Pininfarina has forged a reputation as Italy’s leading carrozzeria over the last 90 years and yes, looking back through its body of work is to refresh your perception of automotive beauty in its most traditional sense. But even this distinguished engineer of elegance has, ahem, missed the mark on occasion. In pushing the technological envelope to its limit, some truly bizarre creations have emerged from the Turin studio. Take the banana-shaped Studio CNR from 1978, for example, a car whose near-unrivalled drag coefficient is certainly no saving grace. Or the 1984 Honda HP-X, which we can only adequately describe as a giant wedge of cheese. We’ll tell you something, though: we’d have loved to have driven the Lancia HIT concept from 1988, essentially a carbon-chassis Delta Integrale that weighed 980kg. In an era of unusable 1,000bhp hypercars and Goliath luxury SUVs, that sounds to us like a sure-fire way of reaching driving nirvana.

Alex Easthope
Deputy Editor