The dreaming designer, the chocolatier and their sports-car

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Captions are sometimes written in error, condemning pictures to be filed away in the wrong place for all time, unless by chance someone who knows better stumbles upon them. It happened to us with this lovely little set of photographs, which we were told showed the following: ‘Sports car dealer Jan Huysman with the Prova prototype, a creation by the Italian sports car designer Achille Candido.’

The date is December 1967 and the location is the showroom of a specialist sports-car dealer in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Do you recognize the car? It’s the little-known Siva Sirio, but we think the photographer didn’t quite know that and just copied what he read on the Italian number plate!

The Sirio was an interesting little thing, based on the tuned mechanicals of the German Ford 20M and launched at the 1967 Turin Motor Show. Achille Candido had no experience in the design industry but thought the time was ripe for a new small and lightweight sports car. Interestingly, it’s Candido who’s standing on the left of Huysman.

Our next spot of research uncovered the newspaper article that went with these press pictures, revealing some further trivia. Huysman was a former chocolate factory director, who’d been made redundant after his Dutch plant had been taken over by an American conglomerate. He swapped chocolate for sports-cars and also ran an architects’ bureau on the side. As you do.

And then there’s ingegnere Candido, 34 years young at the time. He was described as follows: ‘Despite his youth he is a most unusual man. He is a dealer of Ford, Jaguar and our own DAF cars during the weekdays, but he believes Ford is missing out on a small sports car model, which would be a hit, especially for the Italian market. He doesn’t have any background in designing or drawing, but that has not prevented him, after three years of looking around and comparing models, from coming up with a car of his own design. A vehicle which a sports car enthusiast would gaze at for a long time with a dreamy look in the eyes. He joined forces with a number of well-known Italian names for the technical aspects.”

Another Google search teaches us that those well-known names must have been a man named Moretti for chassis design (probably not Giovanni Moretti) and Virginio Conrero for engine tuning, while Giovanni Michelotti is believed to have helped with the Sirio’s design.

The 1967 article furthermore mentions ambitious plans for producing 300 Sirios in 1968 as a precursor to full production in the next year. That never happened. By 1969 the Società Italiana Vendita Automobili (Siva) was dissolved after just three cars had been built. It seems highly unlikely that any one of these was sold by our former chocolate man Huysman.

Words: Jeroen Booij; pictures: Noord-Hollands archive
 

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