60 YEARS OF THE DINO: THE MAKING OF A LEGEND

The Dino celebrates the 60th anniversary of its debut this year, when it enthralled visitors at the 1965 Paris Salon de l’Automobile with its timeless design and purity of line. Yet while the story of the first production Ferrari with a mid-rear V6 is well known, far less familiar is the sequence of decisions that shaped its unmistakeable silhouette, and the artistic, technical, and artisanal process through which the prototype came to be created. Six decades later, Pietro Stroppa brings that story to life with precise and highly revealing drawings.

Stroppa began his career designing car interiors at Bertone as assistant to a young Giorgetto Giugiaro, before moving to Pininfarina and working alongside Brovarone, Martin, and Fioravanti.

Crafted from a mascherone framework and refined through traditional panel beating, the Dino's form emerged from a painstaking artisanal process

He recalls the very first Dino briefing, when the design team received their instructions directly from Sergio Pininfarina, who cared deeply about the project. It was a brief conversation – half an hour at most – accompanied by a presentation of the car’s mechanical layout, which was almost the opposite of the usual front-engined V12 Ferraris.

A couple of weeks later, the winning proposal was chosen – an Aldo Brovarone design envisaging an elegant berlinetta with rounded, flowing front wings and a high, truncated tail. A low roofline, wide panoramic windscreen, and a bonnet that – freed of front-engined constraints – could taper towards the road, giving the car a dynamic stance and excellent forward visibility.

There were revisions to the initial concept. Enzo himself considered the fish-mouth air intake “too Ferrari”, so it was replaced by a grille-less nose flanked by twin headlights protected by a plexiglass panel. An initially proposed rear window that accommodated six intake trumpets made way for a concave semi-circular rear window that followed the fins connecting cockpit and tail.

Stroppa's sketches combine the designer's creative artistry with revealing technical detail

This was when work on the prototype itself began, starting with a 1:1 scale model showing the car in its four views – profile, front, rear, and plan – to establish an overall sense of the vehicle . Stroppa notes: “This was the first geometric stage of development, no longer the artistic one.” The next step was creating a full-size 1:1 drawing, which was marked with a dense grid showing the measurements of every element. Practical work on the prototype could begin from this point.

Stroppa explains: “The workshop modellers created the wooden sections of the model. Imagine a loaf of bread sliced into pieces that, once pressed together, recreate the original form. Here, the process worked in reverse, because the slices were built before being brought together.” This structure formed the mascherone – the maquette that conveyed the car’s lines and volumes. The frame was filled with resin, refined, then used as a template to form the bodywork, created from metal and aluminium sheets that the panel beaters shaped by hand. Once complete, a cage was built around the mascherone as a reference structure for assembling body panels. The cage was then mounted on the chassis supplied by Ferrari. The entire assembly rested on a “marble” base, which carried all the key reference points, including the correct positioning of the wheels.

It was a complex and entirely manual process. Designers worked on large tables, calculations were done with slide rules, craftsmen shaped key details in wood so that the pieces could fit together seamlessly, and panel beaters coaxed metal into shape with their hammers.

Extraordinarily modern and remarkably unique, the Dino remains a masterpiece of dynamics, style, and engineering.