1. Wifredo Pelayo Ricart Medina was a Spanish engineer, designer and executive manager in the automotive industry, who spent his professional career in Spain and Italy.
11 Facts About Wifredo Ricart
1. 2.
Nevertheless, financial difficulties compelled Wifredo Ricart to merge his company with the one of industrial tycoon Felipe Batllo, to produce cars under a new brand, Wifredo Ricart-Espana.
3.
In 1930, Wifredo Ricart became a member of the American Society of Automotive Engineers and he established himself as an independent consultant, working for different European firms.
4.
Wifredo Ricart remained in Alfa for eight years, the most professionally fruitful in his life, aside from his time, later on, at Pegaso.
5.
Wifredo Ricart blamed this on a certain engineer [Wifredo Ricart], and in a famous outburst criticized this engineer's designs for an engine whose crankshaft 'revolved like a skipping rope,' and a racing car which was 'outdated, good only for scrap or a museum'.
6.
Wifredo Ricart's fatal Alfa Romeo 512 was a horizontally opposed 12 cylinder, rear-engined racing car with a centrifugal supercharger giving 335 bhp from 1.5 litres.
7.
Wifredo Ricart had already abandoned the Type 162, which was a 3 litre planned to give 560 bhp, with two carburettors, 3 stage supercharging with five compressors, 16 cylinders, and 64 valves.
8.
In 1945, with Italy devastated by the II World War, Wifredo Ricart returned to Barcelona, and shortly he managed to be hired by the American Studebaker corporation, but just before leaving for the US, he was proposed to lead the creation of a new Spanish automotive group, Enasa, to be built over the remainings of the Spanish arm of Hispano-Suiza.
9.
Wifredo Ricart accepted, and for several years he struggled to get a modern, technically advanced, car and truck maker from a country, materially and morally devastated from the Civil War.
10.
Wifredo Ricart resigned as Enasa CEO in 1959, criticized for paying more attention to technical innovation than to economic realities.
11.
Wifredo Ricart served as President of FISITA, the International Federation of Automotive Engineering Societies, from 1957 to 1959.