Disco Volante
By Montague Gammon III
Hard on the brakes at well over the speed limit in the left lane of Route 13 on the Eastern Shore, I spun the wheel of my slightly tatty Plymouth Horizon and screeched into the break in the median strip.
I think I heard curses from the driver of the pickup that had been behind me, as he went on his way after getting his cardio stimulation for the day.
You see, parked in the field across the road was a grey Lancia Aurelia B20 – considered the progenitor of the modern GT car.
OK – not exactly a sports car, but a true classic, meant for sporty driving.
The underside was rusted solid. The farmer who materialized to greet me – I didn’t see from where – told me he would sell it for $1000.
But what would I do with a “project car,’ with no garage on the campus of the boarding school where I worked and lived in Westchester, nor at my parents’ Norfolk apartment?
I was very far from being motivated enough or skilled enough to do the work myself, and surely not solvent enough to pay anyone else.
So I went on my way, and left a car that is worth a huge multiple of that one grand, even if it remains rusted solid 28 years later.
I needed a car I could drive, albeit chosen for fun. So I’m not kicking myself like I do about other missed automotive opportunities. but I do wonder what happened to the B20. I can’t believe it rusted away – I was surely not the only person driving up the Delmarva Peninsula who would recognize it. I have asked about it through online Lancia bulletin boards, but no one has answered me.
I guess the questions of how it came to be there, and where it went, will remain unanswered until the day I die.
By then I may be the last person in the world who remembers the sight of Pininfarina’s finely sculpted form, subtly curved and grey and graceful, standing alone in a flat plowed field, in the farm land of eastern Virginia.
