the "Golden Head"

The "Golden Head"

The birth of a historic brand

This is the story of how the simple color of a mechanical component has managed to characterize the identity of a company, and become one of the most loved brands in Italian motorsport.

From a "Golden Head" to the Testadoro

The Testadoro brand was given to a special cylinder head for engines (originally for Fiat 508 "Balilla") designed by the engineer Arnaldo Roselli at the end of the 1930s. The term "Testadoro" was coined due to the characteristic color of the head itself, originally cast in bronze. Following the meeting with Giorgio Giusti, an entrepreneur from Turin, the cylinder head was also produced for the more popular Fiat 500 called "Topolino", which allowed the manufacturers a greater diffusion of the product, and the owners of the very popular Turin car an increase in power. combined, according to the advertising of the time, to a decrease in consumption. It must be remembered, in fact, that the standard “Topolino” was credited with only 13 HP at the time, which made it slow and awkward despite its very light construction. The “Testadoro was available in three different versions, differing in compression ratio, power and use:“ N-Normale ”; “S-Sport” and “C-Corsa”.

Giorgio Giusti

 

A Turin entrepreneur, Giusti was in 1935 together with Giorgio Ambrosini one of the animators of the Scuderia Subalpina founded by Count Luigi della Chiesa. The team then served as Maserati's official team. Following the meeting with Roselli, then under the Scuderia Ferrari, Giusti proposed the mass production and marketing of the Testadoro for the Fiat 500 through his own company, the Casa dell'Auto di Torino. After three intense years of racing and victories, including racing himself as a driver of his cars, Giusti retired from racing in 1949 following the death of his partner Roselli, which took place in the autumn of that same year. On his last years, he became an internationally renowned artist as a painter.

Arnaldo Roselli

Engineer, formerly in force at Scuderia Ferrari, he was in 1935 among the designers (together with Luigi Bezzi and Enrico Bertacchini) of the infamous twin-engine Alfa Romeo 16C, commissioned by Enzo Ferrari to counter the dominance of German cars in the Grand Prix of the time. Roselli designed a cylinder head with hemispherical combustion chambers and radial valves for the transformation of normal engines of the Fiat 508 "Balilla" into racing engines for the Sport 1100 class. Following the entry into the company with Giorgio Giusti, he designed the cylinder head with 750cc displacement for the transformation of the quiet Fiat 500 engines. He died in the autumn of 1949 in a car accident together with Dante Spreafico, a driver with several Mille Miglia behind him.

   

   

 

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