Page 30 - Marcello Gandini Maestro of Design Revisited

476iSOrivOLTA GriFO 90
REVISITED
Underpinned with Dallara’s tubular space frame chassis
it and with the permission of Piero Rivolta made a few
and racing-style suspension, powered by the Corvette
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replicas based on the newer Corvette C5 platform. But in
V8 breathed upon by Callaway, and with that elegantly
svelte styling, the IsoRivolta Grifo 90 (as it was badged)
could have been more than a worthy descendant of the
legendary Grifo, a fabulous supercar for the 1990s, that
could have been a serious and desirable alternative to the
supercars from Maranello, Sant’Agata and Campogalliano.
But fate deemed otherwise.
With the market for expensive cars collapsing and with
the promise of government funding disappearing, Piero
Rivolta and Co. quietly dropped the project and the
yellow IsoRivolta Grifo 90 mock-up remained the only
memory of a project that might-have-been. And for all
purposes the story would have ended there.
Iso Grifo enthusiasts were excited by the Gandini-
designed Grifo 90. One of them, Federico Bonomelli,
who also owns an outfit called Mako-Shark Designs in
Dolzago, Italy, located the Grifo 90 styling buck, scanned
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the transition from the original Gandini masterpiece to the
replicas, which have been stretched and narrowed to fit
the Corvette C5’s chassis-mechanicals, not surprisingly, a
lot of the styling finesse of the original has been lost.
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 Cutaway rendering
of the Grifo 90 shows
the tubular chassis that
Giampaolo Dallara was to
develop if the project had
gone ahead. COURTESY
PIERO RIVOLTA/FLAVIO
CAMPETTI
 Another rare color
rendering by Marcello
Gandini, exemplifying his
excellent drawing skills.
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 One of the Mako-
Shark Designs’ Grifos —
clearly the stretching
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and narrowing of the
design so that it could
sit on the chassis of the
Corvette C5 altered the
character of the design
significantly. HUGUES
VANHOOLANDT
DALTON WATSO