Bizarre: the mystery of the Mizar

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It was only a few years ago that we stood eye-to-eye with a Lancia Beta wearing a Felber body. Four doors, a glass hatchback, a pointed nose with a big bumper, pop-up headlights and a miniature Aurelia-style grille – it was as odd as it was cool. Supposedly, seven were made. But it also reminded us of pictures we’d seen before of a similarly styled car – even more unorthodox this time, with, wait for it… four gullwing doors.

It wasn’t hard to dig deeper, and soon we learned the car was in fact called the Mizar, styled and built by Michelotti in 1973. Giovanni Michelotti’s son Edgardo, who assisted his father on the project as a 22-year-old, wrote: “Some of the life-sized scale construction of the Mizar with the wooden jig and the panel assembly jig, all made in the workshop in Orbassano, just outside Turin. The car was made from iron sheet, following the typical methodology used for making single prototypes. The car was also painted and upholstered at the workshop.”

The concept was ready for the 1974 Turin Motor Show as a fully functioning vehicle. The gullwing doors, assisted by telescopic dampers mounted on each side of the steering column, are said to have worked surprisingly well, too. Michelotti later took it to Geneva and Barcelona as well, but it’s perhaps no surprise that full-scale production proved a step too far. Still, it must have been in Geneva that the car caught the eye of Willy Felber – who clearly liked it enough to commission seven cars to be transformed in the vein of the Mizar.

The question remains: what happened to the original concept? According to Edgardo Michelotti, his father sold the car in 1978 to Japan. Could it still be hiding there somewhere..?

Words: Jeroen Booij
Pictures: Edgardo Michelotti

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