Carlo Abarth

Carlo Abarth, born Karl Albert Abarth in Vienna on 15 November 1908, was an automobile designer and racing engineer who became an Italian citizen and took the Italian form of his first names. As a young man he worked on motorbike and bicycle chassis, raced motorcycles and won European championships, then turned to engineering after a serious accident. He moved to Italy in 1934 and, after the Second World War, helped establish the sports car firm Cisitalia with Piero Dusio and Rudolf Hruska. In 1949 he founded Abarth and Company in Bologna, with the scorpion of his astrological sign as its emblem, and moved it to Turin. The firm built racing cars and became a major supplier of high-performance exhaust systems. He sold it to Fiat in 1971, continued to manage it for a period, and died in 1979.