MOTOR CARS | 109In 1958, the American Chrysler Corporation pursued an entry into
the European motor manufacturing market by buying 15 per cent of
the French Simca company’s stock from Ford. At that time, however,
the dominant shareholder remained Fiat of Turin, and their influence
remained distinctively apparent in the engineering and design of
Simca cars for several years into the early 1960s. However, in 1963
Chrysler increased its Simca stake to a controlling 64 per cent by
purchasing stock from Fiat, subsequently extending that holding to
77 per cent.
Chrysler had no interest in any continuation of the previously
successful Simca Abarth and Abarth Simca high-performance car
collaboration, which came to a juddering halt. In Turin Carlo Abarth
found himself left more or less high and dry, but the supply of
basically Simca 1000 chassis floor pans, upon which the sleek and
superfast Abarth Simca 1600s and 2000s had been based, left quite
a number in stock, as yet unused.
The popular legend is that it was upon these unused Simca
platforms that Abarth then founded his 1300cc class Gran Turismo
design for 1965 – the OT 1300. Abarth’s technical team under
Mario Colucci had developed a boxed pressed-steel chassis
structure on the modified Simca 1000 floor pan to which all-
independent suspension was attached with componentry drawn
from the Fiat 850 shelves. The Abarth OT 1300 then emerged,
to race for the first time as a prototype in the September, 1965,
Nurburgring 500-Kilometre classic.Driver Klaus Steinmetz hammered the new Coupé home to a fine
third-place finish overall and the OT 1300 was up and running into
the record books, becoming one of the most successful – and also
one of the most distinctive – models that Abarth & C ever produced.
The OT 1300’s rear-mounted all-Abarth engine was overhung – in
best Carlo Abarth-approved style. It was a 4-cylinder unit with twin
overhead camshaft cylinder head, using a block with cylinder bore
and stroke dimensions of 86mm x 55.5mm to displace 1289cc.