Kaiser Darrin: It Could've Been a Contender

A brief flashback to 1954: Early in the year Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio, the US Navy launched Nautilus, its first nuclear submarine, and President Dwight Eisenhower warned against American involvement in Vietnam, where the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu would fall in May after a 4-month siege. Sixty-five Octobers ago, film maker Elia Kazan would release "On the Waterfront", in which Marlon Brando utters the line, "I coulda been a contender"...

An episode of "The Man in High Castle" TV series prompted speculation about the mysterious convertible which appeared in one scene.  One viewer speculated that the design was so exotic it might have been created just for the show.  Well, except for the fact that the car is now 65 years old, it might not have been that much of a mystery. The  two-seater roadster had already been immortalized in a stamp series issued by the US Postal Service in 2005, along with three of its competitors from the early 1950s...

The car was the Kaiser Darrin 161, named for its body designer and the size of its F-head Willys* engine, which was a sturdy little power plant few people noticed, as they were wowed by Howard "Dutch" Darrin's sliding doors and the curvy fiberglass body, which Kaiser-Frazer (later Kaiser Willys) claimed was the first such body to enter production.  It wasn't; the 161 was beaten into production by Chevrolet's Corvette.  Mighty GM had a hard time selling 300 of those in 1953, because the Corvette's price would've bought a top-line Buick with that year's new V8, and Corvette buyers had to be content with the Blue Flame 6, which wasn't a match for the Jag XK120 or any of GM's other V8s.  Similarly, the 90 to 95 hp offered by the Darrin's Willys six offered 0 to 60 in 15 seconds, not exactly Jaguar performance, but for a Jaguar price of around $3,700.  Other things went wrong, too...

Darrin's insistence on those tricky sliding doors led to difficult operation when the tracks got dirty, and as can be seen in the photo above, the placement and design of the door handle impinged upon an already-narrow opening. The design also precluded wind-up windows, but those weren't featured on the Corvette or the Farina-designed Nash Healey roadster either. The production 161 had a nose and fenders which pointed oddly skyward, the result of Kaiser's worries about meeting headlight height requirements.  Apparently nobody at Kaiser noticed that the Porsche 356 and Jag XK120 were sold legally with lower headlight mountings...

The prototype which appeared well before the first production cars which went on sale in January 1954 had less-round wheel cutouts, along with a divided windshield and bright metal trim strips along the rocker panels. Only 435 Darrins were built from January '54 to the halt of production in August of that year.  There were also 6 prototypes, and about 50 cars were damaged when a big snow storm caught them outside the plant.  Howard Darrin bought the damaged cars at a steep discount, and mounted superchargers on some and Cadillac V8s in others*.  This improved performance as might be expected, but was likely all the Darrin chassis, based upon the 100-inch wheelbase of Kaiser's ill-fated compact Henry J, could handle. Two other cars in the postage stamp series had better fates: Studebaker's graceful, larger and much less expensive '53 Starliner offered a V8, and despite initial production difficulties, sold over 46,000 coupes and hardtops in '53. Nash sold over 402 of its Pinin Farina styled Nash Healey* from '52 to '54, and 104 of the British-bodied '51 model, and that has to count as a success, considering prices ranging from $4,700 for the PF roadsters to $5,900 for the coupes.  Ford's V8 T-Bird was heading for this market niche in 1955, and with prices starting just under $3k, Ford would sell over 16,000 copies in that first year.

This highlights the dilemma faced by Kaiser's Darrin all along.  It was a Hail Mary pass meant to revive Kaiser's fortunes after Henry Kaiser made the mistake of pushing ahead with the compact, bare-bones Henry J instead of producing the V8 his engineers had designed, despite Kaiser's high production costs, which meant the firm could only make money on middle-to-upper bracket cars. Kaiser merged with Willys* during this period, and the demand for Jeeps kept their production lines busy through the 1960s.  The Darrin two-seater might have been a contender with the right ratio of performance to price.  Instead, it now makes for an intriguing footnote to the growth of the sports car movement in the Fifties.

                             

*Errata:  

Though historian Richard Langworth and Wikipedia claim several Kaiser Darrins got Cadillac engines, the Kaiser Frazer Owners Club confims only one, which went to Mrs. Briggs Cunningham, who raced it a few times.  

*Footnote:  

The Nash Healey saga is recounted in "Italian Jobs from the Heartland, Part 1",  posted Nov. 17, 2016.  The Willys Aero story, including some notes on the F-head engine, appears in "Willys Aero Saga: An Afterlife in Rio", our post for August 29, 2019.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  movies.stackexchange.com

2nd thru 5th:  US Postal Service

6th:  the author

7th & 8th: Kaiser-Frazer Corporation

Bottom: barrett-jackson.com

Lime Rock Concours: Alfa, Bugatti, Ferrari, Maserati & Etceterini

This year's Lime Rock Concours and Vintage Races at the old track in Connecticut were reminders that lots of technically intriguing, visually arresting cars were built long before anybody thought of putting microchips in cars, or building them on robotic assembly lines. We'll begin with a skiff-bodied Bugatti from the 1920s...

