Maximum Bugatti? Type 55 Super Sport

Bugattis from the 1920s and 1930s were already considered classic cars halfway through the 20th century, when the factory in Alsace Lorraine was still talking about relaunching car production. In 1951 Ken Purdy was writing worshipful prose about them in his pioneering book, Kings of the Road, and heaping praise upon other certified collector's items like Alfa Romeo and Hispano-Suiza. The Type 35 Bugatti had compiled the longest list of victories in racing history; and the vast Type 41 Royale, a holy grail for collectors with only half a dozen built, was one of the biggest cars in memory.  But Purdy began his Bugatti chapter with a little blue coupe appearing in the distance down a tree-lined road, aiming to make the Paris to Nice run in record time...

This reminded the reader that the name Bugatti was mostly associated with lightweight, nimble cars producing a remarkable amount of power from relatively small engines. The giant Royale, after all, had been a commercial flop. Where would one look to find the essential Bugatti, the Maximum Bugatti?  No, not the modern 1,000 hp lifestyle accessory that maker VW claims is a Bugatti, but the one Bugatti combining the technical details, visual design themes and personality traits most associated with the marque...

                                                

You could easily make a less worthy choice than the Type 55, built from 1931 to '35, and powered by the 2.3 liter inline 8 cylinder Type 51 GP engine, itself a twin-cam supercharged version of the SOHC block that had powered the immortal Type 35 racer.  Beginning with the trademark flat horseshoe radiator (Bugatti's slogan was Le Pur Sang, the purebred among cars), Jean Bugatti, son of founder Ettore, sketched what became the essence of roadster form, with the whimsical sine-wave fenders sheltering flat-spoke alloy wheels made famous on Bugatti racers.  Even for a machine, it had an especially mechanical character, with solid axles front and rear, and mechanical brakes. Unlike Delage, Bugatti was slow to adopt hydraulics...

The fold-down windshield and deeply scooped door panels, along with the purposeful arrangement of controls and instruments, were a reminder of the car's purpose: fun for those who could afford it. Prices matched those of the competing Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 which also appeared in 1931: about $10,000, a fortune back then. The twin spare tires mounted at the rear were a reminder that the fun might be interrupted. The maintenance routines that Bugattis demanded of their owners were so notorious that around a decade after Purdy's book, the magazine Sports Car Quarterly printed an article entitled "Be Glad You Don't Own a Bugatti."

The engines were things of beauty, though, with shear, crisp geometry, allegedly influenced by Cubism, and hand-tooled patterns on the cam covers that became another trademark feature. Power was about 130-135 hp, a bit less than the 2.3 liter Alfa 8C, but the T55 Super Sport shown here weighs a bit less than 2,100 lb.  This example, from 1933, lives in the Collier Collection at the Revs Institute and gets exercised regularly. The museum catalog points out that some of those people who feel this is the most beautiful of sports car designs are not even Bugatti fans.  Bugatti built some impressive cars after it, including the Type 57 road cars and Type 59 GP car, but none of them ever looked more like a Bugatti than this one.

*Footnote:  The Bugatti T57 Atlantic was feature in our post for June 11, 2017 entitled "Authenticity vs. Originality: A Tale of Four (or Five} Bugattis", and a rare T51 with coupe bodywork is shown in "On a Lazy Afternoon in 1987" from May 18, 2019.

Photo Credit:  Paul Anderson

Willys Aero Saga: An Afterlife in Rio

In the first few years after World War II, Willys Overland, which had produced many of the Jeeps which helped turn the tide of war*, was searching for another vehicle which would have enough appeal to take the place of government orders for the Jeep. They introduced an all-steel station wagon with Jeep-like styling in 1946, and the Jeepster convertible in 1948.  The wagon was a modest success, and continued to be produced until 1964, ten years after Willys Overland merged with Kaiser.  The Jeepster was not a great hit, and was discontinued after the 1950 model year. Some suggested that the Jeepster may have reminded returning GIs too much of the wartime Jeep...

