Storied Italian coachbuilder Zagato has taken the keenly-priced French Alpine A110 sports car and turned it into a seriously spendy retromod. Oh, and it’s all thanks to a Polish supercar distributor.
The transition from A to Z comes thanks to Jakub Pietrzak at La Squadra in Katowice, Poland, who took inspiration from a heroic French failure of the 1960s. Alpine had pinned its Le Mans hopes on the A220, a truly stunning-looking racer, that unfortunately proved to be unreliable, with only one of four cars entered completing the 1968 marathon. That lack of success prompted Alpine’s designers to, somewhat brutally, remove 30cm of the A2220’s rear bodywork, which resulted in a far more agile car, suited to shorter circuits and even rally stages, although durability issues would always plague the Alpine and it was retired after the 1969 season.
Nonetheless this story of “one car, two souls” is what motivated the collaboration between La Squadra and Zagato. The AGTZ Twin Tail clothes the highly-praised Alpine A110 in all-new bodywork which comes in both long- and short-tail forms. Put the AGTZ alongside a standard A110 and the extent of the modifications is clear – not a single panel remains the same.
The nose is elongated, and adds a pair of deep ducts into the hood and slim enclosed headlights. The AGTTZ boasts a visor-like glass house, which wraps around the A-pillars into a more steeply raked rear window. The doors are newly-contoured and the wide rear flanks boast angular air intakes to feed the little mid-mounted turbocharged four-cylinder motor. The rear bodywork is removable to give owners two distinct styles. In extended tail guise the rear is dramatically sloped with twin air exits, and looks ready for a stint at La Sarthe, while the short-tail version gets an aggressively chopped rear end that makes it appear more eager to tackle a road course or mountain pass.
“We didn’t want to make a pure racing car because technology, aerodynamics and power have changed a lot since the 1960s,” says Andrea Zagato. “Instead, we wanted to capture the inspiration and design innovation of the A220 shorttail and create an authentic Gran Turismo in the true Zagato tradition.The task of coachbuilders is to provoke the car world with alternative design languages. Playing with a round or truncated tail was always in the design ethos of Zagato for its Gran Touring models. With AGTZ Twin Tail we are producing a car we believe is consistent with our heritage.”
Zagato says just 19 examples will be built, priced at €650,000 (£555,000) or ten times the price of a base A110 – but you do get two cars for the price of one!
