Car of the Week: 1937 Fiat Topolino

Randy Krup has a little-bitty car with a whopper of a story behind it.

The long and winding tale of Krup’s beautiful 1937 Fiat Topolino coupe actually has two parts. He has owned the car twice, and somehow car and owner just seemed destined to wind up together.

Krup, a resident of Roscoe, Ill., is 77 now, and he bought the Fiat the first time when he was just 13. The two parted ways a few years later, but they are together again now and Krup says he’ll never let the car go again.

“When I was 13 years old I saw this car sitting at a Shell gas station in Rockford, and we kept driving by this station. Of course, I wasn’t old enough to drive, but I had friends that were older than I was and they could drive and finally I decided, ‘Why don’t you pull in there I want to see what they are doing with this old car.’ I came from a family that restored antique and classic cars, so I started probably when I was 8, 9, 10 years old out in the garage every Saturday and Sunday. The first car we ever restored was a 1911 Overland. So I had always been around cars, and I wanted to see what this little old car was about."

“So I stopped in and asked the guy there, and he said, ‘I think the guy’s going to sell it… I think he’s asking a couple hundred bucks’. And I said, ‘Tell him I’m interested.’ So with my paper route money I came up with 200 bucks, and we brought it home. I don’t even remember, but I assume that it ran!”

Krup commenced to tinkering with the little Fiat coupe, and over the course of the next three years he and his dad rebuilt the engine, made the car roadworthy and gave it a new paint job. When he turned 16 and got his driver’s license, Krup had his set of wheels waiting for him.

“The car only had about 14,000 miles on it,” he recalls. “I was raised with antiques and classics. We had a ’30 Model A roadster that wasn’t much better than the Fiat, so I was used to driving a car like that. I dated in the thing, it was my everyday car. I must have put 2,000 or 3,000 miles on it. I had a Jeep for the winter months, but the Fiat was my summer thing. It had no rear seats in it, so we’d pile my buddies on the bench back there and drive to the country club and play golf or whatever. We had a great time in the thing.”

After a year or so or tooling around town in the Fiat, Krup said he began getting inquiries to buy the car from a man who owned a local sporting goods store. Krup spurned the offers, but the man was persistent and “he must have called me 10 times about it.

” Finally, the man offered to trade Krup a Thunderbird even-up for the Fiat, and while Krup wasn’t interested in a T-Bird, his brother was, so he made the deal and the Fiat headed down the road. “It was a ’59 or ’60 Thunderbird if I remember correctly. I sold the Thunderbird to my brother that day, and then I bought my first MGTD. That happened to be the from the same guy that I bought the Fiat from!,” he says. “And I still have the TD, by the way!”

That was back in about 1963, and for the next 40 years Krup never saw the little Fiat again, but he remembered it fondly, even while many other great cars came and went from his garage.

In 2003, he got a phone call out of the blue that he still finds hard to believe. A man Krup didn’t know was looking for a “Ray” Krup, and Randy didn’t know anybody by that name.

The two visited on the phone for a couple minutes, and Krup finally said, “’Do you mind me asking why you are looking for him?’ and he said ‘I’ve got a car he once owned.’ I said, ‘Well sir, you’ve got the right guy.’ He said ‘How can you say that?’ I said, ‘Well sir, I’ve owned every car in the county at one time or another [laughs].’ He said I’ll bet you never owned a Fiat, and I said, ‘Sir, how about a 1937 Fiat Topolino?’ And there was dead silence on the phone and he said ‘[Expletive], you are the right guy!’”

It turns out the 1937 Topolino was for sale again, and Randy’s wife Carol insisted that they go look at it. It was only about 15 miles away in Winnebago, Ill.

“The guy had bought it from a used car lot probably a mile from my office. I never knew it was there,” Krup laughs. “He had never driven it, so I don’t know how long he had it. This guy bought it and drove it home, except it had no antifreeze in it! And he cracked the block on the way home to Winnebago. It froze up and it sat in a storage shed all those years… We went up that day and looked at the car. It looked similar to how I left it all those years ago and had maybe 400 or 500 miles on it since I got rid of it.”

“We pushed it out of the shed and of course it didn’t run, the engine was froze. I asked him what he wanted for it and he said ‘I’d like to get $6,500 for it.’ I said, ‘Sir, I paid $200 for it the last time I bought this car. I’m not sure where you came up with that number, but that’s not what I would be willing to pay. He said, ‘Honestly I need a new set of false teeth and the bill is $6,500 and that’s why I’m selling the car.”

A couple weeks later, the seller called Krup back and asked him if he’d make an offer.

Krup volunteered $1,500, “And not a dime more, and the only reason I’m giving you $1,500 is because it was my car when I was 16 years old!”

A ‘MOUSE’ IS BORN

For car collectors and enthusiasts these days, the 1930s are remembered and treasured for the many great luxury machines and coach-built classics that the decade produced. Fiat went all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum when it introduced the Fiat 500, which came to be known as the “Topolino” (the Italian name for Mickey Mouse). Similar to Volkswagen’s vision of a low-budget “people’s car”, Fiat brass saw great opportunity in launching a sturdy car that could be mass produced cheaply and appeal to a worldwide audience.

The Topolino was indeed a pipsqueak of a car. With a curb weight of under 1,200 lbs. and measuring only about 126 inches from nose to tail, it was one of the tiniest automobiles in the world.