Willys identified a market need for a practical, efficient car that would plug the yawning gap between the tiny Crosley and the "full-size" cars from the Big Three.  Nash would introduce its Rambler in 1950 and would soon add a wagon and sedan to the original ragtop.  In 1951, Nash would produce 57,555 of what it would later christen as the compact car. Possibly encouraged by the Nash example, two Packard alumni, engineer Clyde Patton and designer Phil Wright, finished the Willys entry in the field.

It was a predictive effort in many ways. First, there was the unitized body construction, an approach that would be adopted by the Big Three compacts in 1960. The wheelbase was a tidy 108 inches, 8 inches longer than the Rambler and also echoed by the later Valiant, Falcon and Corvair.  Even the engines were interesting; Willys offered new F-head versions of their inline 6 and 4. This head design, also called Inlet Over Exhaust and similar to a design used by Rover as well as Rolls Royce, positioned intake valves in the head and exhaust valves at the side, permitting larger intake valves than the previous flathead design, and more efficient combustion. Willys called their F-head the Hurricane. Owing to the light weight of the Aero, it had, early in its career anyway, the best power to weight ratio of any American car. 

By 1953 Willys made both two and four-door sedans, as well as a pillarless two-door hardtop, and over its production run offered various trim options from the Ace (the top of the line) to the Wing, and also a Lark, Eagle and Falcon.  Obviously, other manufacturers were aware of the pioneering Willys, even when it came to naming their cars. This two-tone green sedan is a 1953 Aero Ace...

The shape of the roof and glass area anticipates the Volvo 122 (Amazon) from the late Fifties. The fins were a bit less tentative than the bumps on early Fifties Caddies, but nothing like the ones that Virgil Exner would release on Chrysler's '57 Forward Look.

Willys sold over 42,000 of its Aero in 1953, bettering the first year by over 10,000 cars. The model's future was cut short, however, by the 1954 merger between Willys and struggling Kaiser, perhaps prompted by Henry Kaiser's interest in the Jeep line and related government contracts...

The '54 model offered few external changes beyond the chrome headlight hoods shown above, and an extra engine option. After the possibly unwise merger with Kaiser, Willys offered the bigger, but less efficient, Continental six from the Kaiser line in the Aero. Kaiser, on the other hand, offered the F-head Willys engine in its fiberglass-bodied Darrin 2-seater. The Kaiser-Willys combine restyled the car for 1955, with a wider grille and zigzag trim typical for the period.  The two-door hardtop station wagon sketched out by the design staff might have been a better choice. In any case, the firm wound down production after '55, along with the larger Kaiser, after making nearly 6,600 of the final Aero model shown below.

After over 91,000 had been sold in the US, the compact Willys found new life south of the border in 1960, when Kaiser Willys began producing the original design in Brazil.  The Aero 2600, as it was called, looked mostly like the '55 shown above until a clever 1961 restyling by Brooks Stevens, who also redesigned the Studebaker Hawk for 1962 (with similar T-Bird inspired roofline) and the Studebaker Lark line from 1962 through 1964. The Willys redesign went into production in 1963 and was a success, and the car stayed in production until 1971.  

That coincided with the first seven years of the military junta that took over in 1964.  You probably didn't want one of these (usually in black) to show up outside your house in the wee hours of  the morning during that period...unless it happened to be your car.  There was also a limousine version, shown below, which was mostly reserved for Brazilian officialdom and business leaders. Of all the independent US car manufacturers, Willys had perhaps the most enduring product lines. After all, the Jeep wagon anticipated the modern SUV (Kaiser's 1963 ohc Jeep Wagoneer, also designed by Brooks Stevens, refined the idea), and Jeeps kept Kaiser's vehicle production lines busy through 1969, after which American Motors took over...until 1987, when Chrysler purchased the AMC car operation, including Eagle (remember that?) and Jeep. Eagle lasted only a short while, but the familiar Jeep face is still easily recognized in Chrysler showrooms and on the road.

Postscript:  Meanwhile, several vintage Willys Overland vehicles are in use in Boulder, Colorado, where the Jeepster and pristine '53 Aero Ace were spotted, along with the well-loved Aero below which is still in regular use by a lady almost a quarter century older than the car...

