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Monday, March 6, 2017

The Revs Institute, Part I: First Impression

The Revs Institute in Naples, Florida envisions its mission as providing a resource for automotive historians and a training ground for the next generation of car restorers.  In keeping with that twofold mission, it maintains a collection of around 110 historic cars, many of them race cars. The collection is as wide-ranging as it is deeply considered, though, so you will find everything from early bicycles and an 1896 Panhard & Levassor automobile to a 1988 Arrows A-10B Formula One racer and a 1989 Trabant from East Germany.  The latter, with its two-cycle twin cylinder engine, is simultaneously the newest car you may find on display and also one of the least sophisticated. Irony is not your first impression of the Revs, however.  When you enter the foyer you are confronted by the Class of '64, three competitors from the under 2-liter class during the 1964 road racing season in Europe and America.  Gleaming in bright red, the Abarth Simca 2000, Porsche 904, and Alfa Romeo TZ-1 exemplify three different approaches to chassis and engine design. The rear-engined Abarth Simca combines a modified Simca sedan chassis platform with an all-Abarth twin cam inline 4 making 192 hp.  The mid-engined 904 is the first Porsche to feature a fiberglass body, but houses a tweaked version of the familiar four-cam, air-cooled boxer four which was introduced in the mid-Fifties 550 sports racer.  The Zagato-bodied Alfa on the right features, like the Abarth, a water-cooled twin cam design, here based on the Giulia aluminum block, and is the most traditional of the three in chassis design, with a front engine in a tubular chassis, but trading the SZ model's live rear axle for a fully independent setup* with inboard disc brakes.  Weight was about 1,650 pounds.  At 1.6 liters it's the smallest engine of the three, but it was a fierce competitor...



Step to the left of the entry and you find a display with a different theme.  Here we have two cars which pioneered the use of plastic materials in chassis structure.  The first is Colin Chapman's Lotus Elite (Type 14).  The body, designed in 1957 by Peter Kirwin-Taylor, pioneered the use of fiberglass as a structural material.*






Just behind the Lotus, you stop to take in a McLaren F1, the mid-engined super car from 1995 with driver's seat located between two passengers.  Designed by Peter Stevens, it pioneered carbon fiber as a structural material.  As a result, it was able to offer a curb weight only slightly higher than a Mazda Miata while providing a strong, compact chassis to house the BMW-sourced V12 making 5 times as much power.  It was enough to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1995...


If you make a right turn after entering you will encounter a 1965 Ferrari 250 LM, Ferrari's attempt to convince European racing authorities that a purpose-built mid-engined racing car was really a variation of the familiar front-engined 250 GT.  Even the name was a bit of a deception, as Ferrari engines were named after their individual cylinder capacities, and the 3.3 liter V12 in the LM was really a 275.  Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt were convinced that their LM would be slower than the hotter Ferrari P2 prototypes and Ford GT40s at the 1965 Le Mans, so they decided to push the car to the breaking point.  Unlike its competitors, it never broke, and they won the race...


The Institute's LM was driven on Canadian streets by its original owner, and lived in New Zealand and Germany before finding a home here.  Like the other cars at the Revs, it gets exercised at least once a year.  The nose on the Scaglietti alloy body was repaired after an accident by Piero Drogo's bodyworks, and is profiled a bit differently than standard, with a more oval air intake.


After spending nearly an hour pondering the cars in the foyer,  you realize that there are over a hundred more cars to see, and that after lunch you'll have only about three hours to do that.  One of the docents mentions that there's one of every type of Porsche sports racer built, up through the Type 917, in the adjacent room, so you decide to get moving…

*Footnote & Errata:  We posted this with an error:  The Alfa TZ-1 did not share the live axle of the earlier SZ model; instead it pioneered (for Alfa) a fully independent rear suspension also featured on the TZ-2. It was the first Alfa offered to the public with fully independent suspension.  Sorry for this error!  For more on the Lotus Elite design, see our July 31, 2016 post entitled "Plastic Promise, Plastic Perils."


All Photos except 4 & 5:  the author
4th and 5th photos from top:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

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