Back in March, David Tracy wrote what was perhaps the hottest take of his career. He said if you drive a car with a timing belt, it’s not really reliable. Debates continue today about whether he was right, but there is a car where David’s words are actually an understatement. The Lancia Gamma was so hilariously over-engineered that simply turning your steering wheel full lock had a non-zero chance of snapping your camshaft belt and turning your car into a pretty paperweight.
Truth be told, most cars with timing belts are reliable enough. Sure, it sucks that every 100,000 miles or so you’ll have to toss a few hundred to over a thousand bucks at replacing a part that should last the life of the car. But I’d rather take that over some of the timing chain systems out there. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Volkswagen!
Some cars are perhaps too complicated for their own good, and one of them is the subject of today’s Unholy Fails.
This story takes us back to the 1970s. As with so many stories beginning in this era, conditions weren’t ideal. Multiple oil crises, hammered economies, and a new focus on the environment reshaped the auto industry. Suddenly, expensive land yachts that measured fuel economy in gallons per mile were too much for buyers to handle. People and governments alike tightened their belts.
This was also a time of change for Lancia. The Italian automaker, which was founded in 1906, was no stranger to crisis. As Curbside Classic notes, Lancia’s first real emergency happened when Vincenzo Lancia passed in 1937 at 55 years old. But the company carried on with the family keeping Lancia alive. Lancia’s widow, Adèle Lancia, even took the CEO role of the firm.
Lancia would face a second crisis just a decade later. After World War II, President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1948, or the Marshall Plan, which provided assistance to war-torn Europe. Vincenzo’s son, Gianni, was at the helm of Lancia. Reportedly, Gianni Lancia and his wife were suspected to be Communist sympathizers and thus missed out on the economic help other Italian automakers got. Thankfully, Lancia was able to pull itself out of the post-war slump thanks to innovative cars that got Italy on wheels again.
Things then got easier for Lancia and it continued its tradition of being a leader in technology. Lancia trickled parts of what made racecars great into common everyday passenger vehicles. This meant that in the 1950s, Lancia had cars with small 2-liter engines, but with advanced features like independent suspensions, transaxles, and a high aluminum content. Lancia loved to experiment with engines, too. Remember, this was the company that pioneered the VR engine long before Volkswagen brought them back to the modern day.
The Lancia family relinquished ownership in 1956, but the cars were still great. Lancia even caught the attention of the Italian government, which has used the Presidential Lancia Flaminia as an official car since 1961.
Unfortunately, Lancia would find itself in a crisis again. It had the interesting front-wheel-drive Fulvia and Flavia ranges plus the Flaminia, but sales weren’t keeping up. Lancia had a new factory that wasn’t paying for itself and to make matters worse, competition from Germany was swaying buyers. As Curbside Classic explains, Lancia soon found itself in a spot where it was selling cars for more money than the competition, but due to its investments was making terrible margins on those vehicles.
FIAT would come to save Lancia in 1969. Revitalized, Lancia would be able to release new cars, including an aspirational flagship.
Lancia Proving Itself
Reportedly, FIAT latched onto a Lancia that had no real future plans in its cupboards and a workforce more deflated than a football tossed by the New England Patriots. FIAT placed Sergio Camuffo as the Technical Director of Lancia, where he was given a mission to deliver new cars from Lancia and to keep the brand’s costs reined in. In effect, Camuffo had to turn the brand around.
In 1972, Camuffo launched what would become a three-year development program for a vehicle to replace the aging Flavia. The new vehicle was given the project name of Tipo 830.
As the retrospective at Driven To Write notes, Tipo 830 development ran into a roadblock almost immediately. I don’t need to tell some of you what happened, but 1973 rolled around, as did an oil crisis. As I said earlier, this made big, expensive vehicles unappealing for many. Italy’s economy took a hit as well. Either of these would have convinced any other automaker to rethink its strategy of building a luxurious flagship.
