Carlo Abarth and some of the cars he developed

Abarth lived a long and exciting life, during which he developed the strong, successful collaboration between the Abarth and Fiat brands. His story did not begin with cars, but motorcycles. When he was 20, he won his first motorcycle races and then built his first motorcycle with the Abarth trademark. Unfortunately, a serious accident during a race forced him to abandon motorcycle racing, but he did not lose his desire to push himself to his limits, and he continued to race with sidecars, a vehicle that he made popular, thanks to exploits such as the race against the Orient Express train (won by Abarth, of course). A second serious accident in 1939 forced him to abandon racing altogether.

And so Abarth’s second life - and the real legend - began. In 1945, he moved to Merano and became Carlo Abarth, an Italian citizen. In 1949, after working for a short time for Cisitalia, he founded Abarth & C. The first car produced was a 204 A Roadster, derived from a Fiat 1100, which immediately won the Italian 1100 Sport Championship and the Formula 2 title.

At the same time, Abarth had the brilliant idea of combining racing activities with products for the mass market, and he began to build his famous conversion kits for standard production cars, that increased their power, top speed and acceleration. Important elements in the kits were the exhaust silencers which, over the years, became veritable icons of the ‘Abarth style’.

The little Fiats which Abarth worked on became legendary in motorsports history

Fiat 131 Abarth was a WRC-winning car

There were two extremely important elements behind the success of the Abarth components and kits: excellent advertising and successful racing. Carlo Abarth introduced marketing and communications techniques that are still used today. To convince motorists to remove their standard silencers and install an Abarth unit, he invented a clever advertising campaign based on an elegant presentation of the product. Publicised with a new, revolutionary ‘language’ in the main newspapers, the silencer was presented in an opaque black version with chrome-plated terminals, and offered at a price well above that of the competition (4,500 lire as opposed to a maximum of 2,000 lire). His colleagues were initially sceptical about this strategy, but they soon changed their minds: it was an immediate, extraordinary success. The first 50 units were built for the Fiat ‘Topolino’.
 
The success of the brand in the minds of motoring fans was constant, incessant, and became almost overwhelming as time passed, reaching its peak in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Carlo Abarth created the legend of the “scorpion” with total dedication and almost frenetic activity, which revealed the characteristics of a genius. The stages of this continuous exploit and unparalleled success story followed one after another at a rate that is still amazing today.

In 1956, driving a Fiat Abarth 750 with a body by Bertone, he set a whole series of duration and speed records. Successes in motorsports were known even across the Atlantic and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., son of the American President, rushed to Italy personally to sign an exclusive agreement with Carlo Abarth to distribute the models.

In 1958 Abarth achieved a masterpiece on the new Fiat 500, completely transforming the small runabout, and highlighting its huge potential. That same year, the partnership with Fiat was stepped up, and Fiat undertook to reward Abarth financially on the basis of the number of victories and records that the stable notched up. This agreement was behind the amazing list of victories in the coming years: 10 world records, 133 international records and over 10,000 victories on the track.

Autobianchi A112 Abarth was the last car which Carlo Abarth was personally involved in

From 1971 Abarth became part of Fiat Auto, and the last car on whose development the founder of the brand collaborated actively was the A112 Abarth. During the 1980s, the story continued with other famous cars such as the Fiat 131 Abarth which won the World Rally Championship, and the Ritmo Abarth.

Carlo Abarth died on October 24, 1979, coincidentally under his birth sign: Scorpio.

• The return of Abarth