By Pete Vack and Alex Vazeos
Geburth Fiat Photos courtesy of Alex Vazeos
What about sending an Italian chassis out of Italy to have coachwork built? The normal direction would be to send your chassis to Italy where it would be given a fine set of new clothes by one of the famous carrozzerias that dotted the landscape in the 50s and 60s. It would be unique, well done, inexpensive and probably beautiful. A criss-cross, then, would involve having a chassis made in Italy bodied in some country not particularly known for automobiles and automobile design like Austria.
Italian chassis have been sent outward of their native land to be bodied and re-bodied for years, for example many pre-war Alfa Romeos were sent to the UK and bodied by James Young, Ranalah, or even more obscure firms such as Thornton. There was even a Ferrari 166 bodied by Abbot which did not last too long before being re-bodied again; another example was the couple of early Ferraris bodied by the Swiss firm of Ghia Aigle.
But still, such attempts go against the tide and in many cases were not very successful. Recently another such effort was uncovered in Austria, and therein lies our story…and as our resident car collector, Alex Vazeos, was quick to point out, “There couldn’t have been so many Austrian bodied Fiat 1100’s around so it might be worth a story”. We agreed.
The Fiat 508C
The Fiat in question was a 1938 model, a simple 1089cc 508C four-door sedan, officially still called a “Balilla”, but the name was fading by then. The 508C was one of the most popular and successful Fiats to date, and over 250,000 were built between 1937 and 1939.
This 508C found its way to Austria, but the first ten years of its life are unknown, probably due to the war. It re-surfaced in November of 1948, when a Carl Rainer Harbach duly registered the car in the town of Pörtschach, famous for Johannes Brahms, who worked on his second symphony while staying in the tiny town, about 125Km from Venice. The next year it made its way to a new owner and location in Wein, a suburb of Vienna. After changing hands a few more times, on April 23 1955, it became the property of Dr. Oskar Göhring, the owner of a Heating-A/C firm by the name of Geburth-Kühlanlagen. Little did it know that it would be transformed, given a new life, and unlike most of the other 250,000 examples of 508Cs, be saved for posterity.