*Footnote:  The Jeep design was a product of Pennsylvania's American Bantam Company (American Austin until 1934) which produced an American version of the British Austin Seven from 1930 to '41. Owing to concerns about Bantam's production capacity, the US Government reopened the contract after Bantam had made nearly 2,700 of the first Jeeps, and production was divided between Willys and Ford, while Bantam produced the T-3 trailer for Jeeps.

Photo Credits:  
Top & 2nd (Jeepster):  the author
3rd: Willys Overland
4th thru 6th from top:  the author 
7th:  Willys Overland
8th: howstuffworks.com
9th & 10th: wikimedia
11th: Willys Overland do Brasil SA
12th: flickr.com
Bottom:  Isaac Stokes.  Special thanks to Isaac for finding a shot from our months-ago dog
walk, and for asking his loyal retriever to provide a bit of scale.

On the Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 2: Postwar Era from Abarth to Offy & McLaren

At the annual "hoods off" festival this summer at the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida, visitors were treated not only to a spectacular show of priceless engines, but also to a rare peek inside the Institute's fabled workshop.   In the photo above, the car in the foreground is a 1958 Scarab* Mk. 1. A 1965 Ferrari 250LM* is tucked under the stairway, while to the right we can spot a '64 Alfa Romeo GTZ*, which became known as the TZ1 after Alfa got around to making a TZ2. The other blue car is a Ballot racer from the era immediately after World War 1.  Like the Peugeot in our previous post, the Ballot used a twin-cam engine designed by Ernest Henry.  For the Ballot design, Henry doubled the cylinders for an inline 8, and concealed the valve springs which had been exposed on the Peugeot.  The 4.8 liter Ballot racers finished 4th and 11th at Indy in 1919, and took 2nd, 5th and 7th the next year. Like the successful 3 liter Ballot GP cars, they've been somewhat forgotten because Edouard Ballot left the car business in 1932.  Henry's Peugeot and Ballot engine designs, however, have been credited by historians for inspiring Harry Miller's engines...

The Institute has what is likely the most famous OSCA* ever, the 1954 MT4 / 1500 that Stirling Moss and Bill Lloyd drove to an outright victory in that year's Sebring 12 Hour endurance race. The 1491 cc inline four features a cast iron block, aluminum head with twin chain-driven overhead cams, and two spark plugs per cylinder. This race made Moss, who drove most of the distance, famous in America.  It also generated demand for the expensive OSCA sports racers, which cost around $10,000.  In taking the overall victory as well as winning its class, the Moss OSCA beat a much more powerful 3.3 liter Lancia as well as a factory Special Test Austin Healey with 2.6 liter engine... 

Bore and stroke were equal at 78 mm.  Later on,  OSCA's founding Maserati brothers experimented with desmodromic valves (mechanically opened and closed) and shared their 1500 and 1600 engine designs with Fiat for some special Fiat 2 seaters...

The year after Moss and the OSCA won Sebring, Briggs Cunningham* and his team of engineers and mechanics produced their last new sports racer aimed at finally attaining victory in the Le Mans 24 Hours.  Previous attempts with the Chrysler-powered C2, C4R and C5R had resulted in two 3rd place finishes, as well as a number of top-ten placements.  So Cunningham decided to switch to a real racing engine, the Offenhauser inline four with twin overhead cams and four valves per cylinder.

The Offenhauser had been designed to deliver its power on the methanol fuel used at the Indy 500 and other oval-track races.  In 3 liter form as used in the new C6R, the Offy produced 220 hp with Hillborn fuel injection and 270 hp with Weber carburetors and the pump gas specified for Le Mans...

But the gasoline-powered engine ran at higher temperatures than the methanol-fueled version, and the Cunningham team was never able to get the running temperature down to a satisfactory level, despite frequent consulting with Offy engineer Leo Goosen.

In the ill-fated, accident-plagued running of the 1955 Le Mans, John Fitch and Phil Walters went 202 laps in the C6R before the high temperatures cost them a piston.  The C6R engine, however, shown in the 3 photos above, remains a work of art… Another twin-cam inline four from the same era had its roots in a humble fire pump engine.  The 2.5 liter Coventry Climax engine was used by Cooper as well as Lotus teams, and powered Cooper and driver Jack Brabham in back-to-back World Championship wins in 1959 and '60.

