TwentyFourHundred is a new venture dedicated to the repair, maintenance, enhancement and restoration of the Fiat Dino, and is run by Dino owner and experienced mechanic, Mark Devaney:
"Having had a close and friendly working relationship with Superformance for many years, and being a longstanding Dino owner, I feel it is time I made Dino owners aware of the service I can offer. In restoring my Coupé I have learnt the pitfalls and complexities of these special cars. It is often stated that the best way to learn how something works is to take it apart to see inside, put it back together again and see if it still works. But what if you can make it work even better? Dinos are exceptional cars but they need to be well maintained and preferably enhanced to give them that extra edge. At TwentyFourHundred all your Dino needs can be taken care of from servicing and MOTs to engine rebuilds and restoration."
The Fiat Dino is a car born out of the need to fulfil the passion of Enzo Ferrari to race cars. Indeed, it was this passion that required Ferrari to find a way to place his machinery on the grids of the 1967 Formula 2 season. He had to "find a way" that was different to his normal method of building hand-crafted pure-bred mostly one-off racers as in 1964 the sports governing body were deciding on an important rule change to come into force which was that to qualify for entry into the championship, the cars entered had to have an engine that was also used in a road-going production car and there had to be at least 500 examples of that car made (importantly the engine capacity didn't have to be the same between production car and racing car - F2 used a 1600cc engine at the time).
This was a problem for Ferrari as he didn't have the capacity to build the 500 cars necessary and nor, quite frankly, the enthusiasm as he was more interested in winning races than developing road-going cars. The solution he found was to enter into talks with Italy's largest car manufacturer - FIAT. The official agreement was announced on the 1st of March 1965 whereby Fiat was to produce the engines in sufficient numbers to allow the use by Ferrari in the F2 single seater. This meant that Ferrari would benefit from the enormous resources and experience that Fiat had for designing and manufacturing high volume production cars (and in this case in a very short space of time), whereas Fiat would benefit from the "kudos" of being linked with the most exciting and successful high profile Italian racing team of the time.
The engine decided upon was the already existent Type 196 V6 which Ferrari could reduce capacity to 1600cc and Fiat could use in 2 litre form, albeit with a number of modifications to allow for mass production, day-to-day use and easy service and maintenance by Fiat main dealers.
Fiat duly designed and built the first Spiders and Coupes in a very short space of time relative to their usual timescales. Ferrari had continual input into the design of the engine (even to the extent of imposing certain features that Fiat would have preferred done in a different way such as the spring loaded cam-shaft chain tensioners) whereas Fiat was completely in charge of the chassis. The Spider bodywork was designed and built by Pininfarina and the Coupe by Bertone (although Pininfarina would also have liked to do the Coupe, creating a few early prototypes).
After a number of prototypes were designed and built in 1966, production of the 2 litre Spider and Coupe commenced in January 1967. The 2.4 litre models were phased in during 1969 incorporating a number of improvements and updates that weren't available in the earlier cars basically just due to the lack of time from conception to production.
Production ran until 1972 with a grand total of 7,600 cars produced (1557 Spiders and 6043 Coupes).
(See the Dino History page for a more historical information and pictures)
Fiat duly designed and built the first Spiders and Coupes in a very short space of time relative to their usual timescales. Ferrari had continual input into the design of the engine (even to the extent of imposing certain features that Fiat would have preferred done in a different way such as the spring loaded cam-shaft chain tensioners) whereas Fiat was completely in charge of the chassis. The Spider bodywork was designed and built by Pininfarina and the Coupe by Bertone (although Pininfarina would also have liked to do the Coupe, creating a few early prototypes).
After a number of prototypes were designed and built in 1966, production of the 2 litre Spider and Coupe commenced in January 1967. The 2.4 litre models were phased in during 1969 incorporating a number of improvements and updates that weren't available in the earlier cars basically just due to the lack of time from conception to production.
Production ran until 1972 with a grand total of 7,600 cars produced (1557 Spiders and 6043 Coupes).
(See the Dino History page for a more historical information and pictures)
