Here’s the perfect question for car experts who think they know everything: what makes an excited ring-ding-ding but looks like a shrunken Ferrari? Which car wears Pininfarina-style couture, from the Plexiglass covers on its headlights to its cheekily terminated tail, yet also trails gentle puffs of blue two-stroke clouds? Hardly anybody in Europe will know.
 
Do you? It’s a DKW-VEMAG GT Malzoni, and it was made in Brazil more than 40 years ago. You can be forgiven for not knowing about them, though – until now, none has ventured onto Europe’s roads. But in its homeland, the licence-built DKW with its bespoke bodywork is a star. Motoring enthusiasts venerate it as an all-time great, and local collectors hunt it with a burning passion.

And that’s no simple task. ‘Only about a dozen roadworthy examples are known today, as well as a couple of wrecks,’ says Boris Feldman, Brazilian collector and Malzoni owner. He’d never sell his, although anyone who wanted to dispose of a Malzoni would find a long list of would-be customers. That notion was brought home to Rodrigo Theise, a 33-year-old DKW restorer from the south of Brazil with family roots in Germany, at 2008’s national gathering of DKW fans in Caxambu: ‘A spontaneous offer was made for the blue Malzoni of over 150,000 real,’ he said. That was around £45,000 – a sum that puts the Malzoni into financial perspective.

The white one that shares space on these pages with the blue DKW is the best-known of them. In 1966 it wrote a chapter of motor sport history that every Brazilian fan knows by heart and today it belongs to Carlos Andre Sarmento, who has poured 2000 man-hours into its restoration.

The background for that great event was the racetrack at Interlagos. There, South America’s racing elite would gather each year for the Mil Milhas (‘1000 miles’), a highly prestigious race in which two drivers shared the wheel of the white GT Malzoni in 1966. One was called Jan Balder, the other was a certain Emerson Fittipaldi who was about to take a step up into Formula 1. For the time being they were both making waves at Interlagos, pushing their little DKW with its four-speed gearbox along for 1000 miles.

And the DKW gave its all. So much so that, with just three laps to go, the impossible looked possible – the little three-cylinder car was going to beat all the exotica. The smell of two-stroke oil was strong, but the whiff of an impending sensation was stronger. And then the dream faded. The little two-stroke that had run so courageously for hour after hour finally weakened. On two cylinders, Balder and Fittipaldi dragged it home in third place to great applause, but no victory. That didn’t stop the celebrations though, for even that result exceeded the wildest of pre-race expectations.

Mind you, DKW two-strokes were no strangers to the racetrack. As early as the 1950s privateers were entering their own saloons in touring car races, and DKW in Germany maintained a competition department that keenly contested rallies and long-distance races such as the Italian Mille Miglia.

Even the DKW licence-holder in Brazil, VEMAG (Veiculos e Máquinas Agricolas, or ‘Agricultural Vehicles and Machines’), maintained a competition department. With the cars designed just for everyday life, tuning was the hot topic of the day and, thanks to its simple, valveless design, the DKW could be persuaded to release more horsepower easily and cheaply. The front-wheel-drive running gear was also able to cope without buckling under the stresses imposed by the track.

Naturally, none of this happened overnight. The little Brazilian Belcar saloon put out a solid and durable 43bhp – enough to get you where you wanted to go, but not quickly. So Jorge Lettry, head of the VEMAG race team, was charged with making the robust two-stroke three-cylinder more powerful. Something also had to be done about the tall, heavy Belcar bodywork, beloved by taxi drivers throughout Sao Paulo and Brasilia, but top-heavy on the track. In the early 1960s they struggled in vain against the low and nimble Willys Interlagos, which was a Brazilian derivative of the French Alpine 108 – and just as vicious in the handling stakes.

Enter Genaro ‘Rino’ Malzoni in 1962, with a plan to match the power with new bodywork. Money wasn’t an issue: his family, with Italian roots, had grown rich on cane sugar, coffee and banking. What he had in mind was a small, pretty coupé in the GT class; something the girls would love, and which was quick enough to win races. A shortened DKW chassis with a tuned engine was a simple combination, easily available too – and that made the coupé a commercial proposition.

An enthusiastic racing driver, Malzoni sketched out the bodywork himself. It’s not hard to see where he got his inspiration: he took Pininfarina’s use of form as the basic recipe for his compact DKW two-door, and seasoned it with a dash of Bizzarrini and a pinch of Frua. Astonishingly, Malzoni succeeded in creating a timeless and perfectly balanced form whose crispness still fascinates today. Its proportions were just right, better than many of the sketches that came from the recognised masters of design.

According to one story, Malzoni invited the VEMAG bosses to a barbeque, showed them his creation, they drove it – and were impressed. So much so that in 1964 the car came onto the market as the GT Malzoni. Rino Malzoni set up for low-volume production, having the bodies made by hand from glassfibre laminate at his own company, Luminari. This was advanced technology for the time, and avoided the need for huge investment in press tools. Malzoni took no chances as far as strength went, and in places the glassfibre and resin were laid up as thick as your finger. DKW-VEMAG bought three for its own competition department, and supported Malzoni’s private initiative to get it into production. It took over the job of installing the mechanical components, and even allowed the coupé to be badged as one of its own.

The cars took to the racetrack immediately, and very quickly recorded their first successes: time and again the fleet-footed GT Malzoni pushed cars with far bigger engines off the podium. Jorge Lettry cut ever more courageous windows in the pistons to optimise the exchange of gases, worked on the shape of the exhaust system (so vital in tuning a two-stroke), and matched the result to a new set of gear ratios. Eventually he wound up the little three-cylinder engine to a scarcely believable 114bhp, easily surpassing the magic 100bhp-per-litre barrier.

‘At the end of the Interlagos straight it was doing nearly 190km/h [119mph],’ says Carlos Andre Sarmento. ‘That’s something nobody had believed the little car was capable of. Lettry performed miracles.’ The engine, once so demure, now screamed like an angry devil, whipping the 680kg coupé along the track at anything up to 7500rpm. The high state of tune compromised its reliability though; with more than 90bhp there were regular problems with pistons and conrods. Back in Germany, DKW’s engineers could hardly believe reports of what the Brazilians were achieving, at least not until the VEMAG team sent an engine to the parent factory. Brazilian two-stroke fans still smile about that.