When the Fiat Cinquecento was introduced in 1991, the world expected a cheap and versatile city car for grocery shopping, in the spirit of the original Fiat 500. But adolescent Italians soon learned that their mothers’ new, lightweight and surprisingly agile Cinquecentos were also perfect toys for street racing on cobblestone boulevards, cutting corners in dense renaissance-era city centres and drifting around tight mountain curves. It’s not clear whether Fiat simply wanted to get Italy’s speed-mad youth off the roads or aimed to create a more inclusive and affordable way of entering the increasingly expensive world of motorsport, but in 1992, the Fiat Cinquecento Trofeo was born.

Jan Baedeker
Editor-in-Chief