Improving on perfection? Meet the most elegant Lancia Lambda

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If readers will forgive the use of the word ‘normal’ in connection with so ingenious a car as the Lancia Lambda, it will be agreed that a normal Lambda is a straight-sided torpedo tourer. Apart from a few Weymann saloons, other body styles were mostly unheard of since coachbuilders of the 1920s were in no way prepared for its avant-garde monocoque construction.

However, Casaro of Turin, which may be best remembered for its postwar bus and commercial bodies, had a go, and this beautifully low, lithe and sinuous speedster was the result. Believed to be the prototype for a run of six, it was shown at the 1924 Salone dell’Automobile where it caught the eye of none other than the great Count Louis Zborowski, who thought it would be a nice little sporty number for his wife Violet to run round in. Thus it was driven to the count’s Higham estate near Canterbury in 1925 and has remained in England ever since.

Violet sold the Lancia in 1927, but its subsequent history has been no less interesting. Its next owner was art critic Paul Konody and postwar it was owned by Tasmanian sculptor Oliffe Richmond. Somewhere along the way, it lost its shapely wings, but these have thankfully been reconstructed during an expert restoration.

Reg Winstone drives what was ‘effectively the first alternative to a standard factory torpedo, and an instantly appealing one’ in the September issue of The Automobile on sale now.

Words by Zack Stiling, photographs by Tony Baker

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