The original FW (featherweight) fire pump engine was just over a liter in size, and with its aluminum block and head with single overhead cam, caught on with racers in the 1,100 cc class in FWA (featherweight automobile) form.  Eventually it was produced in 1.5 liter and 1.9 liter forms, now with twin cams, and the definitive FPF 2.5 liter produced just under 100 hp per liter...

The key to the Cooper's success in the hands of Stirling Moss and Jack Brabham was not the engine however…it was its placement in the chassis, behind the driver and ahead of the transaxle. Along with low weight and frontal area, optimal weight distribution and predictable handling allowed the Cooper drivers to defeat the front engined V6 offerings from Ferrari.

The Italians derided the simple, austerely finished Cooper as the product of a bunch of blacksmiths, but those two Championships caused an revolution.  All competitive Formula One cars, including Phil Hill's Championship-winning Ferrari, were mid-engined by 1961.

A few years before the mid-engined revolution, engineering of production engines began to produce designs that were competitive with designs that were focused only on racing.  First the Jaguar XK twin-cam six, designed for a big sedan, won Le Mans in 1951 & '53 (later victories were '55 thru '57). In 1954 Alfa Romeo introduced its twin cam Giulietta, with aluminum block and head, twin cams and eventually up to 129 hp in 1,300 cc Veloce form.  Specialists like Conrero* offered twin-plug heads as well as 1,500 cc versions, and the ageless engine went on to power the Zagato-bodied GTZ lightweight  at left below, sometimes in twin-plug form...

Abarth was beginning to achieve good results with highly-tuned versions of the production Fiat 600.  The 1000 TC-R below managed 112 hp from a 982cc pushrod four, with special aluminum heads and hemispherical combustion chambers.  The line between production engines and racing engines was beginning to blur...

By 1962, however, Carlo Abarth introduced his own engine for GT competition in the Abarth Simca, at first in 1,300 cc and later as a 1,600 cc.  The culmination was the 2 Mila, a 2,000 cc twin-cam four with twin-spark head design and lightweight block by engineer Mario Colucci.  The car used a shortened Simca 1000 sedan chassis, but the engines and transmissions (in 4, 5 and 6 speed versions were entirely of Abarth manufacture.. 

The 2 Mila's success in endurance racing was limited by the fragility of the transmissions, which had to cope with between 192 and 202 hp.  The Abarth Simcas had real success in hillclimbs, however, beating Alfa and Porsche to win the European Mountain Championship in 1964.

Ford Motor Company, like Cunningham, decided to challenge the Europeans, especially Ferrari, at Le Mans, launched their GT40* in 1964.  The car was originally powered by the 4-cam, aluminum-block 255 Ford Indy V8 engine (loosely based on the production 260) that would win at Indy in '65.  Below is a rare photo of Ford's full-race, 425 hp Indy engine mounted in an early GT40. 

Concerns about the reliability of an engine designed to run a 500 mile race now being asked to run over 2,800 miles led Ford to adapt their production 289 for use in the GT40...  

While Ford's first victory at Le Mans, a 1-2-3 finish in 1966, was with the 7-liter GT40 Mk. II, and the '67 win was with the 7-liter Mk. IV, the 1968 and 1969 wins were perhaps the sweetest...

…because Ford claimed back-to-back wins with their 4.9 liter engine and ZF transaxle in the Mk. I, which was at the end a 5-year old design.  Five years is a long time in race car design, and the GT40, like the D-Type Jaguar in the Fifties, had become the Old Faithful of endurance road racing cars. The line between racing engines and production engines continued to blur... 

In the early 1990s, designer Gordon Murray selected the 60 degree BMW  V12 as the basis for a new supercar. By the time the car was unveiled in 1992, McLaren had won the Indianapolis 500 three times and six Formula 1 Championships. Maybe this colored the decision to make the new car a practical and tractable road car, but one which could compete in road races...in a way, a throwback to the "dual-purpose" sports cars of the Fifties and early Sixties. The BMW engine as it appeared in the F1 was based on the SOHC production V12, but was a 4-cam design with 4 valves per cylinder, and developed over 620 hp from 6.1 liters. The 3-seat, center-steering F1 weighed 2,244 pounds, around the same as a Mazda Miata.  Top speed was 240 mph.  A McLaren F1 won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1995.  

