Lambretta Model D 1950
After WWII Ferdinado Innocenti had nothing but a bombed out seamless steel tube factory and a pile of rubble.
He guessed that Italy now needed cheap transportation so he called in an aeronautical engineer Carrondino D’Acanio to design a scooter for the masses. There was a fallout between the two when the design was presented utilizing pressed steel fabrication for the chassis. Innocenti want a tubular chassis in order to resurrect his pre-war factory so off he went to the banks of the Lambro river near Milan and began to build the Lambretta. D’Acanio took his design to Enrico Piaggio who liked the pressed steel chassis and the Vespa was born. Double whammy for the Italian scooter industry for the next few decades. Engineer D’Acanio went back to the aircraft business and helped produce the first modern helicopters for a Count Agusta. Both Lambretta and Vespa had front suspension systems designed around and looking like the landing wheels of an aircraft of the time and looking back it’s easy to understand why.
The Lambretta in our collection is an early example being the model 150D which was introduced in 1954 with torsion bar suspension and two single seats. There were 55,000 examples of this model made over a three year period but the basic Lambretta styling lasted through all the subsequent machines.
TECHNICAL
- 150cc two stroke 57mm X 58mm bore and stroke
- Torsion bar rear suspension. Trailing link front
- 3 speed constant mesh gearbox twist grip controlled
- No rear chain. Driven by bevel gears
- 6bhp at 4720rpm
- 140mpg in the pamphlet; less in reality