.
Beginning the process of constructing the T-33 is the physical transfer of the tubular chassis fabricated by next door neighbor Aletti and parting a leather curtain between the wall of the two adjoining firms and carrying the chassis through the wall to the Autodelta carrozzeria area. I had only seen it done once and was not in a position at that moment to get my camera and record the actual birth of the 105.33 chassis…much like, perhaps the fumbling that goes on in advance of the birth of a child.
I simply wasn’t ready. I missed it.
Everything else you will see was captured exactly as it occurred 43 years ago.