Based upon the long wheelbase and the mid-Twenties body design, this could be a Type 38, made from 1926-'27. The engine architecture, a single overhead cam straight 8 with 3 valves per cylinder, is related to the 4-cylinder Type 23 as well as the later Type 35 GP straight 8s. In Types 30 and 38, it was just under 2 liters, and in the T43 that came after, it matched the Type 35 at 2,261 cc.

The interior is a visual feast of alloy, wood and leather.  Plastic had yet to show up in cars.

Bugatti's great rival from the Twenties and Thirties, Alfa Romeo, showed up in variations spanning 3 decades, including rare 8C racers in a couple of forms.  Below is an 8C 35 single seater from 1935-36; it managed to embarrass a field of much newer cars.

The Jano-designed 8 cylinder engines featured two monoblocs separated by a tower of gears for the cam drives.  The 8C 35 was raced in displacements up to 3.8 liters, and Alfa's race team, Scuderia Ferrari (yes, that Ferrari) supplemented it with a 4.1 liter V12 which made 60 hp more, called the 12C-36.

The Michelotti-designed Moretti spiders from the mid-Fifties shown below still featured engines of Moretti design and manufacture, in 750c and 1,200cc sizes.  This and other Morettis are featured in our post for Dec. 8, 2015, "The Etceterini Files Part 2: Golden Arrow, the Moretti That Broke the Bank."

The Siata 208S spider also featured a Michelotti body design, built by Motto*.  With 70-degree, 2-liter Fiat V8, and 4-wheel independent suspension adapted from a Fiat off-road vehicle, it charmed Road & Track testers in 1955, even at $5,300... 

Siata 208CS coupes like the one below were built at first by Stablimenti Farina and then by Balbo when the first firm folded.  Coupes in other styles were offered by Vignale. The Siata 208 and related Fiat 8V are featured in our post for Nov. 13, 2016, "The Etceterini Files Part 10."

The period of the early-to-mid Fifties was a fertile one for Italy's body designers. The Zagato bodied Maserati A6G 2000 below aims for the same goals as the Siata above (light weight, aerodynamics), but arrives at different design solutions. Where the Siata features concealed headlights and a wraparound windshield, Zagato's Maserati stays with more conventional fender and windshield shapes, but offers curved side windows and careful attention to air intake and exhaust vents. Zagato also offered the option of the "double bubble" roof, which this car lacks.

What it has is the famous 2 liter inline six with twin overhead cams and two spark plugs per cylinder. This view shows the subtle contours and the side windows curved in section, a feature as unusual in 1954 as the Siata's pop-up headlights.

The Zagato-bodied SZ from 1960-'61 was the first Zagato-bodied Giulietta actually offered by the Alfa factory, though there had been earlier custom cars and lightweight versions of the 1900.  The smooth form, tactile and rounded, relates to the Zagato Lancias and Abarths, but has Alfa-specific features, from the grille to the greenhouse and indented flanks.  A red Zagato-bodied TZ (T for tubular chassis, even lighter than the SZ) sits next to the silver car, and shows the design changes wrought by 1963... 

Similarly, the Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France in the foreground below shows the evolution of style at Pininfarina between that car (built 1956-'59) and the famous SWB (short wheelbase) 250GT built from 1959-'62. The Tour de France is built on the 102 inch wheelbase of the Pininfarina grand tourers, while the SWB is on the 94.5 inch wheelbase of the later GTO and Lusso.  The California spider built during this period was available on both wheelbases.

The cockpit on the TdF is purposeful and just short of stark...less decorative than the Maserati shown from 3 or 4 years earlier.                               

The SWB in the foreground always featured open headlights owing to a short-lived 1959 Italian law that banned covered lights. TdFs built in '59, like all SWBs, had open headlights. The SWB has a glassier cabin, and was available in alloy or steel-bodied versions. No matter how many children you have, selling even one of these cars at auction will put them all through Stanford, MIT, or Harvard...

The first sports racer with the 250 Testa Rossa ("red head") version of Colombo's V12 design appeared in 1957 with the scoop-fendered design below, built by Scaglietti. There had been a previous 625 Testa Rossa, with 2.5 liter inline four, and a couple were bodied by Touring.

