Giotto Bizzarrini and the Bizzarrini BZ2001 :: essays papers

Giotto Bizzarrini and the Bizzarrini BZ2001 When you’re to look upon the Bizzarrini BZ-2001, you’d see that there are no bounds to the imagination of Italian car stylists. The BZ-2001 is the work of Giotto Bizzarrini whose portfolio includes many past exotic cars. Right now, the BZ-2001 rides on the tubular chassis of a Ferrari Testarossa, and is powered by the Ferrari’s 380-horsepower flat-12-cylinder engine. But true to past Bizzarrini designs, plans are afoot to switch to American small-block V-8 power, and to discard the Ferrari’s frame for a chassis built solely of carbon fiber. With more power and less weight than the car has now, performance should be phenomenal. Many people might think that this is an all-Italian automobile, but it’s not. It was first started when Berry Watkins, who is a resident of California, sketched a few crude line drawings of what this dream car could look like. He then showed these drawings to Ing. Giotto Bizzarrini at the Pebble Beach Concours D'Elegance event. At this event, Berry Watkins was displaying his Scaglietti Berlinetta Corvette, which was considered by many that attended to be one of the most beautiful Italian bodied sports cars at Pebble Beach that year. Ing. Giotto Bizzarrini was very impressed with Berry’s work. Giotto Bizzarrini and Mr. Watkins exchanged ideas about what a future sports car or super car would look like. It was evident that Giotto Bizzarrini was very interested in the ideas Mr. Watkins offered. While all of the sketches and drawing were being exchanged, an agreement was signed in May of 1991 between Giotto and Giuseppe Bizzarrini and Mr. Watkins whereby the concept automobile would be the responsibility of Bizzarrini, and the construction, finance and development would be the responsibility of Mr. Watkins. In April of 1990, Luis Romo was elected to be the BZ-2001 project manager. Luis had been the Project Manager for the Dodge Viper Prototype at Metal Crafters. He was also on the Mazda Miata design team and was the Project Manager for the Plymouth Speedster and many, many other exciting development projects. To realize Bizzarrini's concept drawings and sketches, Luis translated them into a 1/5 clay model which was then compared to the original 1/8 plastic model presented to Bizzarrini; and there was basically very little similarity in proportion or style. There were many designers that came from all parts of the world to work on the CAD (Computer Aided Design) part of the project.