A recent visit to the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, posed some problems for contributor Paul Anderson. The original suggestion to photograph mass-produced cars, the working dogs trapped in a collection of wildly expensive show dogs, was sabotaged by the fact that the Revs' Citroen 2CV, its vintage VW, and even its Trabant (yes, they have a Trabant) were not on display. You could stretch your definition of working and say that racing cars have something in common with working dogs, because they are, like greyhounds, bred to focus on the job of winning races. And some of those racers, like the '55 D-Type Jaguar and the '69 Porsche 917 PA, were in the immaculate Revs shop for work...
The 4.5 liter, air-cooled flat-12 PA was named for the era when Porsche and Audi shared US dealerships, but decades before they shared anything else like, for example, SUV parts. Porsche built 65 of the 917 chassis between '69 and '73; of these, there were only 2 of the PA versions intended for the Can-Am Series. That's the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, by the way, a friendly contest which lasted from 1966-'87, an era when the US avoided treating its northern ally like an enemy.
The 917 PA is a genuinely rare car; it couldn't get much scarcer without being nonexistent. This '63 Elva-Porsche is also pretty scarce; no more than 20 were built with a four-cam flat four Porsche Type 547 engine in a modified Elva Mk. VII chassis. In its first race outing, the Elva-Porsche won the Road America 500 at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin against a field of more powerful cars, despite sketchy stability under hard braking. The 1,000-pound cars often beat Porsche's factory racers, in fact.
The Elva-Porsche is a good example of the kind of reductiveness that happens when you breed a car to win races. It usually means it's not much good for anything else, like carrying passengers or groceries. In the same vein, you wouldn't expect a greyhound to be very good at herding sheep...
While cars like the Elva-Porsche were usually trailered to the races, the D-Type Jaguar was one of the last sports racers that could be driven to a race, compete in it, and then drive home. The D-Type first appeared in 1954; the ultra light mid-engined cars of a decade later were more focused and specialized, and thus impractical for workaday tasks.
Single-seaters like this Cooper Type 43 from 1957 are even more focused. Along with no passenger seat, there are no fenders or lights. Formula 1 and 2 races were only held under daylight conditions...
The Type 43 aimed at Formula 1 and 2 was an important design because it compensated for its less than optimal engine power by putting that engine (a 2 liter, 4-cylinder DOHC Coventry Climax) behind the driver and ahead of the gearbox. That way, the driver could make take advantage of the car's balanced handling and light weight (1,060 lb.) to make best use of the car's 180 hp. Stirling Moss sat in the workspace below to win the Argentine GP in 1958...
It was the first Formula 1 race won by a mid-engined car, and it foreshadowed a design trend. More F1 drivers would see something like the view below in 1959 and 60, when Jack Brabham would win the World Championship in a Cooper. The rush to mid-engined designs was on, and the road racing world would not turn back.
Along with the Cooper T43 Moss drove to victory in the '58 Argentine GP, the Revs has a T51 from 1959, the type that Brabham used to win the World Championship that year, with a 2.5 liter version of the Climax four making around 240 hp. Not bad, for an engine derived from a portable fire pump design...
In addition to race cars powered by fire-pump engines, there were road racers based upon humble production cars. Carlo Abarth's firm specialized in those. The Fiat 600, designed by engineer Dante Giacosa, was released in 1955 as an Italian "people's car" and stayed in production for 14 years, powered by a rear-mounted, water-cooled inline four. The radiator was in back too, but race versions like this 1970 Fiat Abarth TCR-1000 Berlina Corsa (a name longer than the car) have front-mounted radiators.
Abarth gave their most modified 600 an engine bored out for a displacement of 60 cubic inches and an aluminum "Radiale" head with hemispherical combustion chambers. Still with pushrod-operated valves but a 13 to 1 compression ratio, it made 112 hp. Abarth added their own 5-speed transmission, shown below.
Under all the spoilers and go-fast add-ons there was a Fiat 600; here's a picture of a standard 600 with sunroof option to give an idea of how Italy's answer to the VW Beetle looked wearing its real face. Cheery, and relatively unthreatening...
Over at Citroen, engineer André Lefebvre and designer Flaminio Bertoni designed a people's car focused on motorizing France's farmers. The front-driver powered by an air-cooled flat twin was released at the 1948 Paris Salon. A design goal was to allow a farmer to carry a basket of eggs across a plowed field without breaking any, and this was facilitated by a suspension connecting front and rear wheels. The canvas sunroof made carrying tall loads easier, and the Deux Chevaux (named after its taxable horsepower) was already a fixture on French streetscapes when the 2CV Sahara on display was introduced in 1960. It featured a second, rear-mounted 425cc twin powering the rear wheels, which moved the gas tank under the front seat, the reason for the fuel filler in the driver's door. Michelin introduced its radial tires on 2CVs.