Reportedly, FIAT pulled back on some of its plans, but Lancia moved forward with the Tipo 830. Engineers still had a lot on their plate. Lancia released the ambitious Beta, which found sales across Europe and North America, but that car suffered from catastrophic rust issues. There was also the Lancia Montecarlo sports car, which had problematic brakes. Reportedly, the Tipo 830 could have been a very different car. Citroën and FIAT joined forces with potential plans for a flagship car. Lancia’s car could have shared components with what would become the Citroën CX, but the partnership fell apart.
Still, those engineers pushed through and in 1976, Lancia rolled the Gamma out to the auto show in Geneva. On paper, there was a lot to love. The Gamma Berlina sedan and the Gamma coupe were penned by the minds at Pininfarina, where designer Aldo Brovarone gets credit for the lovely lines of the coupe. The Gamma name was a big deal, too. Before 1945, Lancia named cars after Greek letters. FIAT ownership brought that back, starting with the Beta.
The Gamma still had some of that Lancia weirdness, too. At launch, Gamma buyers drove a car powered by a 2.5-liter flat four. Power output was a meager 140 HP. Later, Lancia would downsize for tax reasons and offer up a 2.0-liter flat-four that made 120 HP. These power numbers wouldn’t be bad for a cheap car, but are pretty modest for a flagship. Still, the engines continued the Lancia tradition of offbeat power. Those engines drove the front wheels through a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic.
The Gamma was also given MacPherson struts on all four wheels with wide wishbones and parallel transverse links out back. It also has assisted rack and pinion steering and disc brakes on all wheels. All of this was wrapped in a luxurious interior. Reportedly, the press was in love, with Car magazine saying, via Driven To Write:
“It is a driver’s car par excellence; it will please those who like the individuality and detailing that belong more to days gone by: for this is a car in the true Lancia tradition…” Praise for the car continued: “Frankly we were amazed at the amount of attention this car attracts. People who stop to admire it suggest that it has an air of classic elegance, a sort of old-fashioned quality appeal, despite its contemporary shape. Indeed there are features of the body design that reek of times long gone and make one wonder how on earth Lancia can afford to build them into the car… this impression of traditionalism and quality comes over, and the Gamma owner will be much envied wherever he goes.”
“There is a real liveliness about the Gamma as well as an obvious and quantifiable ability and there won’t be many interested drivers who won’t enjoy getting out on the road with it or even punting it around town: it feels and acts like a proper gentleman’s sporting saloon.” They concluded: “It’s an especially good car. The strange throb of its engine at low revs is somewhat difficult to accept but within minutes you’ll find that you’re enjoying the car for its character as well as its pure ability – and that character comes as much from the engine as anything else.”
The car buff mags found the Gamma to be a beautiful, well-handling vehicle. Unfortunately, the love affair wouldn’t last.
Why The Gamma Fails
By all accounts, the Gamma sounded like it was a fantastic driver’s car. Plus, it’s something that you could look at all day. However, its undoing was the kind of reliability that has given Italian cars the stereotypes they have today.
The first issue is that, reportedly, the Gamma was a maintenance-hungry machine. Lancia specified high-quality oils that should be changed in short intervals. These engines weren’t units that you just let run without care. If you kept up on the mechanicals, you also had to battle Lancia’s notorious rust issues.
Yet, none of them can come even close to how the engine could fail. Reportedly, the engine in the Gamma was based on the proven Flavia’s engine. However, engineers made some critical changes that caused some unfortunate side effects. The Flavia’s engine uses pushrod-actuated valves and has a chain-driven camshaft. That’s nothing far out. The redesigned cast aluminum engine for the Gamma took a slightly different route. Now, the camshafts were driven by a belt rather than a chain.
The problem came from how the other components under the hood were driven. Normally, ancillaries such as the power steering pump and the alternator are run from a belt driven by the crankshaft. If your power steering pump seizes, it will likely either throw or burn up the belt. At which point, you just pull over, shut down the engine, and cobble together an escape plan. It’s the same deal for any other part experiencing sudden death.
