Beneventi S.p.A

[Rk38]

Beneventi S.p.A

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Absolute Driving Pleasure

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Beneventi S.p.A., usually known simply as Beneventi is an Italian automobile company, which specialized in car styling, coachbuilding and manufacturing. Founded in 1967 by former Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Lancia engineer Duccio Beneventi. This company later merged with Gotti Escuti to become. The company is a manufacturer of niche, bespoke and limited production of vehicles and has been involved in car racing since the 1970s. It is based in Genoa, Northern Italy.

Overview

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Founded
Genoa, Italy, November 12, 1967
Founder
Duccio Beneventi
Key people
Mariano Romano (CEO/President)
Number of Employees
1,107
Website
beneventicars.com

Current Models

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(2016–present)
In Production

(2017–present)
In Production

(2017–present)
In Production

(2017–present)
In Production

Model Comparision

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Historical Models

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Prolusio

(1967–1978)
Out of Production

Viato

(1974–1986)
Out of Production

Mansio

(1976–1989)
Out of Production

Cito

(1992–1999)
Out of Production

Bellisa

(1995–2005)
Out of Production

Reficio

(2000–2005)
Out of Production

Genocia

(2005–2016)
Out of Production

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History

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Founded in 1967 by former Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Lancia engineer Duccio Beneventi. The company is a manufacturer of sports cars and has been involved in car racing since the 1970s. It is based in Genoa, Northern Italy. (Genua is the antique Latin for Genoa.)

Duccio Beneventi was born in Genoa, Italy in 1927. His father was a rich landowner who came from a family with strong roots in Liguria and the city of Genoa.

Beneventi graduated as an engineer at the University of Genoa in 1951. He then joined Alfa Romeo in 1952. He worked for Alfa Romeo from 1952 to 1955. His contributed some development work on the Alfa Romeo Giulietta. He began working for Ferrari in 1956, eventually working on experimental car development. He worked at Ferrari as a developer, designer, and engineer for five years. His work there helped the development of some of the brand’s iconic models such as the Ferrari 250 GT SWB and the Ferrari 250 GTO.

Beneventi was fired by Ferrari during the “palace revolt” of 1961. He managed to get a job with Lancia where he helped develop the Lancia Flaminia and later the Lancia Flavia. Duccio appreciated the companies drive for innovation, constant quest for excellence, and fixation of quality products. He worked as a designer, and engineer with the company for seven years.

Beneventi left in 1967 and founded Beneventi Automobili S.p.A, with a number of former staff from Žnopresk, Ferrari, Lancia and Alfa Romeo. It produced some 140 cars through 1970 at its Genoa factory. Duccio Beneventi was a dedicated race car designer and builder. It was his desire to build race cars along with high-quality GT cars and he even had plans for production of some family transportation cars. Biy Beneventi had mixed success in racing.

The company due to its small size has often worked together with larger companies both as bespoke coachbuilder and designer. More recently one of the companies more successful models was the GBF Cito a mid-engined, V10 sports car which represented a revolutionary shift in styling when the concept was debut at the 57th International Geneva Motor Show in 1987.

It took another five years of development to when the production model went on sale in 1992, the sleek and low drag aerodynamic body shape with hidden headlamps gave the design its distinctive and icon supercar shape. The Cito SR-10 Strada was also significant as the last car that Duccio Beneventi was personally involved in the design and creation process before taking a more senor role in the company.

In recent years Gryphon Gear partnered with the company to create a joint venture project based on the Procurro sports car. This new vehicle developed with a 9L single overhead cam V8 from Gryphon Gear as well a numerous other tuning and engineering changes led to the ‘Short Nose’ Procurro dubbed the Bellua. This new line of vehicles was unveiled at the iconic Goodwood Festival of Speed.

[abg7]

I first heard about this Italian supercar manufacturer in CSR25… Anyway, your whole lineup looks like something from another planet - in a good way!

