Eight on the way to Twelve – the Abarth V8 Engine
Much was positive for Abarth as 1965 dawned. Especially so in terms of the marque’s racing exploits. For three years in succession, Abarth had taken GT World Championship honours, in the 1 litre class in ’62, 1.3 in ’63 and ’64. In addition to these top-flight achievements, Abarth victories in national, regional and club events were commonplace, providing the Corso Marche treasury with regular and substantial income stemming from the ‘57 agreement whereby Fiat made a payment to Abarth for each and every race win credited to one of its Fiat-based models. But there was a downside to this apparently generous, sugar daddy arrangement – to maintain the competitiveness of Abarth’s numerous racing customers, across a wide spread of model types/variants, it was necessary to implement an ongoing programme of product development and resulting upgrades. This was an expensive business – enough so to be prompting Carlo Abarth, Renzo Avidano and Carlo Scagliarini to consider a major str