![The Tornado-Fiat 600GT classic car in profile Classic & Sports Car – Tornado-Fiat 600GT: Twin Cam tearaway](/sites/default/files/styles/article/public/2024-07/Classic-%26-Sports-Car-Tornado-Fiat-600GT-03.png?itok=F67fr48Q)
Some cars incite chills of dread, not anticipation. The Tornado-Fiat 600GT is one of them.
On first sight, it’s hard not to look on in puckered silence.
There is no façade of normality here, just a small Italian shopping car with a Lotus Twin Cam slung behind the rear axle.
It just looks so, well, out there – like some sort of Darwinian fluke whereby two disparate species somehow mated and produced a mutant strain. It cannot possibly work.
![Lotus and Fiat badges on the Tornado-Fiat 600GT classic car Classic & Sports Car – Tornado-Fiat 600GT: Twin Cam tearaway](/sites/default/files/2024-07/Classic-%26-Sports-Car-Tornado-Fiat-600GT-05.png)
An unlikely combination of badges suggests this is no ordinary Fiat 600D
In the 1960s and ’70s, the car pictured here terrorised speed events, racking up dozens of class wins in hillclimbs and sprints.
It then went on to enjoy a secondary career as a circuit weapon. What’s more, this wasn’t just some homebrewed lash-up.
For a brief period in the mid-’60s, you too could have owned Rickmansworth’s take on the hot Fiat theme, out Abarth-ing Abarth by adding horsepower by means of a shoehorn.
Hertfordshire’s Tornado Cars was one of the more respectable outfits to emerge during the 1950s ‘specials’ boom.
Its products were well made and build-able, the firm attempting to garner mainstream acceptance with the handsome Talisman coupé of 1962.
![The Tornado-Fiat 600GT classic car’s Lotus Twin Cam engine up close Classic & Sports Car – Tornado-Fiat 600GT: Twin Cam tearaway](/sites/default/files/2024-07/Classic-%26-Sports-Car-Tornado-Fiat-600GT-04.png)
Fiat’s air-cooled ‘twin’ has been replaced by a Lotus Twin Cam engine in this Tornado-Fiat 600GT