[Rk38]

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Bellua SR8e Strada shown with optional 19" Perfomance wheels

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The new Genua-Beneventi Fabbrica Bellua has its focus set firmly on the track but is still perfect for regular use on the road. It is a further development from our Procurro SR6 Traccia along advanced technology created in partnership with the reknown Australian company Gryphon Gear.

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But the Bellua maintains all the functionality of previous Procurro SR6 Traccia model. Initrally called the ‘Short Nose’ Procurro in development as to make the most of the performance, the chassis was reworked and shorten creating a tauter and more agile design.

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Bellua is Latin for “The beast” – a suitable name for a machine that offers an unforeseen combination of power, responsiveness and performance. The Bellua will offer brutally fast performance at surprising levels of affordability.

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___ At the entry level of the range, we have the Bellua SR8e Strada with models maintains the twin seating capacity of the Procurro while replacing the lightweight naturally aspirated V6 for a powerful twin-turbo V8. We feel this models provides the perfect balance of performance and practicality for a high performance vehicle. This may look and drive like a track machine yet it maintains a level of composure for street car. ___

___ Next up is the single seater Bellua SR8TT Speciale which steps up the levels of performance creating a race-like feel in a road car. This car is removes all distractions from the interior placing the driver into a central driving position to give you full focus on the track. Absolute driving pleasure from this pure breed track machine. ___

___ Finally at the top level created with a special extremely perfomance focused breast. The Bellua 'GG Tune' Competizione blends outrageous speed, handling for an unmatched driving experience. It is the ultimate track vehicle. It offers blistering levels of speed and handling around a racetrack or anywhere else.

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In spite of the Bellua’s increased weight over the Procurro it can still perform competitively around a race circuit. How does 2.9 seconds between 0 to 100 km/h and under 50 seconds at the Goodwood hillclimb sound?

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[strop]

An open letter, penned by the Lead Designer and Sometime Spokesperson of Gryphon Gear:

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To all sports car enthusiasts,

I’m very pleased to be writing this, now that the Bellua has been officially released and can see the fruits of our joint efforts in the flesh. We are all honoured to have been a part of this collaboration; the passion and dedication shown by the GBF team went above and beyond even the legendary reputation traditionally held by provincial Italian sports car manufacturers, thus the results also exceeded our expectations. To explain about more about why this car exists and ended up the way it was, I’d like to talk about the background a little more.

Gryphon Gear (well, really, yours truly) first showed interest in the GBF Procurro almost entirely due to its classic yet unconventional beauty. It wasn’t until a serendipitous meeting on a closed session at a certain European track where GG does a lot of testing cough Nordscleife cough that the development crew had a chance to really look at the car and its potential as their next major project. At the time, powered by a V6 producing around 400bhp, it was most akin to a Lotus Evora 400. Coincidentally, the GBF team were starting to explore possible options to increase this performance, to achieve supercar levels.

To explain how fortunate this was, I’ll need to explain our circumstances: The GG of 2017 retains the brute aggression with which it exploded onto the scene in 2012. But under the considered direction of an attentive executive board, it always exerts its growing power with an agenda. If the proto-GG could be considered the crude art of more bang, more buck, Phase One was learning how not to go broke from overspending see the Znopresk Zeus, Phase Two was about going smarter (even if going harder anyway) see Mercury, Jormungandr, and Phase Three would be our egalitarian vision of making ludicrous speed normally reserved for rich people, available to the masses. The first example of which would be Lilith, the sub-7 car worth less than 100k.

Yet that isn’t good enough. I mean, yes, unless you want to cram yourself into a Radical, you’re looking at over 500k for an Aventador SV, or over a million for any of the hypercars, so under 100k is really bloody fantastic, if you don’t mind not having an interior sculpted out of platinum and rare animal bits. Yet, a starting price tag of 94k (before exporting costs, tariffs, registration and stamp duty etc. etc.) still places that car out of reach of many, unless I’m living in the wrong dimension and we’re all really driving M4s and 911s. But we want to revive Australian auto manufacturing and the everyperson’s love affair with the sports car. We tantalise and titillate by showing you what we can do with our ultimate tier cars, but we want to put the visceral sensation of pure speed within reach of people who work 40+ hours a week to pay the mortgage/rent and set aside everything they can for the garage because cars are life. That’s most of us over here at Gryphon Gear, so we’re all kinda inspired in the same way, and we hope that more people will be similarly swept up in what will become our renaissance.

