Pebble Beach: Icona Vulcano goes titanium

It was designed and created in Italy, but wouldn’t be right to describe the one-off Vulcano Titanium as an Italian supercar.

The chassis and engine are fundamentally American-made C6 Corvette ZR1, and the supercharged pushrod V8 lends its heritage more to a 1957 Chevy Belair than a Ferrari.

But it is definitely supercar quick and defines itself with a claim of 0-100km/h in less than three seconds.

The Vulcano Titanium is purely a design study, claims design director Samuael Chuffart at Icona, an Italian design house in Turin.

Icona also has studios in Shanghai and Southern California. Rumours suggest the project was funded by Chinese investors, but according to Icona spokesman Matteo Rignanese the rumours aren’t true.

Two years ago Icona revealed the Vulcano at California's Pebble Beach car show as a non-driving concept with an aluminium alloy body painted red with carbon-fibre accents.

Chauffart describes it as a “supercar with sensuality and inspired by a time when cars were sexy.” He mentions Ferrari 250 GTO and the more recent Aston Martin One-77.

There is no design or styling differences between the original Vulcano concept and the Vulcano Titanium other than the hand-hammered titanium body panels in place of the red aluminium panels. And, of course, the Vulcano Titanium is completely functional and driveable, its supercharged V8 developing 500kW and 840Nm.

“We can quite easily tune it to give about 900kW, but when we showed the Vulcano here in 2013, people did not want more power. They wanted practicality and driveability,” said Chuffart.

“We also considered using a Ferrari V12 in the Vulcano Titanium and could have quite easily through Claudio Lombardi’s connections.”

Lombardi during the early 1990 was Scuderia Ferrari team manager and is credited as the designer of the Ferrari F1 V12 engine in 1993. Lombardi turned his engineering talents to sorting out the Vulcano Titanium’s drivetrain and replacing the gated gearbox with a close-ratio paddle shift six-speed gearbox from Automac Modena. He also modified the ZR1 suspension from its Corvette’s beginnings to better cope with the Vulcano Titanium’s claimed 355km/h top speed.

The titanium body is entirely hand-hammered. There are no welds, no heating and no tricks. Cecomp, an Italian coachbuilder, employed eight people for seven months to hand form the 0.5mm thick titanium sheets.

“Any thicker and the titanium cannot be worked,” says Chauffart, and he uses ‘worked’ very generally. Those seven craftsmen invested more than 10,000 hours.

Chauffart claims Icona’s decision to used titanium was driven by curiosity. “We were asked by a few supercar manufacturers if we could supply titanium body parts,” says Chauffart. “We hadn’t ever worked with titanium before. We learned so much working on this project.”

Titanium, for one, doesn’t like to hold a shape. “We’d spend all day hammering a sheet of titanium over a form as we would with aluminium. But, when we released the titanium from the jig, it would bounce back. Titanium also doesn’t like to be stretched.”  

“That’s why you see a lot of cut-lines in the body,” he explains. “We learned to work around the problem.”

While there were challenges, there were also benefits to using titanium. It is light in weight and it doesn’t oxidise or tarnish. Chauffart admits he prefers the natural warm raw colour of titanium. It gives the one-off supercar a unique look.

“Titanium you can see it is like a Mad Max car,” he says. “Look closely and you can see we’ve hand worked each panel. We now know how to work with titanium.”