The Oldest Car in the Field: A Pre-War Tourer on a Sicilian Road
There is a point at which a car stops being a classic and becomes a document. The two-tone cream and black open tourer photographed somewhere on the Sicilian rally route — wire wheels, fold-flat windscreen, running boards, coachbuilt bodywork in that particular interwar combination of cream upper panels over black fenders — has crossed that threshold. It belongs to the late 1920s, almost certainly to an Italian manufacturer given the event context, and the most likely candidates are a Lancia Lambda or a Fiat 521 or 522. The Lambda, produced between 1922 and 1931, would make it the older and more significant of the possibilities; the Fiat 521 series, which ran from 1928 to 1931, was the more common car.
Either way, this is the oldest vehicle in the rally’s running order by a margin of at least two decades, and it carries that seniority visibly. The bodywork is coachbuilt — not pressed from a single die but assembled by hand from separate panels shaped by craftsmen working to a customer’s specification or a coachbuilder’s catalogue. The two-tone paint scheme, the cream-upholstered interior visible over the door, the chromed windscreen frame and hood latches — these are details that required decisions, not default settings. Someone chose all of this, probably in 1928 or 1929, and the choices have survived.
The passenger wears a wide-brimmed cream hat appropriate to the car’s era, which either reflects deliberate period dressing or coincidence of the useful kind. The driver concentrates on the road, which is the correct approach when piloting machinery that predates power steering, modern braking systems, and the entire concept of crumple zones. Pre-war motoring asks more of its drivers than modern machinery does. The controls are heavier, the feedback is more literal, the margin for error is narrower. What it offers in return is a directness of experience that no amount of electronic assistance can replicate.
The bougainvillea is in full bloom in the background, deep magenta against the Sicilian stone. The car moves through it with the unhurried authority of something that has seen considerably more of the world than the road it is currently on.