Footnote: *Asterisk indicates there is an essay with photos on the car indicated.  Searching the Archives will lead to essays on the Abarth, Alfa Zagato, Ferrari 250LM, Scarab, OSCA, Cunningham, and Conrero Alfa, as well as Ford's GT40.

Photo credits: All photos were taken and supplied by Paul Anderson, with the following exceptions:

Ballot engine:  The Miller / Offenhauser Historical Society, milleroffy.com

Abarth 2000 engine from Abarth Simca:  The Revs Institute

Ford 255 four-cam engine in early GT40:  Ford Motor Company, reproduced on gt40.net.

On the Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 1: Classic Era (Delage, Bugatti and Alfa)

Once a year, the Collier Collection at the Revs Institute features a Hoods Off Exhibit*, and this past July, old friend Paul Anderson made a pilgrimage to Naples, Florida to take some pictures. The resulting photos are a reminder that the basics of the modern engine were established before World War I, and that racing engines are still beautiful to behold. For more than the first decade of the 20the century, racing engines, like most automobile engines, tended to be large and slow-turning, with low power outputs per unit of displacement. The Marmon* Wasp which Ray Harroun drove to victory in the 1911 Indianapolis 500, and the first car credited with a rear-view mirror, had an engine which was essentially the four cylinder T-head Model 32 with two more cylinders. Model 32 developed its 70 horsepower from 354 cubic inches.  The 3 liter 1913 Peugeot pictured below changed all that...

When privateer Arthur Duray entered chocolatier Jacques Menier's  90 hp car in the 500 for 1914, he was not taken seriously by other drivers.  After all, the Peugeot factory's entry consisted of 5.6 liter cars, and Delage had entered its 105 hp GP cars.  The other drivers called Duray's mount "the baby"…until he broke the Indy lap record at 99.85 mph.  Imagine, for a moment, averaging almost 100 mph on the narrow tires available back then, and on a track known as the Brickyard for a reason.  In the race itself, Duray led for a few laps, but averse to damaging his friend Menier's baby, was content to finish second behind a Delage...

That second-place finish was considered a triumph of small, high-output engines over lumbering trucks, and by the Twenties all engines raced at Indy reflected the influence of engineer Ernest Henry's design for Peugeot. His inline four featured double overhead camshafts, four valves per cylinder, and made half a horsepower per cubic inch; it was only 6 cubic inches bigger than a Ford Model T.  The exposed valve springs were soon to disappear from Henry's designs.  The Peugeot on display at the Revs Institute is the actual car that Duray drove to humble most of the field at Indy... 

Duray's countrymen at Delage* were among the first to learn these lessons.  Designer Albert Lory's 1926 GP engine had half the displacement of the Peugeot, at 1.5 liters.  While it shared the twin overhead cam configuration, its eight cylinders had two valves each, and the Roots-type supercharger allowed 170 horsepower at a shocking 8,000 rpm, or nearly 2 hp per cubic inch... For 1927, the model year shown, Lory redesigned the engine to reverse intake and exhaust manifolds, and thus to move the hot exhaust pipe away from the driver, who needed to stay on the right for the clockwise tracks. This was Lory's masterpiece, and race results were good enough that Louis Delage retired his firm from racing after that year. How good were the results? Robert Benoist won every race he entered, becoming the first world champion driver ever...

In 1915, a racer came to Los Angeles carburetor builder Harry Miller with a broken Peugeot racing engine like the one from the previous year's Indy 500.  Unable to source parts from a war-ravaged France, he asked Miller to rebuild it.  Miller effectively made a new Peugeot engine, and incorporated the Peugeot's key features into his own subsequent racing engines, including twin overhead cams and four valves per cylinder.  Miller built both 4 and 8 cylinder engines, including the inline 122 cubic inch four that powered a Duesenberg to victory in the 1922 Indy 500. Between 1922 and 1938, Miller engines powered cars to 12 victories at Indy, half of them in chassis also built by Miller.  The Miller designs became the basis for the Offenhauser engines that dominated Indy, and in smaller 110 cubic inch size, midget car racing, for decades.