However, the Gamma’s engine did things a bit differently. Instead of running the power steering pump from a crank-driven belt, the Gamma’s engine ties the pump to the cam belt on the left side of the engine. On the surface, this sounds harmless, because Citroën did the same thing and while the belts did break, they didn’t exactly become infamous. The Ford Vulcan V6 runs its water pump from the cam system but uses chains. The Lancia Gamma Consortium explains what goes wrong:
Gammas have an unenviable reputation when it comes to their toothed camshaft drive belt, and not without reason! The camshaft serving the nearside (left- hand) pair of cylinders also drives the power steering pump. A lack of development, in early cars in particular, showed itself when unsuspecting owners would start their Gammas on a cold morning with the steering on full lock. This would cause the cambelt to break / jump with the load from the steering pump, resulting in one pair of cylinders firing-up whilst the other pair tried to destroy themselves, at the least causing bent valves. Later models have revised belt tensioners, but are still known to suffer from this problem.
The solution? At the least, it is a good precaution to park leaving the steering in the straight-ahead position. Cam belts should be changed regularly. A special tool is available for hire from the Lancia Motor Club tool library. Lancia recommended every 36,000 miles or 3 years, but considering the relatively low cost of a pair of new belts (about £25-30), many owners change them every 12,000 or even 9,000 miles. The only positive way to solve the problem is to move the pump to the front of the engine and to take its drive from the crankshaft pulley (using the pulley groove intended for the air conditioning pump). A cheaper, less technically elegant, possibility is to slacken off the ‘V’ drive belts to the steering pump, causing them to slip under load. Hardly entirely satisfactory, but if it saves your engine…?
If you follow what you learned in driver’s education, you probably park your car on a hill with your wheels turned over. After all, if your parking brake or parking pawl fails, you don’t want your driverless car plowing into other things or people. However, if you were a Lancia Gamma owner you put your engine at risk by parking properly on a hill. Instead, you parked with your wheels pointed dead ahead and hoped it didn’t roll away on you.
Jason Torchinsky wrote about this wild phenomenon in 2021, and he points out that you don’t even have to be starting the car to ruin your Gamma’s engine:
It didn’t even have to be when you first start the car — though it is suggested that if you have one, only start it with the steering wheel nice and straight — if you pulled out of a parking spot with the engine cold and cranked the wheel enough, you could pop that belt just as easy.
Holy crap, how does a car company let that happen? I can’t think of another car where you can literally destroy your own engine just by cranking the steering wheel at the wrong time. Well, I mean, other than by cranking the wheel to drive into something.
Now, it might be easy to dismiss this whole deal from the rust to the fatal engine flat to lazy engineering, but Jason points out that such wasn’t fully the case with the Gamma. Engineers gave the fastback Berlina a rear end with an elaborate trunk.
There isn’t just a rear window, but a second window inside of the vehicle that looks into the trunk and a third window attached to the trunk lid that also allows you to look into the trunk. That third window is covered up with a set of louvers. So there was some serious engineering done on the Gamma, but it certainly wasn’t on how the power steering pump was run.
It’s still not exactly known what went on there. What I can tell you is that both versions of the Gamma were a flop. Lancia sold the Gamma from 1976 to 1984, moving just 15,272 Berlinas and 6,789 coupés in the process. Lancia introduced a slew of Gamma concepts, upgraded the 2.5 engine to fuel injection, and gave the Gamma a facelift, but it could never find a ton of buyers.
At the very least, the Gamma name wasn’t revived to be placed on a Chrysler product. The poor Flavia was brought back as a rebadged version of the Chrysler 200. Currently, Lancia doesn’t even build rebadged Chryslers anymore but just the little Ypsilon, and that shares its bones with a number of Stellantis European models.
The good news here is that it seems that Lancia collectors go after the marque’s far more famous rides. You can get a running Gamma for under $20,000 or even under $10,000 if you look hard enough.
It’s a shame the Gamma has such a weird fatal flaw, because it sounds like it was otherwise a great car. Sure, a Gamma won’t blow your socks off, but it sounds like a fun car to drive with the kind of style that makes you look like a distinguished driver. So, maybe it’s worth buying one, just be sure not to park with your wheels turned.
(Images: Lancia/Stellantis, unless otherwise noted.)
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