To summarise that, on one hand, you have a company that produces beautiful, budget track cars looking to expand and see how much performance they can fit onto their platform. On the other, you have a company that produces hyper speed machines looking to expand and see how budget they can squeeze out of their performance. It’s a match that was meant to be.

Some of us Aussies like to ironically poke fun at the Americans, but one leaf we unabashedly took out of the book of good ol’ American wisdom was, for the same money, you can always get more power out of bigger blocks, which is why Pony and Muscle is what it is. Our particular specialty is boosting the hell out of them, then making the rest of the car work with whatever behemoth we can fit in the body, which is why the SR8 Bellua series has a 9L V8 with a single cam. There’s nothing in the world like it, but in terms of sheer bang for your buck on commonly sourced parts, it just can’t be beat. As for the rest, the real challenge we faced was that we had no option to develop bespoke parts like we normally do: the entire car had to be built on stuff you can buy off shelves. We had to also rethink our production line processes from the ground up, with simplicity and minimalism, which is where our Japanese production strategists and floor managers became heroes: the entire line-up is highly modular with about 90% of the parts being shared across all three trims. Even the cabin is arranged in modular components to facilitate easier building of both single seater and 2 seater configurations. The biggest difference is in the tuning.

On that note, you can think of the trims in terms of similarly performing cars and their comparative price:

##[color=blue]SR8e Strada[/color]

The SR8e is coded such because it’s the ‘economy’ model. Sure, it’s not that frugal (at a smidge over 10L/100km mixed regular driving), but it’s as economical as we could get it while pumping out over 700bhp (with peak torque available all the way from 1700rpm, I should add). At the base price of 50K AUD/35K USD, it’s priced at the level of a FK8 Type R, and less than, say, a Focus RS or Golf R. But it goes like a 458. It doesn’t quite have the cargo versatility of a hatchback, but twice the power of the hottest of hot hatches, at about an eighth the price of a Ferrari? As I mentioned, it doesn’t have hand-crafted leather upholstery with double stitching and the paint doesn’t cost 15k for a single coat or whatever it is that makes Ferraris so expensive, but it’s got bucket seats, A/C, Apple CarPlay/Android Auto, and you can dial the driving aids all the way down to OFF. What more could you want? I suppose if you wanted a fairer, more contemporary comparison, you can look at the American marvels of today, such as the Camaro ZL1: 100% the performance of a ZL1, for about half the price.

##[color=darkred]SR8TT Speciale[/color]

This is a somewhat self-indulgent nod to ourselves, the acknowledgement that we can’t resist making a car without giving it 1000 horses and a top speed of over 400km/h. So that’s what this gets, well, more like 1050bhp. I suppose this makes it a wannabe Veyron for a fraction of the engineering. But track wise it’s running with the likes of LFA, GT3, ACR, thanks to… you guessed it, using bigger turbos and stiffening the suspension.

##[color=gold]SR8 “GG Tune” Competizione[/color]

a.k.a. Bumblebee a.k.a. “Mac’n’Cheese Beest”. What we ran in Goodwood. This is a proof of concept. The one overriding challenge we had was to prove it was possible to squeeze a sub-seven car out of our base. And when you don’t have money, or time, or really fancy parts and you only get the tyres you can buy at the local dealer, that sub-seven can look like a daunting goal. Or, if you have a driver whose only fear in life is going slow, you can strip the interior, crank the BOOSCHT dial up to eleven and squeeze out close to 1500 ponies, and hope for the best.