At his workshops in Molsheim, Alsace Lorraine, Ettore Bugatti answered the twin-cam designs of Delage and Miller by issuing the Type 51 in 1931; it was essentially a twin-cam version of his famous 2.3 liter Type 35 inline eight, supercharged and now with 160 hp.  The road-going Type 55 below dates from 1933 and has a version of the T51 engine expanded to nearly 3 liters. Supercharged and with 2 valves per cylinder,  the T55 made 135 hp at 5,500 rpm.

Art historians have suggested that the shear, sharp-edged rectangular masses and pure cylindrical shapes on Bugatti engines were inspired by Cubism, but based upon the recollections of those who worked in, or visited, the Molsheim factory in the 1930s, a more likely explanation for these pure geometric solids could be the limitations imposed by Bugatti's machine tools. Whatever the reason, the purity of form, and details like the hand-tooled pattern on the cam covers, will always be associated with Bugatti, and with high performance engines.

One of Bugatti's chief competitors, Alfa Romeo began producing a road-going version of its GP car, VIttorio Jano's 8C2900, in 1936.  Alfa entered 3 cars in the 1936 Mille Miglia, and they finished in 1-2-3 order.  By 1938, the 8C32900B was developing 180 hp at 5,200 rpm from the twin-cam, supercharged inline eight with 2 valves per cylinder. The alloy blocks were cast in unit with the heads, and two four-cylinder units were separated by the central gear tower which drove the cams.  As with the Bugatti, the Alfa designs of this period had a visual harmony and dedication to detail that created a performance image for their maker.  

The 3 liter, supercharged DOHC V-12 of the 1939 Mercedes-Benz W154 (Chassis 15, the last) reflects the cost-no-object racing juggernaut of the German government-supported teams, both Mercedes and Auto Union.  This car won the Belgrade Grand Prix on the day that another juggernaut, the Nazi army, invaded Poland. The engine on this car is always exposed, as the bodywork has been cut away on one side to display the chassis.  The forms and details of the engine and related plumbing betray none of the regard for visual artistry shown in the Bugatti and Alfa; they are, instead, a workmanlike assemblage of elements in constant need of attention from a flotilla of factory-trained mechanics in order to perform as designed.  An example of this approach is the rearward tilt of the engine block...

When American Don Lee entered a W154 in the 1947 Indy 500 (photo below), mechanics left the engine idling for a long warm-up during practice, and due to this tilt, fuel collected in the cylinders at the rear, resulting in broken connecting rods and a broken piston. Enterprising machinists fabricated a new piston and rods from drawings which were (amazingly) on hand, but the piston failed again in the race, with Duke Nalon at the wheel. In a reversal of the old Subaru slogan, it appears the W154 was designed to be expensive…and to stay that way.

This completes our review of racing engines during the Classic Era.  In the next installment we'll have a look at the innovations, and repetitions, of the postwar era.

*Footnote:  Engineer Howard Marmon's innovations are summarized in "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie", from 9/1/15. Delage racing and touring cars were featured in "Delage: A Car for the Ages", our post for 5/20/18.  The Bugatti Type 57 Atlantic was featured in "Authenticity vs. Originality: A Tale of Four (or Five) Bugattis" in our Archives for 6/11/17.  And the lone Atlantic-style Bugatti Type 51 can be viewed in "On a Lazy Afternoon in 1987: Inside Bob Sutherland's Garage", from 5/18/19.  This summer, the Revs Institute Hoods Off exhibit ran from mid-June through the end of July.  Check the revsinstitute.org website for next year's exhibit and other special events.  

Photo Credits:  All photos were provided by Paul Anderson, except for the Mercedes W154 (by the author), the W154 at Indy (wikimedia) and the Alfa 8C2900B (the Revs Institute Collier Collection.).