Germany's Borgward, built in Bremen, was a liver dumpling of a car: wholesome, sincere, plump and a bit clunky. Enthusiasts and historians alike bypassed it in favor of the more eccentric Porsche, the more charismatic Mercedes and the sometimes-elegant BMW. If not for some bad management decisions and tricks of fate, however, we might be driving Borgwards today. Actually, in engineering terms, many of us are driving Borgwards today, because Borgward's engineers formulated the definitive modern inline four-cylinder engine in the late Fifties, a good twenty years ahead of the industry. Features included twin overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, and direct mechanical fuel injection. But these features were reserved for the racing engines that went into founder Carl Borgward's RS race cars, as well as the Cooper Borgward that Stirling Moss used to win the Formula II Championship in 1959 for privateer Rob Walker. Production cars like the Hansa 2400 six and the Isabella 1.5 liter four made do with pushrod-operated overhead valves. The sturdy Isabella (1954-62), with its swing-axle rear suspension, might have seemed an alternative to Volvo in the USA, but eventually fell victim to the Swedish car's bigger dealer network, and to the inefficiency of Borgward's manufacturing policies. These included completely different engine designs for the senior Borgward lines, the smaller Goliath, and the Lloyd mini cars. This "separate companies" strategy was conceived to insure adequate supply of raw materials during early postwar rationing, but resulted in high tooling costs and almost no interchangeable parts between product lines. It also resulted in a plethora of interesting engines, including a two cycle, fuel-injected twin (Goliath), an overhead cam air-cooled inline twin (Lloyd), and two distinct water-cooled boxer fours for Lloyd and Goliath.
Hansa fastback sedan, 1952-55
Isabella, 1954-62 (1960 shown)
But it was the lightweight, twin cam fuel injected RS racing engine that caught English race team owner Rob Walker's eye. He thought it would make a powerful alternative to the Coventry Climax fours then used in his Cooper Formula II cars, and approached Borgward about supplying engines.
The engine had first appeared in a limited run of RS (Rennsport) two-seaters, and these had competed in Mexico's Carrera Panamericana as well as on European tracks...
The 1.5 liter cars gave the Porsches something to worry about, and the sleek alloy bodies were sometimes left unpainted to save weight...
Borgward's aerodynamic experiments included the tapered tail shown above and the Kamm-tailed car below.
But the RS engine achieved its greatest success in the Cooper chassis which established the template for the modern, mid-engined racing car. With Stirling Moss in the driver's seat, the car won the Formula Two Championship in 1959, the same year that a Climax-engined Cooper won the Formula One Championship with Jack Brabham driving.
The resulting fame should have spurred sales of the Isabella, or at least garnered some orders for racing engines, but Borgward was spending critical funds on a bigger six cylinder P100 introduced in mid-1959. That model sold only about 2,500 cars by the time of the firm's bankruptcy in August 1961; an additional 2,000 cars were assembled in Mexico. At the time of the collapse it was widely reported that intervention by the Quandt family, which had recently taken over BMW, made sure that Carl Borgward could not get a loan to continue operations. But a bit of Borgward influence survives in many cars sold today; the RS racing engine paved the way for modern twin cam, sixteen-valve fours, including (ironically) those made by BMW. And Borgward's Lloyd 900 engine served as the template for the early horizontally-opposed fours from Subaru in Japan. Subaru maintains that boxer architecture in all its automobile engines sold in the US, along with four valves per cylinder.
Photo credits:
Top & 3rd from top: wikimedia
2nd: de.academic.ru
4th: borgward.com
5th through 7th: pinterest.com
8th: Auta5p.eu
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