C'e' ancora chi assiste le Fiat in USA

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Ancient Grease: Inside the Midwest-Bayless Fiat Shop - Feature

Building a parts empire for Italian jobs in Columbus.

BY PHIL BERG, PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROY RITCHIE

September 2010

Last year, Matt and Marnie Brannon inherited nine semi-truck loads of Fiat sports-car and sports-sedan parts from Bayless Racing, a fondly remembered Fiat parts and service specialist founded in Georgia in 1970 by Art and Susan Bayless. The Brannons had started an online Fiat X1/9 store in 2004. By 2006, both were working full time at their rapidly expanding Midwest X1/9 company in Columbus, Ohio (800-241-1446; www.midwest-bayless.com), shipping parts all over the world for the two-seat, mid-engine sports car.

The semi-trucks deposited the Bayless stuff into a new building purchased last year that includes 10,000 square feet of parts storage on shelves and about 10,000 square feet of service, workshop, and car-storage space. Here, the new Midwest-Bayless outfit produces 30 different types of fiberglass body parts, rebuilds engines, restores complete cars, and stores and sells body and mechanical parts for any year Fiat sold in North America. Here’s a conversation we had with Matt:

Why are there four Yugos parked in front of your Fiat emporium?

Yugo is all Fiat underneath. When Yugo went out, a lot of dealer inventory was available. Hard mechanical parts like control arms, bushings, and transmission components all interchange with the Fiat 128 and X1/9, but when we bought inventories from dealers, we’d also end up with Yugo seatbelts, Yugo air filters. We probably have one of the bigger Yugo collections in the country, but demand is just nil.

Fiat 128

Still. Four Yugos?

More people comment and give me high-fives on the Yugos than all of my hot-rod X1/9s combined. They just think it’s the funniest awesome car.

Where do you get your parts?

In many cases, we have sources in Latin America and Europe. There were like six million of these [sOHC four-cylinder] drivetrains made, shipped all over the world. There are still companies making seals and pistons and rings.

Are you a junkyard picker?

There’ve been only one or two junk Fiats that I’ve passed up. It’s a finite resource. Eighty percent is going to be dog crap, but it’s going to have cherries in it. We found one inventory that had been sitting in a school bus in Pennsylvania for probably 25 years, right across the river from a steel plant. Everything was covered in soot, but all of it was new old stock. We were doing jumping jacks, back flips.

Why do you like Fiats?

A modified single-cam engine can rev to 8500 rpm. This is why I have such appreciation for Fiat—to have the independent suspension of an X1/9 on a pedestrian car in 1973 was years ahead of anyone.

Fiat X1/9

What’s your diagnosis of Fiat in the United States the last time around?

Fiat never had a dedicated dealer network. In one town, Fiats were serviced by the Pontiac dealer, in another, by Oldsmobile—who were, at heart, domestic-iron guys. Dealers would overtighten the timing belt, then the belt would break. The dealers would leave an air pocket in the cooling system when they flushed it, and the car would overheat. To work on the Fiat’s electronic fuel injection in 1980, when every American car had a carburetor, was witchcraft to the dealers. Look at Fiat everywhere else in the world—it didn’t have reliability problems. The new, dedicated dealerships should solve that issue.

Who else still likes Fiats?

Odd places like Huntsville, Alabama, have a lot of them. Because NASA is there. Rochester, with Eastman Kodak, has a lot of Fiats. Little pockets all around the country are where you find them. Las Cruces, New Mexico, has Fiats. That’s where the Los Alamos missile testing happens. Fiats sold in high-tech places—it was the thinking man’s car.