Fancy a test track within the clouds located in the centre of a city? Well Fiat’s Lingotto building named after the district of Turin it was built provides just that.
For many car enthusiasts to watch The Italian Job from 1969 featuring Michael Caine, Noel Coward and Benny Hill among others, this rooftop circuit is familiar as it features as part of the getaway sequence with the three Mini Coopers.
Built in Via Nizza, the Lingotto building was the former home to a Fiat manufacturing plant. Construction began on the Matte Trucco designed building in 1916 and was completed seven years later featuring an assembly line working its way up the levels as the raw materials entered the ground floor. Finished cars emerged on the rooftop where a test track was constructed.
At the time of its completion, the Lingotto building was the largest car plant in the world as it proved an influential and impressive fixture of not only Italy’s manufacturing industry, but globally.
More than 80 different Fiat models were assembly in the Lingotto building before the Italian manufacturer built a state of the art new manufacturing facility in Mirafiori during the 1970s.
The Lingotto building assembly line was closed in 1982, but it has since been repurposed as a public space in a competition won by Renzo Piano. It included concert halls, theatre convention centre, shopping arcades and a hotel, while the eastern section was the headquarters for the Automotive Engineering faculty of the Polytechnic University of Turin.
Despite the departure of Fiat from the facility the test track remains on the rooftop and can still be visited, with many tourists either walking or riding vespas around it.
The track itself is a half kilometre oval with two banked corners at either end sitting 28 metres above the city of Turin. It now features gardens on top as Fiat recently opened the rooftop test track for prospective buyers to drive its new electric 500, but only on Mondays.