Seeing it at Bicester got me thinking again about B20s. Those thoughts long ago stopped being about buying one, because anything remotely presentable is nowadays into six figures, but I have been lucky enough to drive a couple over the years and to be driven in one much longer ago, when no-one except the cognoscenti cared about them.
When I was a teenager, and not quite old enough to drive, I had a friend whose father was certainly a cognoscento. An aeronautical engineer, he worked his way through a couple of Borgwards before alighting on first a Lancia Aprilia, then on an Aurelia B20. All were a bit battered, some way beyond mere patination, but all were much loved and driven with gusto. The Aurelia had been owned when new by Mike Hawthorn, but by the time my friend's father owned it there was a fair square footage of missing metalwork.
No matter. It still sounded great and, it seemed to me, went like the wind. My friend and I had been to a Genesis concert, and we were waiting for her father to pick us up. He came in the Aurelia, its engine note tingling my ears as it approached despite the battering from some very different tunes they had taken earlier. In 1971, the only V6s regularly heard in Britain were those made by Ford – indeed my father had one, a 2.5-litre Zephyr – but the Lancia's sound was altogether crisper, snappier, freer-breathing. It set the template of what a V6 should sound like.
It did that not just because it sounded the best, but also because the Aurelia's motor was the world's first production V6. Lancia was the obvious company to achieve this feat, having pioneered all manner of vee-engines with unlikely vee-angles (generally very narrow) thanks to an obsession with squeezing more cylinders into a length normally occupied by fewer. What started out as a wartime idea to give the pre-war, but technically advanced, Aprilia some extra pace soon evolved into a plan for a new, larger car to make the best use of Francesco de Virgilio's new motor.