The factory at night was honest.
No engines running. No men performing confidence. No visitors to impress. Just steel, oil, and the quiet truth of what existed and what did not.
Arthur locked the office door behind him and stepped onto the floor.
His footsteps echoed more than they should have. That alone told him something was wrong.
He walked past rows of wooden crates stamped with fading stencils—Pistoni Speciali, Cuscinetti — Torino, Manifattura Lombarda. Some had been opened and resealed three, four times. Others had never been opened at all.
Inventory without intention.
He lifted the lid of one crate.
Inside: camshafts. Beautifully machined. Mirror-polished lobes. Hand-numbered in white paint.
They didn't match each other.
Different profiles. Different heat treatments. Different tolerances that existed only in the heads of the men who had made them.
Arthur closed the crate.
He took out his notebook.
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Logistical Audit — Day One
Engines:
14 variants of the Straight-6 block
No master drawing
Casting differences up to 3 mm between batches
Parts commonality:
Almost none
Left and right components mirrored by hand, not design
Time per vehicle:
Estimated: 120–150 hours
Actual: unknowable
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He stopped writing.
The problem wasn't inefficiency.
It was romantic chaos.
Arthur moved deeper into the factory. The old prototype corner sat beneath a broken skylight, moonlight spilling onto half-finished dreams that had never been buried.
A Veloce coupé with an experimental rear suspension. A racing chassis drilled for weight savings that had gone too far. An aluminum-bodied special built for a count who had never paid the final invoice.
Each one represented months of labor.
None of them had ever made money.
Arthur crouched beside one, running his hand along the frame rail.
"Prestige," he murmured. "Paid in payroll."
He stood and kept walking.
At the far end of the floor, near the foundry delivery door, he noticed something he hadn't seen before.
Sand.
Not the fine, pale casting sand used in quality blocks — but darker. Coarser. Clinging to the edges of discarded engine castings stacked near the wall.
Arthur picked up a failed block and turned it under the light.
Porosity.
Tiny, ugly voids where metal should have been solid.
Fonderia-Galli, he thought.
Family-owned. Proud. Cheap.
Too cheap.
He made a note and moved on.
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Back in the drafting room, Arthur rolled out the current 1500 chassis blueprint.
It was sound.
Old, yes. Heavy in places. But fundamentally correct.
Designing a new chassis would take money and time he did not have.
So he did what his father never had.
He worked within constraint.
Arthur took a fresh sheet and overlaid it.
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Serie Alpha — Concept
Retain chassis
Reduce engine mass by ~75 kg
Move engine rearward by 120 mm
Improve front weight bias without new tooling
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He sketched quickly now.
Shorter engine meant space. Space meant options.
He drew a revised firewall. A tighter engine bay. Steering geometry that no longer had to negotiate around six cylinders of ego.
Then aerodynamics.
Not wind tunnels — intuition and mathematics.
He softened the nose. Reduced frontal openings. Smoothed airflow around the wheels where possible.
Not faster.
More efficient.
Arthur leaned back, rubbing his eyes.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly.
He thought of his father — brilliant, stubborn, trapped by a world where craftsmanship had been the goal instead of the tool.
"I'll keep the soul," Arthur said quietly. "But I'll change the bones."
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He returned to the factory floor one last time.
The machines sat idle. Lathes. Mills. Presses. Each one capable, each one underused.
They weren't obsolete.
They were unorganized.
Arthur could see it now — flow lines where none existed. Tools placed where hands naturally reached instead of where tradition dictated. Fewer parts. Fewer choices. Fewer mistakes.
At the center of the floor, he stopped.
This was where the Straight-6 had always been assembled.
He imagined it empty.
Clean.
Reclaimed.
Arthur opened his notebook and wrote one final line for the night:
The problem is not that Veloce is slow.It is that Veloce is doing too many things at once.
He closed the book.
Ninety days had felt impossibly short that morning.
Now, for the first time, they felt just enough.