His heart has beaten for cars since he was a child, but not for every marque: only for the marques of the Belpaese. Already during his apprenticeship as an electrician, Franco devoted himself entirely to his favourite passion, the motor car. He founded his tuning company “Motorsport Epifanio”, which he ran in his spare time. Shortly afterwards he turned up without an appointment at the City Garage in Wettingen to see the founder of the company, Bruno Baschnagel, urging him with the words: “I want to sell cars. I want to and I can, trust me.” The young Franco’s determination led Bruno Baschnagel to offer him a job at his garage. “I started with 50% in planning and 50% in sales,” Franco recounts. After only a few months he was allowed to concentrate on sales full time. In 1990, with the second-best mark in Switzerland, he obtained the federal certificate of car salesman and the following year he was appointed sales director with power of attorney.
Over these 37 years he has sold around 5,000 cars. The awards he has received as Best Seller from the general importer are numerous, and he has also been the salesman of many special models, such as the Lancia Thema Ferrari and later the Alfa Romeo 8C, the Alfa 4C and the Giulia GTAm. Franco has a special bond with the Alfa Romeo marque, since his birthday falls on 24 June, an important date for the house of the Biscione: it is in fact the day on which Alfa Romeo was founded 114 years ago.
Over the long course of his career the City Garage has become “his” garage, his home. “It will be very hard for me to say goodbye to you. I would like to thank Bruno Baschnagel, who believed in me 37 years ago and gave me the opportunities to train and to become what I am today. I would also like to thank Rolf Baschnagel, my ‘travelling companion’ of the last 20 years, with whom we laid the foundations and then shaped the CityGarage of today. I will miss the team and also the many contacts with the customers.”
In any case, for Franco it does not end here: projects are already in the pipeline that he will take on from 2025. “His departure is a great loss for us, but it is the natural course of life and that is fine,” underlined Rolf Baschnagel, managing director since 2011.
City Garage Wettingen
Landstrasse 108
5430 Wettingen
Tel. 056 437 20 70
www.citywettingen.ch
