Doug Nye: Period panel‑beaters could show modern restorers a thing or two

And if I am honest there is also, of course, a third class of owner – for any born enthusiast a pond-life third class – to whom such an artifact is just another financial investment, to be stored, protected, possibly promoted and surely to be cashed-in whenever a profit compared to purchase price might seem possible. Yes, well, one does not have to applaud.

Now as car values have inflated over there long years, what used to be the enthusiast industry of specialists capable of servicing, maintaining, restoring – and in some cases replicating – such machines, has grown to meet demand. And as it has grown so its pricing structures have inflated, and in many cases, the time taken to do almost anything – from changing a spark plug to re-inventing the wheel itself – takes longer, and longer.

Nattering with a friend last night, he mentioned that he has been waiting months for some really quite simple wing sections to be made in aluminium for a ’60s saloon car he owns. No doubt when they do finally arrive the story will be of sweating craftsmen, labouring away for weeks and months, lovingly to hand-fashion these iconic pieces. I also have no doubt that the bill, when it arrives, will reflect that claim – and will be eye-wateringly expensive.

I would be the last to deny a craftsman, exercising a now-rarefied and fast-vanishing skill, due reward for his capability – but any argument that “well if you want a great job, this is the time it takes”, just doesn’t wash. If it takes that long to produce a minor panel – then the producer either isn’t half as good as he (or she) thinks in their own self-image – or they are taking the mickey.

Now I have tried my hand at panel bashing…and while I managed to produce some shape in a sheet of aluminium the end result looked like the cratered surface of the moon. OK, I might need some time and a bit more tuition. But I did enough to realise it’s not rocket science. What counts is experience, the skills absorbed from constant repetition, and above all learning at the knee of a really skilled practitioner.

Way back in the late-‘70s or ‘80s, I did a feature story for ‘Road & Track’ magazine about Carrozzeria Zagato – the great Italian styling house and body-building company. We visited their works at Terrazzano near Milan and saw traditional Italian metal workers shaping aluminium like artisan bakers shaping dough. At that time the craftsmen were making great use of ‘The English Wheel’ but talking to some of the older hands in that workshop it was plain they regarded that pernicious machine as an Anglo-Saxon cheat (if a darned effective and useful one).

One of Zagato’s craftsmen led us across the workshop, reached down behind a bench, and dragged out the traditional Italian shaping tool upon which he had learned his art. It was a dry-as-a-bone tree stump, with a concave top, bound with iron hoops to prevent it splitting. It was probably more than 100 years old.

He then took a sheet of aluminium, laid it on top of the stump, and began to hammer it down into the concavity. Clang! Bang! Wallop! Thud! – and in a couple of minutes, he had a large dome formed into the aluminium. He took that across to the wooden buck, which was the pattern for the car wing he was making, and offered it up. Tap, tap – that improved the fit. He then picked up a scriber, marked out the section of dome he wanted, and cut it out. He then explained he would then shape a neighbouring section, and another, and another, to be welded to the first. And at the end of the day, the complex compound-curved metal body panel that he required would be ready for assembly onto the host car chassis.

What he had shown us that day was a skill and a process inherited over hundreds of years of Italian metal-working. And the finished panel was covered with distinctive pocks and blemishes from the hand hammering it had received – and my goodness what a beating it had taken. These were the self-same skills that in mediaeval times would have produced suits of armour. And all the great cars produced by the Italian specialist and high-performance industry before about 1969-1970 would have had hammered aluminium body panels like that, fashioned in just that way – by hand – using the concave top of an iron-bound tree stump.

Take a careful look inside the bodywork of a Ferrari or Maserati or OSCA or Stanguellini of the 1950s/60s – or for that matter an Alfa Romeo or Isotta-Fraschini or OM of earlier decades – and if the panels are original it should be possible to detect that hand-hammered signature. In contrast, find a late-made replacement restorer’s panel, and the chances are it will be concours perfect in form and finish, but grained with the mechanically faultless spoor of The English Wheel.

Pondering on all this then, reminded me of how staggeringly quickly the likes of Ferrari and Maserati used to build brand-new cars for each season’s racing. From a plain sheet of drafting paper to a finished, running, racing, works team car would be lightning fast. Ferrari sports-racing car bodies were hand-fashioned by the bashers at Scaglietti or Fantuzzi, Maseratis by Fantuzzi, OSCAs by Morelli and so on.

Given 10-12 weeks – no more – full body panels for a works team of three to five sports-prototypes would be out and in combat. On test those unpainted panels would bask in the sun at Modena or Monza, those hand-hammered marks splintering light in all directions. Ferrari used to brush-paint the inner sides with a kind of gooey black paint, and in it – on a rare surviving original panel – you can still see the finger prints of the blokes who built those cars. Damn! That’s impressive. That’s what elevates the best of these great artefacts from being mere dirty-finger-nailed, smelly machines, to being tremendous works of automotive art. 

While a great fine-art painting might be the work of one acknowledged artist, great cars of the kind we run at Goodwood can be the work of many otherwise forgotten and hitherto unacknowledged artists – the incredibly skilled and capable panel bashers, frame-makers, fitters and mechanics who created these things in the first place. 

Their end-product was in effect their most tangible reward. Those guys were paid a pittance in-period for their talents and dedication – and for the blinding speed at which they worked. So wait months and months for one aluminium saloon car wing? Give us a break. Somebody is, indeed, taking the mickey.

Images courtesy of The GP Library