Monteverdi High Speed 375

Frua's original is the beautiful one, and it belongs to a family. The same pen drew the Maserati Mistral and the AC 428, and the resemblance is close enough that sources have long claimed the three share glass and door pressings, which is worth treating as a claim rather than a fact. Monteverdi's own literature credited the shape to Peter Monteverdi rather than to Frua, and that is roughly where the royalty dispute began. The 1969 Fissore body kept the Frua proportions almost exactly and squared off both ends, which reads as a coarsening or a modernisation depending on your eye. What is not in dispute is the parts-bin economy under the elegance. Tail lights on the 375 L and early 375/4 are Alfa Romeo Giulia Berlina units. The 375/4's door handles come from a Fiat 128, late cars switched to Triumph TR6 lamps, and one very late saloon left with rectangular Ford Granada headlights and rubber-faced bumpers. Inside, the dashboard was English in spirit until 1972 or 1973, wood and round dials, then turned black and sporting.

There is none, and the reason is a law. Switzerland banned circuit racing outright after the 1955 Le Mans disaster, and that ban stood until the federal government lifted it with effect from 1 July 2026. A Swiss constructor in 1967 had no home circuit, no domestic series and no reason on earth to build a homologation car. Peter Monteverdi had done his racing already. Formula Junior and hillclimbs through the late 1950s, then his own MBM single-seaters from 1960, and one Formula One appearance at the non-championship 1961 Solitude Grand Prix, where he retired after two laps. He withdrew his German Grand Prix entry after being injured and stopped driving. So the 375 never turned a competitive wheel, though its engine did plenty of racing without it: the Chrysler 440 was a NASCAR and drag-strip staple in America while Monteverdi was bolting it into hand-formed Italian bodywork. He came back to the sport at the far end of his career, buying the Onyx Formula One team in 1989, whose best result was Stefan Johansson's third place at that year's Portuguese Grand Prix.

The Monteverdi's cultural footprint is small, specific and a little odd. A 375 L appears in Zeta One, a 1969 British spy spoof, supplied by the factory and credited on screen to Monteverdi Concessionaires Limited. That is essentially the entire screen record for the marque. What Monteverdi had instead was a customer list. American buyers took a share of the output, and the Middle East took more, with the Qatari royal family among the 375/4 owners. When car production stopped, Peter Monteverdi turned the Binningen factory into the Monteverdi Car Collection, which opened in 1985 and closed in 2016; most of the cars went to the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne, which is where a visitor is now most likely to meet one. Jay Leno owned one of the six Fissore-bodied short-wheelbase coupes for several years, which did more for the marque's profile in America than the factory ever managed. Beyond that, the 375 is a car for people who already know. Nobody buys one to be recognised at a show.

Two entirely different cars live under one badge, and they age at different rates. The Chrysler half is the easy one. A 440 Magnum, a TorqueFlite and a Salisbury-based rear end are among the best understood components of the era, and a competent shop anywhere can rebuild all three. Monteverdi added a bigger seven-litre oil pan and an oil cooler, plus a transmission cooler on automatics, and otherwise left the engine alone, so there are no bespoke internals to chase. The Swiss and Italian half is where the time goes. Bodies are steel over a square-tube steel frame on everything except the Frua cars, formed by hand in tiny numbers, with no panel supply of any kind. Early Fissore-era cars had teething trouble with fuel systems, brakes and throttle linkages as production moved between shops, and the 375 C convertible was reported at the time to lack rigidity. Reckon on 18 to 23 litres per 100 kilometres, which is the factory's own figure. Plan the route around fuel stops and the car is genuinely usable.