An Ode To The Momo Prototipo
I have this thing about steering wheels. Perhaps it’s my age, and I remember the days when swapping the steering wheel on your favorite ride could be accomplished entirely without fear of disabling air bags, audio controls or other high technology nonsense. Or perhaps I’m just a bit too attuned to the sensations of driving, and get overly wound up about the way a particular tiller looks in the cabin, or feels on the palms. Driving is all about these sensations. The feel of the road through your hands, the weight of the steering, your ability to see the gauges, control the car, and enjoy it all at the same time. If you love driving, that stuff is paramount, so I have spent the vast majority of my life obsessing about details most normal people wouldn’t deem worthy of even a passing thought. Steering wheels are high on that list of details.
For me, there have always been only two proper types of steering wheels. Large diameter wood-rimmed wheels, and smaller diameter leather-wrapped models. The former are typically big, spindly jobs with polished spokes and rivets punctuating their pencil-thin rims, and the latter are chunky, fatter-rimmed, racing type models. Although there is some crossover, I tend to fit wooden wheels to any vehicle built before about 1967 and leather wheels to anything built after, but as I said there is a lot of gray area. And if that seems already too dogmatic, it gets worse, trust me, because after decades of trial and error I have pretty much settled on ONE wooden wheel (the Nardi “Anni 60”) and ONE leather wheel.
The purposeful, almost sinister look of a 917 cockpit, complete with the Momo Prototipo’s spiritual ancestor.
The Momo Prototipo.
If there is one aftermarket car part that has dogged me since my youth, it it the Momo Prototipo. I think I have probably purchased two dozen of the things for my personal cars. They have been in everything from my ‘77 Scirocco to my 911 Carrera, from my Lancia Delta HF to my Mk2 Ford Escort, from my Audi Coupe GT to my Alfa Romeo Alfetta GT and from my MGB rally car to my Porsche 928. You might say I’m hooked. The Prototipo has become like an old friend to me, and tends to make any sporting machine I own feel immediately familiar.
But it’s not like I haven’t tried the competition. I have. I just keep coming back to the Prototipo. There is something so impossibly perfect about the design, which, perhaps atypically of many Italian products, sees its form follow its function with a slavishness that borders on the bauhaus. There is something so incomparably classic about the look, which appears to have been ripped from the cockpit of a Porsche 908 on the pitwall at Le Mans, circa 1970. And the functionality? Well, yeah… it’s bang on. 350mm of circular perfection, wrapped in leather.
It hasn’t changed much over the decades, the Prototipo, and why would it? There isn’t much to the thing, and that’s the whole point. It’s a competition-bred piece of purpose and understatement. Three spokes with holes and a chunky leather rim, available in any color combination you want as long as you want either black with black spokes or black with silver spokes. (There is a “Heritage” model out now, which you should snap up if you’re a rebel, because it has the alarming departure of mild distressing on the still-black leather, and a return to the stacked Momo logo in the otherwise-unchanged horn button. These are what pass for “peacocking” in the Momo Prototipo universe.) It looks today, right now, pretty much the same as that old 917K steering wheel. The same way it looked when it was fitted to the Ferrari 308 in the Magnum P.I. days. The same way it looks sitting on a Porsche 911 that has been “Reimagined by Singer.” Fit a Prototipo to your car and you’re in very good company indeed.
A Prototipo nestled in the cockpit of an e30 BMW…
Once you do, take it for a spin. Compared to virtually any other steering wheel you will notice nothing and everything all at once. The thickness of the rim doesn’t jump out at you as being especially thick or thin, it just feels… right. The diameter doesn’t seem particularly large or small, it just feels… correct. The spokes, perfectly positioned for “ten and two” or “nine and three,” depending on your style, just vanish in front of you. You don’t notice them. The leather is neither slick and shiny, nor sueded and attention-seeking. In use, the Prototipo does what all the best racing car components do. It just works beautifully without you being aware of it. And that ruthless efficiency, which was good enough for the Le Mans winning 917’s in 1970, good enough for Ferrari’s high volume sports cars of the 1980’s, and good enough for those damnably talented boys over at Singer, is good enough for me, too. Always has been.
So sure, on your next early Alfa Giulia, feel free to fit the Nardi. On a Series Land Rover, use a Moto-Lita or Exmoor Evander. They’re gorgeous in those applications. If you’re going for pure style, there are many different wheels that might suit your unique taste. But if you drive a sporting machine from the 1970’s or 1980’s and you’ve never owned a Momo Prototipo, you might want to give one a go. Even if it’s the first one you’ve ever purchased, you may, like me, find that it’s the first of many.