The Topolino debuted for the 1936 model year. It was officially referred to as the Model A and was offered as a two-door saloon, two-door convertible (with a folding roof) and a two-door van through 1948. Power came from a liquid-cooled, 13-hp, 569cc four-cylinder, side-valve engine that was squeezed all the way to the front of the car behind a stylish, sloping grille assembly. The radiator was actually mounted behind the engine, which allowed for better front end aerodynamics.

The independent front suspension and quarter-elliptic rear springs provided a surprisingly stable ride, and fuel economy was in the neighborhood of 50 mpg, unless you jammed a couple of passengers in back — which was not an uncommon occurrence.

The “Mouse” saw few changes during its lifetime, perhaps the biggest coming in 1948 when a new overhead-valve engine was adopted that delivered 16.5 hp and maybe a slight bump over the Topolino’s claimed top speed of about 53 mph.

The Topolino lasted until 1955 when the larger rear-wheel-drive Fiat 600 came out. By then Fiat had sold about 511,000 of the mighty mice. Many got driven into the ground. Plenty of others became “gassers” for the racing crowd. One of them found a permanent home in northcentral Illinois.

BETTER THEN SECOND TIME

Unlike the first time he had the car, Krup didn’t start tearing into the Fiat immediately when he brought it home the second time. He had other projects going and other cars to enjoy, and the Topolino sat in mothballs for more than a decade. Krup wasn’t sure exactly how much restoring he was going to do on the car, but when he wound up getting the ball rolling in 2014, he went all the way.

“Well, I sold my business … and I also sold the building where I was keeping the car, so I had to move the car and I took it to Antique Auto Restoration in Rockford,” Krup says. “They do great work and they had done a lot of jobs for me in the past … I told them I gotta get it out of the garage, let’s start a restoration on it. I said ‘I don’t need a 100-point restoration, it’s not going to Pebble Beach, but I’ll tell everybody who did the work on it, if that gives you any idea what I’m hoping for … If it takes a couple years that’s OK, I don’t care.’”

It took until 2018, but when the car was finished it could certainly qualify as one of the nicest examples of its breed. Krup wound up ordering a replacement engine block, rather than trying to repair the block that had been cracked many years earlier. The Fiat had been driving sparingly during its brief time on the road, so there was almost no rust on the car, and all the pieces — plus some spare parts and even a spare engine — were still around.

“The body was in exceptional shape. No rust whatsoever. The only hole we found in it was in the battery box, probably from acid. That was it. It was exceptionally good,” Krup noted. “I had to re-chrome some hubcaps and stuff when I first did the restoration, but some of the stuff was so nice I didn’t have to re-do it!”

One of the Krup’s biggest decision came when it was time to paint the car.

He had painted the Fiat 1960 Dodge Toreador Red when he had it the first time, “but then I figured out that 1960 Toreador Red was actually a truck color, not a regular color for cars,” he says. “And I decided the red was going to make it too much like a clown car, so I thought it was time for a change.”

He considered doing the car in burgundy with black fenders, but he already had that color scheme on his MGTD, and Jay Leno has a well-known 1937 Topolino painted burgundy and black.

“So I thought, ‘Well, we can’t do that. It will look just like Leno’s car.” So we developed this blue with the black fenders, and I think it turned out really good.”

The lack of turn signals on the car originally still has Krup scratching his head a bit. He added them for the sake of safety this time around, but he’s still not sure why they were missing in the first place.

“The car never came with turn signals, but there was a hole in the dash when I was 13 years old and I never knew what the hole was for,” he says. “So I filled that hole, not knowing what was supposed to be there. Turns out after talking to people in Europe, that was for a turn signal switch. And they said all cars leaving Europe had turn signals, and I said, ‘Well, not mine!’ There were no turn signals, no holes [on the body] to indicate signals were there, and of course no wiring … So why the hole was there …I guess originally it must have had a switch, but not the turn signals themselves... Now it’s got some motorcycle-type small indicators on the front and back. It’s a little dangerous driving that little car with other cars zipping by you at 70 mph and I’m doing 35, 40. So I went ahead and put them on.”

If Krup’s Topolino ever got docked points at a show for the incorrect turn signals, that would be one of the few flaws anyone could find. The Fiat is truly immaculate in almost every way. He is quick to laugh at himself for almost making the Topolino “too nice” to drive, but the payout comes when he putters onto a showfield and wows others who rarely see a car of its ilk in such perfect condition.

“Oh yeah, it’s better than I probably ever expected,” he admits. “I didn’t do it to try to win anything with it, but I’ve taken it to a number of shows … I was at the Des Moines [Iowa] Concourse and at Elkhart Lake [Wis.] a couple of times. Each one of those shows it’s gotten People’s Choice or better. There’s these million, million-and-a-half-dollar cars, and my little Fiat shows up and beats the million-dollar Ferraris. It’s been really fun.”

And if anybody tries to buy it from him a second time, even they call him 10 times, he insists this time the answer would be a firm no.

“I joke that I should get a sign saying ‘This is world’s most expensive Topolino,’” he laughs. “Nobody would ever give me as much money as I have in this deal, so I won’t sell it.”

Randy Krup and his Fiat that keeps coming back to him

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