Camal Studio, a Turin-based specialist creating one-off cars and bespoke designs, has announced the new Scoperta, a two-seater roadster ‘inspired by the forms of the past’ and intended as a continuation of the long-standing Piedmontese coachbuilding tradition. The studio, which was founded by Alessandro Camorali in 2008, has worked across the auto industry and transportation sector, providing modelling and design skills to a number of famous names.
The Scorpeta takes the Caterham Seven as its base, only instead of the ultra-light Super Seven 600 it has chosen to use the high-powered 485 chassis. This is still a diminutive and diaphanous chassis by modern standards, weighing in at just 560kg. Power comes from a well-tuned 2.0 Ford Duratec engine, rather than anything Italian and exotic.
Scoperta, which means ‘discovery’, is an appropriately evocative name for a two-seater sports tourer. The name ‘also suggests its purpose, a new journey to be undertaken, wind in the hair accompanied by the roar of the engine’, according to the studio. These renders show Camal’s finished design, a voluptuous assemblage of carbon and aluminium that is simultaneously modern but also a throwback to the open-topped barchettas of the 1950s and 1960s.
Unlike the open-wheeled form of the donor car, the Scoperta’s bodywork wraps around the two-seater cabin, with a stubby windshield providing a minimal amount of weatherproofing. Caterham’s weight-saving ethos has been given an Italian twist, not just in the way the bodywork flows past pronounced front wheel arches back past a nipped in central section to the upturned tail, but also in the treatment of the spare tyre, fastened to the section behind the cabin.
Visually, the little sports car has more in common with Caterham’s Project V concept than anything else the British company has ever made. Inside, it’s even more minimal, with a gated manual gearbox and instruments that have been reduced to a single linear visual display.
Camal describes the car as comprised of a series of pure geometric forms, curves and ellipses that evoke the hand-crafted aluminium bodywork from the golden era of Italian coachbuilding. Intended for a limited series production, and made strictly to order, Camal Studio has suggested the Scoperta could start at around 150,000 euros, plus tax.
