124 Sport Spider and modern 124 Spider/Abarth

Fiat 124 Sport Spider and the Modern Abarth 124

The Fiat 124 Sport Spider arrived at the Turin Auto Show in November 1966, the product of Fiat handing Pininfarina a free hand to rebody the workaday 124 sedan into an open two-seater. Designer Tom Tjaarda kept only the round headlights and a shortened version of the sedan's platform, building the car as an integrated chassis that blended body-on-frame toughness with unibody lightness. Under the skin sat a double-overhead-cam, aluminum-head four-cylinder engineered by former Ferrari engineer Aurelio Lampredi. It was a genuinely sporting unit for what was, underneath the styling, a fairly ordinary Fiat sedan. The Spider reached American showrooms in 1968 and quickly became one of Fiat's most important export models; over its long run the engine grew from an original 1,438cc/90hp unit to a 1,608cc/110hp 1600 in 1969, and then, in 1972, gained an additional 1,756cc 1800 option using hardware shared with the Fiat 132.

That same year, Abarth, by then Fiat's in-house performance and competition arm, turned the Spider into a homologation special for international rallying. The Abarth 124 Rally, previewed as a prototype at the Geneva Salon and on sale from November 1972, was a serious reworking: independent rear suspension on MacPherson struts, wide alloy wheels, flared fiberglass arches, a five-speed gearbox, limited-slip differential, roll bar, hardtop and competition seats. Sources disagree on exactly how many were built: Stellantis's own heritage materials put the figure at 995 cars by the end of production in 1975, while a dealer listing claims 1,013, and other accounts simply round to 'a bit over 1,000'. But the rallying record is not in dispute. Driver Raffaele 'Lele' Pinto and co-driver Gino Macaluso took the 124 Abarth Rally to the 1972 European Rally Championship, and the model closed out its production run in style, with Maurizio Verini winning the 1975 European Rally Championship at the wheel of the final 16-valve version.

The road-going Sport Spider, meanwhile, kept selling for years after the Abarth Rally's run ended. Fiat marketed the car itself through 1982, after which Pininfarina took over sales, marketing and eventually assembly, finally ending production in 1985, reportedly in part to free up factory capacity for the Cadillac Allante, which Pininfarina also built. By the time the line closed, close to 200,000 Sport Spiders had been built across nearly two decades, roughly three-quarters of them shipped to the United States, making it one of the best-selling European sports cars of its era in the American market.

The 124 nameplate lay dormant for three decades before a very different kind of story brought it back. In May 2012, Mazda and what was then Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced a joint-development deal under which the next-generation Mazda MX-5 platform would also underpin a new companion roadster. The new roadster was initially floated as a revived Alfa Romeo Spider, with both cars to be assembled at Mazda's plant in Hiroshima, Japan. By the time the partnership's fruit was revealed at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November 2015, the badge on the new car was Fiat, not Alfa, and the name chosen for it was 124 Spider, deliberately recalling the 1966 original. The modern 124 Spider went on sale in mid-2016 as a 2017 model.

This was platform-sharing in the full sense, not simple badge engineering. The new 124 Spider used the same fundamental chassis, much of the suspension architecture, and the build line of the fourth-generation Mazda MX-5 (ND), rolling down the same Hiroshima assembly line as its Mazda sibling. But Fiat differentiated it meaningfully: the body was stretched roughly five inches longer than the MX-5's, no exterior panels were shared between the two cars, and, most importantly for how the car drove, Fiat fitted its own turbocharged 1.4-liter MultiAir four-cylinder engine in place of Mazda's naturally aspirated unit, giving the 124 Spider a torquier, more low-end-focused character than its Japanese cousin. A hotter Abarth 124 Spider followed for the European market in April 2016, with a 1.4-liter turbo tuned to roughly 168 hp and 184 lb-ft, while the US-market Fiat-badged car ran a slightly different state of tune at around 160 hp.

Abarth also revived the 124's competition pedigree alongside the road cars. An FIA R-GT-regulation rally car, also called the Abarth 124 rally, was unveiled at the 2016 Geneva Motor Show with a 1.8-liter turbo engine making around 296 hp, a sequential gearbox, and near-50/50 weight distribution. It was Abarth's return to manufacturer-level rallying after a long absence. That car went on to win the FIA R-GT Cup and the ERC's R-GT class, racking up more than 40 national-championship class wins across a dozen countries. Abarth celebrated that competition success in 2019 with a road-going Abarth 124 Rally Tribute, a 124-unit limited edition finished in period-correct Costa Brava Red or Turini White with a matte black bonnet, honoring both the modern rally program and, in name, the original 1972 homologation car.

The modern platform-share proved short-lived by classic-car standards. European sales of the Fiat 124 Spider and Abarth 124 Spider ended around 2019, only about three years after launch, and Stellantis discontinued the US-market car after the 2020 model year, citing modest sales for a niche two-seater and the steep cost of re-engineering the turbo engine to meet incoming Euro 6d emissions rules. Reported figures for how many modern 124 Spiders were ultimately built vary by source and by scope: production numbers posted on the 124spider.org owner forum total just over 41,000 units worldwide across all model years, while the sales tracker GoodCarBadCar puts cumulative American retail sales at roughly 15,800 cars from 2016 through 2020. Either way, the modern 124's run closed out a partnership that had, for a few years, put a revived Italian nameplate on a thoroughly Japanese-engineered roadster.