Flaminia

A new owner and a new flagship

The Flaminia exists because Lancia changed hands. Sports Car Market recounts that the company's racing program of the early 1950s brought fame but little fortune, and that in 1955 Gianni Lancia and his mother sold out to the industrialist Carlo Pesenti. A modernization followed, and the Flaminia was its first product and the first Lancia designed entirely under the new technical chief, Professor Antonio Fessia. Fessia kept what worked on the Aurelia, the all-aluminum V6, the rear-mounted transaxle and the De Dion rear axle, and threw out the sliding-pillar front suspension Lancia had used since the 1922 Lambda, replacing it with double wishbones and coil springs. The styling came from Pinin Farina's two Aurelia-based Florida show cars of 1955 and 1956; Battista Farina drove the Florida II coupe as his own car.

One chassis, four builders

The Berlina went on sale in 1957 and was the only body Lancia built itself, at the old Borgo San Paolo works. Everything else was coachbuilt. Pininfarina built a 2+2 coupe on a shorter steel chassis; Touring built an aluminum two-seat GT from 1959, a convertible from 1960 and the 2+2 GTL later; Zagato built the Sport, a double-bubble aluminum coupe first shown at Turin in 1958. The first 99 Zagato cars had faired-in headlights, which Sotheby's says were soon outlawed in Italy. The coachbuilt coupes outsold the sedan, which Wikipedia and the Lancia Motor Club both note as unusual given their higher price. Zagato Sports won the Coppa Intereuropa outright in 1960 and 1963 and took class wins in the Targa Florio, per RM Sotheby's.

The 3C and the 2.8

The single-carburetor 2.5 gave the two-door cars about 117-119 hp. The 3C, for tre carburatori, put three Weber twin-choke downdraft carburetors on the V6 and raised output to 140 hp; RM Sotheby's dates it to 1961 for the Touring and Zagato cars, Curbside Classic to 1962. A 2,775 cc engine followed, in 1962 per Wikipedia or 1963 per RM Sotheby's and Curbside, quoted at 146 hp by Gooding and at 150 hp by RM Sotheby's and Curbside. Curbside's point is that the 2.8 was less about peak output than smoothness and torque. Bernard Cahier, testing a 3C Zagato in 1961, found its acceleration close to an Aston Martin DB4 and a Ferrari 250 GT.

The convertible

Touring's Convertibile was the soft-top version of the two-seat GT, with the same four-headlight nose and a short wheelbase. Wikipedia and classic.com put production at 847, of which 180 had the 2.8 3C engine. Curbside notes that convertible production ended in 1964 but that stocks, both 2.5 and 2.8, lasted until 1968-69. Fantasy Junction documented one such car: a 2.8 3C completed on December 10, 1963, then stored at the Lancia factory until its French owner collected it in the spring of 1968.

Slow sales and a quiet end

The Flaminia was expensive and sold slowly. Curbside records only a few dozen Berlinas a year from 1966 to 1969, Touring went bankrupt in 1966, and Lancia passed to Fiat in 1969. The Berlina stayed on the price list to 1970, and no direct successor arrived until the Gamma.

In America

No source consulted here documents a US importer's volume or a US list price. What the sources do show is Flaminias arriving in the US early and staying: Fantasy Junction sold a 1960 Touring coupe whose first owner lived in Oakland and which carried California black plates for 50 years. Sports Car Market observed in the 1990s that Lancias in America tend to be owned by enthusiasts with engineering backgrounds.

The sources consulted document repair work rather than failure statistics. The recurring items on US cars are the brakes and the fuel system. Fantasy Junction's 1968 convertible needed its front calipers, brake servo and master cylinder rebuilt or replaced, its fuel pump replaced, carburetors rebuilt, fuel tank boiled out and fuel level sender rebuilt, plus driveline doughnuts, tie-rod ends, shocks and external oil lines, for a bill just short of $16,000. The same dealer's 1960 Touring coupe had an engine rebuild and clutch in 2009 with receipts over $17,000, and a brake service in October 2016 replacing all wheel cylinders at $3,200. The inboard rear discs sit next to the transaxle, so brake work there is more involved than on a conventional axle. The driveline rubber couplings (doughnuts) between engine and rear transaxle are a wear item that shows up in these records. Corrosion is the other theme: Fantasy Junction describes splash-area corrosion as typical of Italian cars of the era. Parts support in the US is specialist and small; the California coupe was restored with the help of Dino Motors and other Northern California specialists over many years, which is a fair picture of how these cars are kept running here.

Engine specification first. The 2.8 3C is the configuration the market pays for, and the chassis and engine type numbers say which car you have: RM Sotheby's and Gooding convertibles carry 826.134 chassis numbers with 826 engines, while the RM Sotheby's Zagato records type 826.132 for the 2.8 3C Sport and 826.232 for the Super Sport. A Lancia certificate of origin, as on the RM Sotheby's Ponder car, records the completion date; on convertibles, expect it to differ from the title year, because some cars sat in factory stock for years. Look for original paperwork: the Fantasy Junction 1968 convertible came with its 1968 sales documents, and the 1960 coupe with 47 years of service records. Body construction matters. The Touring cars are aluminum panels over a steel frame and the Zagato cars are aluminum, so corrosion shows up where steel and aluminum meet and underneath; Fantasy Junction noted corrosion in the splash areas of an otherwise good California car and called it typical of Italian cars of the era. Check the details that separate a correct car from a tidied one: the thermostatically controlled radiator louvers and the external oil cooler that Fantasy Junction describes, the triple Weber setup on a claimed 3C, and whether a convertible still has its hardtop, which Gooding listed as a feature. On Zagato cars, confirm headlight type and engine against the chassis type, since RM Sotheby's records 37 Sports converted to Super Sport by Zagato itself.

As of September 2026, classic.com puts the average Lancia Flaminia sale at $119,848 across all bodies, with its lowest recorded sale $1,500 for a 1962 Berlina in December 2022. Its body-level market benchmarks, as of September 2026, run from about $29,651 for the Pininfarina coupe to $97,571 for the Touring GT, $108,313 for the Touring convertible, $208,450 for the Zagato Super Sport, $308,953 for the second-series Zagato Sport and $438,132 for the first-series covered-headlight Sport. Individual US results show how wide the convertible spread is. Gooding sold a 1966-titled 2800 3C convertible (chassis 826.134-1098) at its 2025 Pebble Beach Auctions for $128,800, without reserve, against a $180,000-$220,000 estimate. RM Sotheby's sold a 1964 2800 3C convertible (826.134-1052, titled as a 1963) from the Gene Ponder Collection for $225,500; the lot page does not print the sale date. classic.com records a 1961 convertible sold at auction for $75,500 in November 2025, a 1963 car bid to $139,000 without selling in May 2026, and a low of $40,500 for a 1962 Touring convertible in February 2025. Every one of these convertibles was sold with its own mix of restoration and documentation, so the spread reflects condition and engine as much as body.