MOTOR CARS | 187This is a truly historic pre-war Sports Racing Car, and the most
successful survivor of the noted OM marque, one of the very
special definitive supercharged versions which among many events
campaigned the Mille Miglia in 1930.
The Mille Miglia and the Brescia based OM Company are inextricably
intertwined. It is said that one of the inspirations for the founders of
the Automobile Club of Brescia, Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti
and their thousand mile race was the moving of the Italian Grand Prix
away from their home town to Monza. Together with their mentor
Renzo Castagneto, and journalist Giovanni Canestrini in little more
than three months from its conception in December 1926, they had
organised the first Mille Miglia, staging a new event that began and
finished in Brescia charting a ‘figure of eight’ course down to Rome
and back. To add a ‘fairytale’ ending to the equation, it was won with
a 1-2-3 finish by Brescia based car manufacturer, OM.
The OM (Officine Meccaniche - Mechanical Workshops) company
came into being in 1899 as a result of the merger of Miani, Silvestri
& Co with Grondona, Comi & Co, both firms being active in the
production of railway locomotives and rolling stock. OM’s involvement
with car manufacturing began in 1917 when it bought the Roberto
Züst factory in Brescia and the first OM car, closely resembling a
Züst, appeared in 1918. While the first cars to wear the OM badge
had much in common with Züst production, it was not long before
wholly new automobiles would appear.
As with so many Italian manufacturers, the punitive taxation system
based on engine capacity dictated the need to get the most power
out of what may have been considered almost nominal engine sizes
in other countries. Designed by the Austrian-born engineer Lucien
Barratouch and introduced in 1920, the Type 465 was powered
by a four-cylinder 1,325cc sidevalve engine. This was followed by
two more four-cylinder models, the Types 467 and 469 (OM type
nomenclature being the number of cylinders followed by the bore
dimension in millimetres).When a six cylinder OM was added to the range, debuting at the
Milan Auto Salon in 1923, contemporary reports would wax lyrical -
“If the crowd flock at the O.M. stand drawn by the beautiful cars and
the refinement of the furniture, the expert motorist and the technician
especially are enticed by the interest of admiring the brand new
chassis, model 6-65 with a 6 cylinder engine, not without reason
christened ‘Superba’ ‘this mechanical jewel in which is fulfilled the
ideal type of today’s production’.