The Revs actually has a VW Beetle, but because it wasn't on display we found a photo from an earlier visit. Perhaps the only Beetle story not generally known by car wonks is that the Czech car builder Tatra sued VW for stealing the Beetle's design concept from its rear-engined, air-cooled V570 prototype from 1931-33. This was something that Ferdinand Porsche had already admitted. Tatra won a settlement of their pre-war lawsuit in 1965, when VW paid them one million DM.
East Germany's front-drive Trabant 601 was produced in over 2.8 million examples from 1964 to 1990, powered by a transverse two-cycle inline 2-cylinder based upon a 1930s DKW design. Bodywork was made of Duroplast, a phenolic resin reinforced with cotton fibers leftover from the fabric industry.
In the same era, BMC engineer Alec Issigonis designed the Austin and Morris Mini twins. Introduced in 1959, the first generation Mini design would remain in production until 2000. In Britain, the 1956 Suez crisis had revived fuel rationing, and chairman Leonard Lord wanted a proper 4-passenger car to compete with the German bubble cars that were beginning to sell, even in England. Lord wanted a car that would fit inside a box 10 feet long, 4 feet wide and 4 feet high, with 6 feet of its length devoted to passenger space.
The engine was an existing design to save money, BMC's A-type inline 4, but mounted crosswise between the front wheels, and sharing its crankcase oil with the transmission to save space. Other cars like the Saab 92 and the Trabant had used transverse engines, but failed to maximize passenger space as the Mini did. This first-generation Mini was judged the 2nd most influential 20th century car design in 1999, behind the Ford Model T and ahead of the VW Beetle and CItroen DS. There's plenty of evidence the jury was wrong; the original Mini was the most influential car design of the century. The Ford T was mainly significant because it introduced real mass production; it broke no new technical ground. The Mini, however, influenced dozens of designs that came after it, including the Honda Civic and transverse-engined front drivers from Toyota, Ford and GM. John Cooper, who with his father Charles founded Cooper Cars and gave us those mid-engined single seaters, worked a bit of magic on the standard Mini, making it into the Mini Cooper S, a car that won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1964, '65 and '67. The Revs example is a '64 Cooper S. Below, a shot of that transverse engine and gearbox...
A wildly opposite approach to basing a road racer or rally winner on a mass-produced car might be to base a road car on a Grand Prix contestant. It would also be an expensive approach, and Alfa Romeo appears to have tried it with their 8C2900 series, made in A and B versions from 1935 to '39. The engine, a supercharged inline 8 with dual overhead cams by engineer Vittorio Jano, was alleged to have been sourced from leftover units built for Alfa's single-seat racers. Details matched that of Alfa's racing eights, including two separate aluminum blocks of 4 cylinders separated by the gear drive for the supercharger and camshafts. But Alfa built 41 of these cars, and its hard to believe even a well-financed racing program would have needed over 3 dozen GP engines. So maybe what we have here was always intended to be a show dog among mutts. But the show dog delivered on the track, with a 1-2-3 finish in the Mille Miglia in 1938, the year our subject berlinetta was built...
The rest of the specifications came up to show dog standards; Jano designed 4-wheel independent suspension and specified hydraulic brakes. Short wheelbase racers often had alloy bodywork by Touring Superleggera, which built this lightweight, long-wheelbase coupe using their system of aluminum panels anchored to a network of small-diameter steel tubes. The 8C2900 Alfas were the fastest production cars in the years before World War 2, if you'd accept 41 cars in 5 years as "production".
The approach to road racers and show cars at France's Delahaye was a bit different. They built 4 GP racers powered by a 3-cam V12, and no more than 5 Type 165 road cars powered by a detuned, 12-plug version of the 24-plug racer. But they eventually built around 2,000 of their Type 135, including the Figoni & Falaschi bodied 135 MS Special Roadster at the Revs. These cars were powered by a famously reliable and durable glorified truck engine...
Under its swoopy exterior, the Delahaye 135 featured a 3.5 liter inline 6 derived directly from Delahaye's commercial truck engines. Modern enough to have overhead valves, it was nowhere near as complex or sophisticated as the Alfa's supercharged, twin-cam straight 8. In the 135MS the engine produced 160 hp, less than the 180 to 220 from the Alfa 8C2900, but the same as the first DOHC Jaguar XK that was a dozen years in the future. Most 135s featured the Cotal electromagnetic preselector gearbox, not the hot ticket for racing...
Still, stripped-down, lightweight versions of Delahaye's 135 did well enough in road races to establish a reputation for performance, and the cars didn't have the temperamental reputation that attached to Alfa's high-strung 8C. Perhaps this may indicate that the most trouble-free cars, like the most trouble-free dogs, are really mutts beneath the surface...
Photo Credits:
1 & 2: Paul Anderson
3: The Revs Institute
4-9: Paul Anderson
10: Ian Avery-De Witt\
11 & 12: Paul Anderson
13: Wikimedia
14, 16, 17, 19 & 20: Ian Avery-De Witt
15 & 18, 21-23: Paul Anderson