Most Ferrari models during this period were designated by their individual cylinder displacement, but there was nothing in the type name to tell you whether the car had 4, 6 or 12 cylinders...and Ferrari offered variations on all 3 configurations, plus running the Lancia V8 engine in Formula 1. So there was no way of telling without opening the hood that a 750 Monza, with its 4 cylinders, had the same displacement as this 250 Testa Rossa, with 12...

The Testa Rossa TRI-61 below shows Ferrari's rapid progress in body design around the time of their Championship-winning 1961 GP car and the first mid-engined cars turned out by Carlo Chiti's engineering team.  All these cars initially shared Chiti's distinctive twin-nostril air intake, and a wraparound windscreen with side windows meeting a high, chopped Kamm Theory tail...

To which Ferrari engineers added the distinctive turned-up spoiler, which increased downforce and improved handling at the cost of a slight decrease in top speed.  That year's new mid-engined cars, the Dino V6-powered 196 and 286 SP, as well as the Chiti designed 248 V8, were visually identical and tested in the wind tunnel.  The TRI-61 featured a new space frame chassis to complement the new Fantuzzi bodywork, and the disc brakes and five-speed transmission which had shown up in the previous series. The engine, still at the front, was the reliable Colombo-designed Type 128 three-liter SOHC V12, with the dry-sump lubrication from 1960 allowing a lower hood.  The Testa Rossa engine featured double-helical valve springs, another first for Ferrari.  Despite the low production (2 cars), TRI-61s won Sebring twice and Le Mans once before mid-engined cars, many of them Ferraris, took over. 

The 250 GTO which appeared late in 1962 was proposed by Ferrari as a version of the long-running 250 GT series. In line with that, the wheelbase matched the SWB at 94.5 inches.  The chassis was designed by Giotto Bizzarrini, and Ferrari claimed this was a production GT car, despite the fact that only 36 of the FIA-required 100 examples were built.

Among the cars tested in the new wind tunnel were the visually-identical V6 Dino-engined 196 and 286 SP, as well as the Carlo Chiti-designed V8s, the 248 and 268 from 1963.  Two years after the 1961 "palace revolt" when Chiti and Bizzarrini left Ferrari, the twin-nostril grilles of the early 250P and TRI 61 had been replaced by air intakes like the one below.  On the V6 and V8 cars, the first two numbers refer to engine (rather than individual cylinder) displacement, and the third number refers to the number of cylinders... 

Ferrari's 250 LM (below) was introduced late in 1963 as a closed "road car" version of the 250 P sports racer.  Ferrari's strategy to get the car homologated as a GT car rather than a prototype was to give the impression that this mid-engined racer was a variation of the 250 series of production cars, just as the previous front-engined GTO had been... 

Despite the name, all 250 LMs were produced with a 3.3 liter single overhead cam V12, so the engine was really a 275. Ferrari was unable to build 100 units of the LM, producing only 32 through 1965.  The Ferrari factory declined to enter an LM in the prototype class at the '65 Le Mans, Luigi Chinetti's North American Racing Team entered one, driven by American Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt, who thrashed the car for hours on end, feeling that they had no chance of winning anyway.  To their surprise, the sturdy engine and transaxle held together, and they won the race, beating the newcomer Fords.  The deep "tunnel roof" is an exaggerated version of the roof on the front-engined GTO64...

The 250 GT Lusso, built from 1962 through '64 in just over 350 copies, is a reminder of what Ferrari's real production cars were during this era. The subtle contours of the Pininfarina-designed, Scaglietti-built body provide a tasteful skin over a tubular chassis related to the competition GTO. The way the arc of the front fender fades into the door is especially fetching, and the proportions belie the 94 inch wheelbase shared with the SWB and GTO. Like the GTO, there was a simple live axle rear suspension, but also a disc brake at each wheel. Years later, East Coast distributor Luigi Chinetti commented that the Lusso was perhaps the last of the  light, simple and reasonably-priced twelve cylinder Ferraris.  

The Lusso was probably the first production car, and the first production Ferrari, to feature the Kamm Theory tail with subtle spoiler at the deck edge...

                            

The Bizzarrini P538 below was designed by exiled Ferrari engineer Giotto Bizzarrini, and three of the four cars built featured a 5.3 liter, mid-mounted Chevy V8, thus the name 538... 

One of the 4 cars, however, featured a Lamborghini V12, which meant that it was the only Bizzarrini to feature an engine as well as a chassis designed by its namesake.  The 538 history is reviewed on our post from Feb. 27, 2019, "The Etceterini Files Part 18: Bizzarrini P538."

*Footnote:  The diverse work of coach builder Rocco Motto is surveyed in our post for March 25, 2018, entitled "Unsung Genius: Rocco Motto, the Closer."

Photo Credit:  All photos were taken and submitted by LT Jonathan D. Asbury, USN, with the exception of the Ferrari Lusso rear view, which was by the author.