The remarkable looking Bisiluro Damolnar was created in 1955 by Carlo Mollino and Enrico Nardi, their goal was to create an ultra-light, aerodynamic car to compete at Le Mans alongside the much larger and far better funded factory teams like Jaguar and Ferrari.
“Bi Siluro” is Italian for “twin torpedo”, looking at the car front on it’s easy to see how it acquired it’s nickname.
From a pure design perspective the Bisiluro Damolnar is an anomaly, it’s asymmetrical, has no passenger seat and has the engine mounted on the left hand side (to counter the weight of the driver, seated on the right). The total weight of the car is just 450kgs (992lbs) and it’s twin cam, 4 cylinder, 737 cc Gianni engine was said to produce 62hp.
I’ve seen some silly numbers thrown around regarding the car’s top speed with 216mph being the most far fetched, though with a tubular steel chassis, a light-weight body and an engine with a high (for the time) power to weight ratio it’s fair to say that the Bisiluro would have been a great car to drive.
Sadly during the race it was built for, the 1955 Le Mans, the Bisiluro was literally blown off the track by the vortex kicked up by a close-passing D-Type Jaguar and sustained too much damage to continue the race.
After having been repaired and restored, the car now lives at the prestigious Leonardo Da Vinci Museum in Milan, Italy.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
