Mittwoch, 26. Oktober 2011

At the paint-shop 1995

Cars and Persons

Precious few can believe me when I confess that during the years I almost lost interest for cars, or at least that my interest for persons who built them exceeds my interest for the cars very much.

I should explain that my professional job is to work in an elder persons home where non-autosufficient persons live until they die. Maybe this fact and the experience about fragility of human health evoked the desire to search for persons who were part of the Abarth-history, maybe because they did some work for Abarth.

By surprise when checking some documents abandonned by the Abarth-factory when moving to Chivasso to the Ex-Lancia-Works, now called „Fiat Auto Corse“ instead of „Abarth“ unfortunately, I discovered some hundreds of incomplete adresses at Turin about manufacturers and craftsmen which at least some of them I managed to reconstuct.

This fact lead me to Vinicio Mais and Michele Minini at the border to Grugliasco in Turin;  they did many of the paint-jobs for the Abarth works then.
When I came to them first I saw with own eyes how Minini painted with a paint brush the logo of the city of Trofarello on both doors of a blue Fiat Punto. Everybody today uses stickers so this real art of painting is rarely requested; so nobody or few today learn this traditional methods which have their origins when the horse-pulled coaches were painted then.

The interview was most interesting, but what afascinated me very much was when Mr. Minini told me that Mr. Abarth instructed ("ha istruito") his personnel with a megaphone at Via Trecate during the first years. This fact corrisponded exactly what Cavalliere Luigi Sibille referred about Via Trecate, but he choose a quite different expression. This will be a separate article later on.

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