By Pete Vack
All images courtesy and copyright Alfa Romeo Automobilismo Storico, Centro Documentazione (Arese, Milano)
Carlo Chiti was many things: an engineer for Alfa Romeo from 1952 to 1957, Ferrari’s revolutionary chief engineer from 1958-1961, then the ATS chief engineer from 1962-1963. But above all, Carlo Chiti was Autodelta. Wrote his wife Luigia Fumanelli, “Autodelta was his creation. I think that he looked upon it as his second home, and it lasted so long – twenty years – that when it was no longer there he felt his life had been taken from him.”
Chiti admitted that his fortunes at Autodelta were closely allied to those of Giuseppe Luraghi, the colorful, novel- writing President of Alfa Romeo from 1960 to 1974. It was Luraghi who, via Orazio Satta, was invited to form a competition department of Alfa in 1962, but Chiti was tied up with ATS. By 1964 ATS was on the ropes and he was now able to take up on Luraghi’s offer to create a racing department, originally separate from the factory. Chiti had remarkable independence; although each project had to be passed through both Satta and Giuseppe Busso, according to Piero Casucci, “the freedom he enjoyed, together with his team, was virtually complete.”