Bruno Sacco - In Memoriam

I am honored that you asked me to tell a memory of Bruno Sacco. The fact that he came to the United States is interesting because, professionally speaking, he held the United States of America in the highest regard. He followed the headquarters of the Mercedes-Benz Style Center in Irvine, CA, with great attention, and the appointments at Pebble Beach during the Monterey Week were unmissable.

He considered the Detroit Motor Show to be fundamental, and he never missed it, often suggesting presenting his concept cars for their world premiere there. In 2006, in Dearborn, MI, his name was written in the Automotive Hall of Fame. In his speech he said "as a young designer I was inspired by American style design". My memory begins from the first meeting in December 1991 until April 1999 when he retired, but we saw and spoke to each other for many years afterward. My family worked in the automotive sector from 1919 to 2004 specifically in the modeling of bodywork and interiors, in the construction of prototypes and show cars and related engineering, continuing with Studiotorino from 2005 to today. By typing Studiotorino.com into a web browser and clicking on the chapter “Work Family Stola” you can read the more than one-hundred-year history of our work and a chapter about Mercedes-Benz that begins in June 1994, and not by chance, is the longest and most passionate.

I firmly believe that for an automotive supplier, working for Mercedes-Benz is a dream for the beauty of the products, for the recognized seriousness and for the absolute prestige that would derive for themselves and other customers. IN 1988, we at Stola S.p.A. began working a commercial relationship with the house of the Star. It seemed like a difficult thing, as we knew of a very famous Director of the Style Center named Bruno Sacco and therefore, evidently, Italian. We had already noticed him at the various salons in Geneva, Frankfurt and Paris but approaching him was impossible because he was always busy and accompanied by numerous collaborators. On these occasions, I was also particularly struck by his sartorial (fashionable) elegance, which was perfect in every detail, indeed of Italian manufacture. We Italians always tend to think that it is easy to get to know each other abroad "among us Italians", and therefore meet, and have the possibility of being able to describe our skills and start working together. Nothing could be more wrong with this idea with Bruno Sacco. In any case, through some channels of acquaintances after almost three years of attempts to approach, in December 1990, we managed to have an appointment with Him in Sindelfingen. After all, our company in the modeling sector was well-known and had an excellent reputation with very modern equipment, and among other things, it was one of the oldest in the world.

In these meetings, Mr. Sacco (as I called him from the first moment, always speaking to us in Italian) was always courteous and kind. Still, at the end of those 20 minutes a year that he gave us, the ending was always the same; “thank you We appreciate your work, but we are already perfectly organized." The same scene happened in his office in Sindelfingen in December of 1991,1992 and 1993.

We therefore had no hope, but I never gave up on in the next meeting, during a sort of highly prestigious pre-Christmas visit. The place and environment were so charming; the person was rather charismatic, and his motivation, which was already organized, really seemed sincere and devoid of even the slightest arrogance. On a day in June 1994 in Stola S.p.A. I get a phone call from a certain Harald Leschke from the “Advance Design Mercedes” department (I discovered later that he was the manager of this department) who asked me if we were available to build a working aluminum show car with delivery in November, for an international exhibition in Beijing. The answer on the phone was immediately yes without even checking our internal workloads, and the following week, Leschke himself accompanied by his assistant Franz Leker in a car, obviously a Mercedes-Benz, came to Italy to tell us the details and inform us, in a few days the reference model and a frame would arrive (era of the future A-Class), mechanized.

The project was called FCC, an acronym for Family China Car, a competition of sorts organized by the Chinese government for the most important car manufacturers in the world to understand what the ideal car for people would be in the future. Mr. Sacco came to visit us just before the delivery (we never saw him during the five months of work), and we immediately understood that Mercedes-Benz, at least for the work of the Style Center, was the best environment of people and skills we had ever had to deal with. It must be said that we at Stola S.p.A. practically worked for almost all the automotive manufacturers in the world. In this first project, followed by Advanced Design, it was immediately clear to us through the various German designers and managers present the authority of their Director Bruno Sacco. Given the customer's satisfaction with the work done, we took the courage to propose directly to the Director, the true core business of our company, the super specialty or the construction of style models see-through in hard material to be made in seven weeks, including seven days of modifications at a precise all-inclusive price. So a meeting took place in Italy with our management and Mr. Sacco with Peter Pfeiffer, Deputy Director of Style for the production models. It should be kept in mind that at Mercedes-Benz the models were made only in clay model, a technology and a manufacturing process completely different from ours.

