In the spring of 1968, on the mountain roads circling Monte Pellegrino outside Palermo, a silver prototype lined up at the Targa Florio wearing something that had nothing to do with engineering. Three horizontal bands — sky blue, deep navy, and a red the colour of a good Negroni — cut across its bodywork like a sash on a diplomat. It was not the first time a racing car carried commercial livery. But it was the first time one wore it with such effortless conviction.
Three Stripes, No Compromise
The sequence mattered. The aperitivo house's design team, working from cocktail-napkin sketches in Turin, insisted on a strict chromatic order: light blue nearest the ground, deep navy at the centre, red on top. On the low-slung endurance prototypes, this meant the red stripe ran just below the driver's sightline, the navy bisected the door, and the sky blue kissed the sill. The effect was startling — the car appeared lower, wider, impossibly fast even while standing motionless on the grid at Monza.