The Italian Marcello Gandini (1938–) remains one of the most extraordinary talents in the world of car design. He followed Giorgetto Giugiaro (1938–) as chief designer at Bertone and, with the completion of the Lamborghini Miura, showed that he could work in a ‘studio’ style – the Miura follows closely the language that Giugiaro had established at Bertone with the Corvair Testudo and Alfa Romeo-based Canguro.
Gandini’s subsequent design experiments, however, revealed a quite new aesthetic language with concept cars such as the original Stratos and the Carabo. These cars broke with the classic postwar Italian line established by the Cisitalia. They did not reference existing or historic trends but sprang into a new aesthetic world looking, it was once said, ‘like they had just landed – and on the wrong planet’.
The Carabo is clearly a step towards the Lamborghini Countach that Gandini was soon to design. Even his great professional rival, Giugiaro, called him ‘unbeatable at creating way-out sport cars with overpowering aggression: some of his coupés seem to bite the ground even when they are standing still’. But though aggression in cars now seems both delinquent and old-fashioned, the Carabo and the Countach should still be relished as kinetic sculptures from another age.
The Carabo illustrates the unparalleled imagination that Marcello Gandini deployed to reinvent the supercar. He went on to extend this theme to the Lamborghini Countach.