By Giles Chapman, from his book, “Three Million Miles in a Volvo and Other Curious Car Stories“
When we received Giles Chapman’s latest book we thoroughly enjoyed the short bios and interesting stories that comprised “Three Million Miles in a Volvo and other Curious Car Stories”. These are just perfect for the VeloceToday format, and here is the second in a series.
Peter Monteverdi remains the most prolific Swiss car manufacturer of all time. However, the older he got the more bitter he became that he received little recognition in his home country.
Born in Binningen, a suburb of Basel on the Franco-Swiss border, on 17 June 1934, he was the only son of Rosolino Monteverdi, who ran a garage specialising in truck repairs at 14 Oberwilerstrasse. Peter was obsessed with vehicles and as a teenager earned pocket money at a local tractor factory. After school he worked a four-year apprenticeship at the Saurer truck works in Arbon. But rather than design some utilitarian farm implement, Peter built his own car, aged just 17.
He bought a clapped-out Fiat 1100 saloon for £200 and transferred its salvageable organs to a home-made chassis and body to create his own two-seater sports car. ‘I think I was the only Swiss person ever to do that at that age,’ he recalled.
When his father died in 1956 Monteverdi was left running a truck repair shop he had little interest in. Almost immediately, he diversified into sports car tuning and repairs, and expanded fast. With no home-grown sports cars on offer, Monteverdi built one, and his first “MBM” – Monteverdi-Basel-Motors – was a cocktail of odds and ends: a British Heron plastic kit car body and a Ford Anglia 997cc engine tuned to give 85bhp. Only three were made. A useful sideline was go-karts, of which he sold dozens, while he also found commercial luck with a simple Formula Junior single-seater with DKW or Ford engines and five-speed Volkswagen gearbox; 23 were sold between 1959 and ’62.
Monteverdi then constructed the first and only Swiss Formula One car. It boasted a factory-tuned Porsche RSK engine in a modified MBM FJ body/chassis, and the MBM F1 was entered in a few Grands Prix in 1960 and ’61. Monteverdi himself drove to a second place at Mont Verdun in 1960 but the MBM didn’t excel.
Monteverdi’s short and hectic career as a driver was more distinguished in sports cars – coming third in the Nürburgring 1000kms in 1959 in a factory-backed Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR – and rallying, capturing a second place in the 1959 Geneva Rally in a works Renault Dauphine. He claimed to have entered 60 international and 20 national races and rallies, with several victories. But a nasty accident at Hockenheim in 1961 in his F1 car left Monteverdi seriously injured, and he quit the grid altogether.
His business had grown so large he bulldozed his dad’s old truck sheds and built palatial new premises on the Oberwilerstrasse, with showrooms at the front, multi-storey workshops at the back, and apartments above to generate more income. He did a roaring trade selling Lancias and making racing cars – even taking two to London for the 1961 Racing Car Show, where MBM was the first ever foreign exhibitor.
Canny business sense in sports cars and truck mending meant Peter Monteverdi could afford the first Ferrari sold in Switzerland, a Tipo 53 Mille Miglia, in 1954. Keeping it going, however, required frequent jaunts to Italy for spares.
‘One time in 1954 I was in Modena and I met Enzo Ferrari,’ recalled Monteverdi. ‘He asked me what I did and I told him I had a small garage in Basel. As I was also a racing driver, he asked if I’d like to sell his cars for him in Switzerland. So I became the Ferrari concessionaire at just 21.’ The arrangement fuelled Monteverdi’s prestige and turnover but, in 1964, ended abruptly. ‘Enzo insisted I buy 100 cars at a time and pay for them in advance. I wasn’t prepared to do that so he said he’d find another importer.’
It then took Monteverdi two years to design and build the first prototype of the Monteverdi 375S.
‘It was intended to be different from a Ferrari,’ he said, ‘to offer everything Ferrari didn’t. A Ferrari’s a young man’s car but no young man can afford it, only older people. And older people want things like automatic transmission. But Enzo Ferrari refused to give them that.’
The Monteverdi 375S was one of the most handsome cars in the world at its autumn 1967 debut, powered by a 7.2-litre Chrysler V8 engine pumping out 375bhp – hence the name – and with sleek, exotic lines. A series of coupés, convertibles and a four-door saloon, the 375/4, followed. But the Monteverdi 375S was twice as expensive as a Jensen Interceptor and a staggering five times more costly then a Jaguar E-type. There were around 50 takers a year until the fuel crisis of 1974 made them unsaleable.
With startling inventiveness, Monteverdi then switched tack to luxurious four-wheel drive vehicles aimed exclusively at the Middle East where oil crises didn’t really figure. Instead of designing and building his own from scratch, he adapted American International Harvester 4×4 vehicles. With Fissore’s coachworkers in Italy, Monteverdi turned the workaday IH Scout into the upmarket Sahara, with plush interior and reworked nose, and the Safari, with completely restyled bodywork and an even more deluxe interior. The Monteverdi Sierra was a similar rethink of the Plymouth Volare, while the elaborate Tiara was in essence a Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
By the late 1970s, however, it was getting hard for, effectively, a one-man band to manufacture new cars, so Monteverdi concentrated on his new Monteverdi Design enterprise. He devised a clever way to squeeze two extra doors into a Range Rover without altering the wheelbase. Land Rover loved it and bought the IP, subsequently paying Monteverdi a royalty on every standard four-door it made until 1994.
By 1984, he abandoned making cars altogether after building around 3000 of them — just 200 of which were sold at home. Instead, in the basement of his old factory, Peter Monteverdi created a car museum that was, in effect, a shrine to himself (he never married, and died in July 1998); of the 150 cars he owned, 60 were Monteverdis, including his first Fiat Special. Billed as “Switzerland’s largest car museum”, there were few visitors, and this left him bitter. He claimed he lost money on the museum from the day it opened.
‘Switzerland is a green place,’ he once said, caustically. ‘People frown on exclusive cars. Germany’s the same. People say: “We don’t like cars – they should be banned.” That’s why I stopped production.’ People who owned them, however, adored them, including the Qatari royal family with its fleet of five 375/4 limousines.
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Mike+Martin says
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing.
Jim Pask says
Monteverdi’s result in the 1959 Nurburgring 1000 KM was not exactly as presented in the article. He, along with co-driver Walter Stangl, finished 3rd in the GT 3 litre class, 19th overall, in a Mercedes 300 SL. Good article though.