Why Is the Fiat Logo Red?

Early international races, starting with the Gordon Bennett Cup, gave each country a color so national teams could be told apart. Italy was first assigned black, which had a short life. After a couple of years, for reasons that remain unknown, Italian cars switched to the red originally reserved for the United States. This is the origin of rosso corsa, Italian racing red.

Sources disagree on what made red Italian. One account credits Prince Scipione Borghese's red Itala in the 1907 Peking to Paris race, and another says it came after a red Fiat won a Grand Prix in 1907. Felice Nazzaro did win the 1907 French Grand Prix in a Fiat. Fiat also built record cars such as the S76, which is shown in "Fiat red" in the 1911 to 1912 period. What can be said safely is that Fiat's racing cars wore the Italian color and that Fiat later put red on its badges. Fiat has not said the logo red was chosen because of racing.

Red enters the archive in 1921 as the lettering on a silver roundel. In 1931 the wreath badge has a red center disc, and the same year Fiat began using a single red shield without a wreath, according to Wikipedia. Rectangular and pointed red shields with silver letters followed in 1932, 1938, 1949 and 1959, in step with the chrome trim of the cars.

From then on, red is the default Fiat field. The 1965 wreath returned as a red disc with yellow letters, used on sporting models such as the 124 Spider.

The 1968 rhomboid spelled FIAT across four connected slanted blocks and appeared in black and silver, then in blue and white in 1972, so red was not universal even then. The 1982 five-bar mark and the later badges moved away from letters on red for a time.

The 2020 logo returns to red in a very direct way. It drops every frame and sets the tall condensed letters in a flat red sampled at about #FF1430. The company has not published a symbolic meaning for the color, so reading it as passion or Italian energy is interpretation.