At the end of the meeting Mr. Sacco said: "if you convince Mr. Pfeiffer, it is not a problem for me to try this system of yours in hard material". They sent us the mathematical surfaces of the brand new CL203 model (which was later referred to as the C-Class Sport Coupé) we created the model. Mr. Pfeiffer considered our technical system excellent, and a second meeting with the model painted and finished took place in Turin and Mr. Sacco asked us if we could create six style models at the same time. Silence fell in the meeting room, the timing seemed impossible, the challenge was too important, so my Uncle Roberto CEO of the Stola company said "yes we are ready to do the work for you; give us an extra week to deliver the last three models". This happened, and from that moment, we became the external model shop of reference for the Mercedes Style Center. Perhaps even luck and fate helped us, because Mr. Sacco told us that “the model and style construction factories in Sindelfingen would be demolished and rebuilt new and in a single building designed by the very famous architect Renzo Piano and therefore the Stola family would be perfect for this anomalous temporary situation for two years”; then there will be many more. From these decisions, one can understand what autonomy of power and what consideration and trust Mr. Sacco had in Stuttgart.

With Mr. Sacco we basically worked every day without a minute of interruption for five years, and I want to say right away that we worked for another five with his successor, now the new Director Peter Pfeiffer, who kept the previous spirit intact. We stopped working for Mercedes-Benz in the summer of 2004 because we sold our company, obviously informing them in time to eventually organize themselves. Mercedes-Benz no longer gave any work to Stola with the new ownership, and the very last works done by us were two style models of the W 212 E-Class. It must be said that in these ten years with Mercedes-Benz we created 16 perfectly functioning show cars, three papal cars, and over 70 style models between exteriors and interiors, including those for the show cars themselves. One of Sacco's most important characteristics was to surround himself with the best people; and through his competence, his correctness, and his charisma he had great results in return. It is not easy to put into words how much his colleagues respected him. I happened to attend meetings in Turin in front of a model or a show car with the top management of the time, for example, Jurgen Hubbert or Dieter Zetsche, and you cannot imagine how these people listened with attention and total trust to his words. The fact that he was an Italian among all these Germans was even more surprising; the truth, in my opinion, is that in his work Sacco was more German than a German. A few anecdotes to describe the person, for example he suggested to his men who came to Turin driving the Mercedes-Benz for service that they be perfectly clean before parking them in Stola S.p.A. He organized an optional Italian language course for his designers because in his opinion, knowing Italian would have been a positive thing considering that the greatest masters of style were Italian.

Pininfarina, Bertone, Giugiaro, Gandini were the world pinnacle of design, without forgetting the past of Vignale, Michelotti, Touring and Zagato. It was the period when car manufacturers designed watches, and Mercedes-Benz was one of the first after Porsche. One day my Uncle Roberto Stola complimented Sacco on the watch he was wearing, and proudly, Mr. Sacco said that it had been designed by his family, and with a gesture he took it off his wrist and gave it to him. Sacco was not only a master of style for the automobile but also a master of elegance in behavior. It seems impossible, but in five years, there was never a reason for friction not even the slightest; I believe the reason was the setting and the method of his work and once again the professionalism of his assistants. His first level of men was exceptional: Deputy Director of Series Cars Peter Pfeiffer, Deputy Director of Heavy Vehicles Gherard Honer and Deputy Director of Advanced Design Harald Leschke. About 63 men and women from Mercedes-Benz, Smart and Maybach visited Stola S.p.A. in these ten years. As in the tradition of the history of Mercedes-Benz, in 1999 Sacco was succeeded as director of the Style Center by his Deputy Mr. Pfeiffer and subsequently, the latter, the current Gorden Wagener took over in 2007. Gorden Wagener began working in the Style Center in 1997 and I met him on the SRL project.

There are many other stories I could share, but the experience of the papal cars is special. I knew that Mercedes-Benz had always offered its unique cars to the Vatican, so once I accompanied Mr. Sacco to the airport. I told him that I would have liked to participate in one of their projects for the Pope, offering free painting for a papal car. The answer was a bit vague in the sense that he did not try too hard to make me understand if it was a yes or a no. Six months later he called me personally and said “the time has come for the papal car and two special M-Class cars need to be built”. I was speechless because I remembered having told him that I was offering “only” free painting for a car, he continued describing the job a bit and then concluded that “he would have the specifications sent to us by the special cars department with a request for a quote from the purchasing office”, at that moment I recovered from the fright. One of the first projects that Sacco oversaw was Concept C111 in 1969 (as a child at 10 years old, I had at home the 1/43 scale model), and his last show car as Director created in Stola S.p.A. was the SRL Vision. These two extreme cars from 1969 and 1999 make me think that Mr. Sacco was “also” legendary design. Forty-one years at the Style Center of which twenty-four as Director tell a legendary career, and his work is already in history.