Note that the top speed barely changes after the addition of 400 extra horses, that was because part of our limitations was not being allowed to alter the body at all. All three trims share an identical body. The only thing that changed, was the default angle of attack on the lip and the wing. I think it goes without saying that we’ll be producing the “GG Tune” trim in exceedingly limited numbers, and we’ll be vetting customers on that one, because we don’t want all of them going on unscheduled dates with barriers, poles, walls or trees.

What really gets me is that this is a car as tuned as a base model. I just wonder what will happen once the modders get their hands on it, as I’m very sure they will. And that’s all part of the spirit that we hope to share and foster.

As excited as I’ve been working on this beast of a machine, I think I’ve blabbed on quite long enough. In fact, I think it’s time I reserved my own SR8e!

vroom vroom mother[spoiler]fuckers[/spoiler],

stroppy mchorseguy

[DeusExMackia]

#A Motoring Man’s Meanderings
###Review: GBF Bellua SR8e Strada

“I’m a £30k supercar and you can bet your ass I’m going to make sure you know that.”

As an automotive journalist, it is my job to stay up to date with all and any announcements, updates and new releases from across the motoring world. And that is why I am sorry to admit that I have failed you, you my faithful readership. GBF are a company I’ve barely read-up on, let alone paid attention to, and yet out of the blue, here they are. Goodwood 2017; a car that looks like Bumblebee in drag as a 1969 Ferrari 512 rolls up to the start line at the Festival of Speed and blitzes the course. OK, you have my attention now.

Gryphon Gear got involved with this quiet Italian marque a few years ago to develop a new car, the Bellua SR8e Strada. It’s part of an initiative by the CEO of GG to try and make a genuinely affordable supercar, as in affordable to anyone with £30k to spend. That’s not everyone, for sure, but it greatly expands the market base of the average £150/200k supercar, doesn’t it? It’s the Jeremy Corbyn of the performance world.

What do you get then for £30k then? Because that really is all this car costs. $35k US, $50k AUD. That sure is cheap. Well, it’s an all aluminum, MR layout car, with all round push-rods. Powertrain is an 8.3l twin-turbo flatplane V8 producing 712hp linked to a 7 speed single clutch sequential and a viscous LSD. 0-60 in 3.2 seconds, tops out at 237mph. Curb weight of 1583kg, 2 seats, regular interior and some limited luxuries. While there’s no active stuff in the transmission or suspension, it has all the usual driver aids to make it usable. Entry level interior with supercar performance; not half bad for £30k.

How they’re managing to do all this for such a low price, I don’t know. But, it’s time to find out if there’s a catch. With the cars staying in the UK for one more day after Goodwood has finished, I’ve got the South Downs for a play ground and boy are there some great roads out here.

First impressions are that its decently comfortable and decently noisy too. The engine tone is nice but feels restricted as it only revs to 7-and-bit-thousand RPM. But remember, it’s £30k. I feel that that’s going to be a common theme for this drive.

We head up to South Harting and on to Rogate. It feels very competent and pliable on these mixed back roads, and you quickly begin to appreciate that low turbo spool. Reaction wise, this car certainly hits the mark for being reponsive. Turn the traction control off and it becomes very skitty. You’ll be spinning your wheels even in second gear, something I suspect might be to do with the tires, which aren’t high performance ones due to cost restraints. Still, that does make it rather exciting I guess.

Braking is smooth and nominal, and feels, once again, normal. Normal normal normal…but remember, it’s £30k. While it is back heavy, they’ve tuned the suspension to be more favourable to understeer, though that doesn’t stop it kicking out its rear end every so often, especially with those loose rear wheels.

We hit the A3 and head north to the Hindhead Tunnel. It has to do well here, or frankly it isn’t a supercar. At cruising speeds, the Bellua is relaxed and happy to run along not being pushed to the limit, though its far from a cruising machine. Road noise feels comparable to that of a city car at 70mph, which is a compromise I can accept but hardly one that is welcome.

