08/08/2022
If there is one aftermarket car part that has dogged me since my youth, it's the Momo Prototipo. I think I have purchased two dozen of the things for my personal cars. They've been in everything from my ‘77 Scirocco to my 911 Carrera, from my Lancia Delta HF to my Mk2 Ford Es**rt, from my Audi Coupe GT to my Alfetta GT. You might say I’m hooked. The Prototipo has become like an old friend, and tends to make any sporting machine I own feel immediately familiar.
I've tried the competition, sure, I just keep coming back to the Prototipo. There is something so impossibly perfect about the design, which (perhaps atypically of many Italian products) sees its form follow its function with a slavishness that borders on the bauhaus. There is something incomparably classic about the look, which appears to have been ripped from the cockpit of a Porsche 908 on the pitwall at Le Mans, circa 1970. And the functionality? Well, yeah… it’s bang on. 350mm of circular perfection, wrapped in leather.
It hasn’t changed much over the decades, the Prototipo, and why would it? There isn’t much to it, and that’s the whole point. It’s a competition-bred piece of purpose and understatement. Three spokes with holes and a chunky leather rim, available in any color combination you want as long as you want either black with black spokes or black with silver spokes. It looks today, right now, pretty much the same as an old 917K steering wheel. The same way it looked when it was fitted to the Ferrari 308 in the Magnum P.I. days. The same way it looks sitting on a Porsche 911 that has been “Reimagined by Singer.” Fit a Prototipo to your car and you’re in very good company indeed.
In use the Prototipo does what all the best racing car components do. It works beautifully without you being aware of it. And that ruthless efficiency, which was good enough for the Le Mans winning Porsches way back when, good enough for Ferrari’s high volume sports cars of the 1980’s, and good enough for those damnably talented boys over at Singer, is good enough for me, too. Always has been.
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