Rare Rides: A 1951 Pegaso Z-102 GT Berlinetta, Prototype Luxury Coupe

Corey Lewis
by Corey Lewis

Today’s Rare Ride hails from a Spanish company that made some very fast sports coupes for a very short while. Let’s find out some more about Pegaso.

Pegaso was founded in 1946 in Barcelona, Spain. Its parent company was Enasa, a firm founded that same year after it purchased the assets of the Spanish portion of Hispano-Suiza.

Enasa was lead by engineer Wifredo Ricart. After WWII Ricart fled from Italy to Spain and wanted to leave Europe entirely. He secured a job in the US with Studebaker, but before he could depart the government approached him to head up Enasa. He found that offer more appealing than a job at Studebaker. Ricart directed his company with an eye toward engineering and innovation, which was great for sports cars and nice buses, but not so great for the accountants.

Enasa was a state-owned firm and was mainly concerned with heavy-duty trucks and buses. Thus Enasa directed Pegaso to build said trucks and buses, along with armored vehicles, and tractors. For a short while, the company also built sports cars.

And the sports cars in question were mostly the Z-102, as it was the only passenger car Pegaso ever produced in any quantity. Between 1951 and 1958, the old Hispano-Suiza factory in Spain churned out sports cars at a very slow rate. Available in coupe and convertible varieties, the basic design was penned by Ricart. Additional bodies were available from Carrozzeria Touring, Saoutchik, Serra, as well as other designs from Enasa.

Ricart spared no expense in the development of his sports car and used the expertise he’d developed at Alfa Romeo where he designed the Tipo 512. The pressed steel chassis was paired with an aluminum body for lightness, though the cars still proved too heavy for racing. With the exception of the bodies, the Z-102 was built entirely in-house. The all-new engine design was a quad-cam alloy V8 with a dry sump. Initially, the mill was 2.5 liters in displacement (175hp) but was later upgraded to a 2.8 and then a 3.2. The 3.2 was a dual overhead cam design and had 32 valves for a whopping 360 horsepower with the optional supercharger. Top speed in the base version was 120 miles per hour, but that increased with the supercharged engine to 151. The top speed made it the fastest production car on sale anywhere in the world at the time. All transmissions were five-speed manuals, with the gearbox located at the rear.

The powerful, expensive, and luxurious Z-102 was unfortunately not a sales success, even with its performance prowess. In a last-ditch attempt to make some money, the successor Z-103 was introduced in 1955. Z-103 used simpler OHV engines and was lighter and less expensive to produce. Crucially, it used cheaper bodies made of a mix of steel and aluminum. Only three were made by 1958 when Pegaso was forced to shift its focus back to commercial vehicles and close down its passenger car operation. Pegaso continued its production of commercial vehicles through 1990, at which point Iveco purchased Enasa. The Pegaso brand was killed off in 1994.

Today’s light green Rare Ride is one of the first four prototypes produced by Pegaso, with some styling cues that didn’t make it into the production version. It’s priced on request in Belgium.

[Images: Pegaso]

Corey Lewis
Corey Lewis

Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.

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  • SCE to AUX SCE to AUX on Mar 11, 2021

    That's an exceptional find. I doubt RockAuto supports that make. I like their flush door handles a lot more than those available today. And a small-displacement V-8... yum. Yet another story about how hard it is to succeed in the car business.

  • THX1136 THX1136 on Mar 12, 2021

    Pegaso, what large wheel wells you have! All the better to create excess drag, my dear. (or not) This aspect - wheels set so far into the wells - is so foreign to the way cars look today. The first photo which highlights this just makes the car look so wacky to my eye.

  • 3-On-The-Tree I’m sure they are good vehicles but you can’t base that on who is buying them. Land Rovers, Bentley’ are bought by Robin Leaches’s “The Rich and Famous” but they have terrible reliability.
  • SCE to AUX The fix sounds like a bandaid. Kia's not going to address the defective shaft assemblies because it's hard and expensive - not cool.
  • Analoggrotto I am sick and tired of every little Hyundai Kia Genesis flaw being blown out of proportion. Why doesn't TTAC talk about the Tundra iForce Max problems, Toyota V35A engine problems or the Lexus 500H Hybrid problems? Here's why: education. Most of America is illiterate, as are the people who bash Hyundai Kia Genesis. Surveys conducted by credible sources have observed a high concentration of Hyundai Kia Genesis models at elite ivy league universities, you know those places where students earn degrees which earn more than $100K per year? Get with the program TTAC.
  • Analoggrotto NoooooooO!
  • Ted “the model is going to be almost 4 inches longer and 2 inches wider than its predecessor”Size matters. In this case there is 6” too much.
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