It does make up for itself with the sound in the tunnel, however. Its muted thwartiness echoes well. But it’s not like you’re driving in a tunnel everywhere; the sound just isn’t as impressive as it could be on normal roads.

We head back to the Goodwood Estate. I’m struggling with this thing. It’s a diet supercar that performs like the real thing without being quite as exciting. I almost feel like I’m missing something…

…ah yes, the looks. They are very supercar. The cockpit feels like that of a Porsche 962; it’s a bubble, which creates an amazing sensation on the road. The dials looks excellent too and do make up for the lack of interior interest elsewhere. The back needs no justifying, it just looks gorgeous. Classic curves hint at 50s and 60s styling cues, but that big, stark rear wing balances it out. This is not a retro-future thing, it’s thoroughly modern. But, the front is questionable. Whatever angle I take it from I just can’t enjoy it. It’s too thinned out and complicated, and as I said in my FoS report, makes the car look as though it’s trapped in a constant state of pre-sneezing.

I can’t help but feel though that despite my disagreements with this thing, it is only £30k. It feels like what you expect a supercar to be, nothing more, except with a totally un-supercar price. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Bellua, it’s just it feels a bit like they tried not to be too mad, which is both a blessing a curse. It’s got supercar looks that grab your eye but the sound is less than impressive; the power and performance are amazing, but its delivery feels very normal, and it just isn’t as exciting as I feel it ought to be. It’s normal to drive. Very, very normal.

But…oh for god’s sake, I can’t stand saying this again, it’s £30k. Of all the cars you could have for that money, this is the fastest thing that is an actual road car. I just think that you’d constantly have to explain to everyone that you paid only that amount whenever they asked you why its noise isn’t quite as soulful as other supercars, why its interior isn’t as nice as other supercars, and so on and so on.

I can’t decide on it. Maybe if we treat it as something that isn’t a supercar, but almost like a ‘supercar experience’, then it would feel better, but then what would be the point? I refer back to my Jeremy Corbyn analogy from earlier to summarise on this car; yes, he’s a very well intentioned politcian and I think we can all agree he’s just trying to stick to some very aggreable values. But would you actually want him as your Prime Minister?

-Gavin Anderson

[strop]

@DeusExMackia

It’s the Jeremy Corbyn of the performance world.

And if the performance world is the Labor Party, it’s all a bit of a mess innit? I’m not sure how to feel about this!

Edit:

Strop closed the window on his browser and leaned back in his office chair, his lips pursed. Behind him, Dan stood, arms crossed, at full height, that being barely half a head taller than Strop seated.

“I know what I think, but what I want to know what you think.” Strop was silent for several seconds, then he spoke.

“It seems this Gavin Anderson is not our kind of driver.” Upon declaring this, he printed out a photo of the journalist’s portrait, and stuck it to the dartboard.

[squidhead]

Gavin seems to have a … challenging year.

[Rk38]

@DeusExMackia

It’s the Jeremy Corbyn of the performance world.

Alright so what’s the Theresa May of the automotive world?

[ramthecowy]

A car with a strong and stable ride

[DeusExMackia]

@rk38 Well for that, it would need to say a lot about what it can do and then not deliver… Hmmmmm

[strop]

It all depends on what one is supposed to deliver. Is it a bad thing that one is promising delivering Brexit, but then failing at doing so?

[DeusExMackia]

Oooh. Now we are turning this political

Would just like to point out that my previous comments were not directed towards GBF, but another company(ies)…

[strop]

I thought as much, but thought the analogy being drawn here has a lot of potential

You can be sure that the GG team, aside of peppering Gavin’s face with many a dart, will actually be thinking quite carefully about his comments.

[DeusExMackia]

I’m glad to hear, tis merely an honest critique. The idea though is an excellent one, that’s certainly what he thinks.

[ramthecowy]

I think he’s just taking out his dejectedness after a certain rejection

[strop]

To borrow from the playbook of another user: