At Gillet, a car does not come off a production line. It comes out of a workshop, where a handful of people shape it, fit it and set it up, part after part.
Many of you want to know more about the BellaRiva, and we cannot wait to show it to you. But before the car, let us introduce the people who build it.
Building a car takes an enormous amount of craft, and very different trades: model makers, mechanics, trimmers, designers, engineers, electronics specialists, development engineers. We are lucky to have talented people in the team, each with their own trade, their own eye, their own way of working. And on a project like the BellaRiva, their ability to move from one job to another without ever dropping the standard counts as much as their speciality.
We will not be able to introduce them all, but today we are starting with two of them.
Andrea Viniziano, 28 years with the company
Andrea joined in 1998. Which is to say he has seen just about everything the marque has built since.
He learned his trade in competition, and carried on down that road once he was at Gillet, with Belgian Racing, one of the major Belgian GT teams of the time, and alongside people like Olivier Laine, today at the helm of Boutsen VDS in GT3 Europe.
At Gillet, he started on the racing version of the Vertigo, entered through the MRS team, with its naturally aspirated Alfa V6. Then came the 2002 restyling, the one that gave birth to the Vertigo Streiff. That is where he became a model maker: new bodywork, new moulds, a facelift so deep the word barely covers it. He worked the lines, the shapes, the moulds.
In late 1999, he also had a hand in a project of a very different kind. On 4 December, Prince Philippe, Duke of Brabant, married Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz in Brussels. They would become our King and Queen. The procession called for an open car, but this was December, in Belgium. So the workshop built the transparent bubble fitted to the official Mercedes. An unusual commission, and a real source of pride to be entrusted with it.
Later, he took care of the finishing on the Mostro. And today that has become his ground: preparing and fitting the interior parts, the door panels, the dashboard, everything you touch and look at close up. When a part does not exist, he designs it.
On the BellaRiva, he works on the bodywork and reworks anything that needs adjusting, including the woodwork, which we cannot wait to show you in a future article.
Timothy Dehan, mechanics and the stopwatch
Timothy has been with us for a little over four years. For him, it is mechanics.
He knew very early what he wanted to do. At around 19, he left for a long training course near Spa-Francorchamps, to get into the trade as fast as possible.
Then motorsport, and plenty of it: Boutsen, WRT, Cometoyou. Seasons in LMP3 with Boutsen, with the Sarthe circuit on the programme. A championship title with WRT, taken in Barcelona in 2016 with Enzo Ide. Championships that took him a long way, from Asian GT to the Middle East, by way of the WTCR.
At Gillet, he turns his hand to everything on the mechanical side. Building the Zagatos, full restorations, engine out, body off. The kind of job that calls for steady hands, method, and the ability to rebuild an engine without ending up with an orphan screw in your hand.
Two approaches, one car
On the BellaRiva, the experience of both makes sense. All those years spent shaping, setting up and chasing the tenth are now part of the soul of the car.
They are only two among many others. But if we had to start somewhere, this was the place. Because a car built by hand is set up by hand, and craft, here, always comes through someone.
Now you understand why the BellaRiva, like every Gillet automobile before it, is unique. Each one carries something of the people who built it.
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