Cars and Coffee in New Canaan

The late summer car festival at the Lime Rock* track in Connecticut encompassed vintage racing, a concours and car club gatherings.  If you missed those events, it appears you could have attained an automotive nirvana almost as complete by visiting the Cars and Coffee event in New Canaan…

This Riley Nine  below from the 1930s looks to be a Brooklands or Speed model.  These had an 1,100 cc inline four with twin low-mounted cams operating overhead valves through short pushrods. The idea, similar to the Lea-Francis four and postwar Talbot Lago inline six, was to offer hemispherical combustion chambers without the complexity of overhead cams.  

The spartan but well-instrumented cockpit and boat tail give the little club racer a purposeful aspect.  The first Brooklands model appeared in 1929.

The Cisitalia* competition coupe from the late 1940s is powered by a modified Fiat inline four of 1,100 cc.  Piero Dusio's firm found brief success after WWII with small but expensive alloy-bodied racers and road cars, the most famous of which were the finned road racers named for Tazio Nuvolari, the driver who put them on the podium, and the predictive Pinin Farina GT coupes which appeared with them in 1947.  

The body design of this Cisitalia is less sophisticated than those models, and appears to reflect a single-minded focus on road racing.  The high, tapered boat tail resembles some Zagato-bodied Fiat Panoramicas from the same period, but this car lacks the curved side window sections and compound-curved rear windows of those cars...

The '57 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint shown below was one of Bertone's first high-volume production cars, and also the first Giulietta to appear when the series was introduced in 1954.  

Franco Scaglione's design* shows toned-down versions of the themes in his show cars, including the parabolic arc of the roof section and rear window, the emphasis on aerodynamics over surface decoration, and the emphasis on weight-saving.  The sliding side windows are an example of the latter, and were featured on the lightweight Sprints, while most GT coupes had winding windows. 

Albrecht Goertz's design for the BMW 507* roadster dates from 1956 through '59. Hatched from a desire by BMW to re-enter the two-seater market they'd last visited with the prewar 328, and New York dealer Max Hoffman's wish to have something slotted between the Porsche Speedster and the Mercedes 300SL in price, the 507 succeeded in looking like the perfect car for the jet set before there even was a jet set.  In the price department it failed to meet Hoffman's program, as it was almost $2,000 more than the 300SL Gullwing.  Just over 250 of the graceful V8 roadsters were built.

Where the graceful 507 failed commercially, the equally graceful Jaguar E-Type* introduced half a decade later succeeded wildly.  Much of this was about William Lyons' production team, including designer Malcolm Sayer, hitting the right price point.  The E-Type was about $4,000 less than the 507 at its US introduction in April 1961...

This is a Series One 4.2 liter car, introduced late in 1964 and built through 1967.

The Ferrari 330 GT 2+2 from the same era was once considered a bit too tame and civilized owing to its 4 seats and also the 4 headlights that appeared on early models...

All this has been forgiven by enthusiasts today, and collectors are chasing these V12 touring cars with the enthusiasm they once reserved for lightweight road racers. 

The BMW CSL"Batmobile" of the mid-70s re-established BMW's road racing profile in the European Touring Car race series.  In keeping with the theory and practice of race car design in the 1970s, the aerodynamic add-ons seem to take up more space than the bodywork.  They definitely take up more of the spectator's attention... 

The Batmobile interior makes for a striking contrast with the Ferrari 330GT, and shows just how elastic a term like "Touring Car" had become by the time this car was raced in a touring car series...

The Ferrari F40 below, introduced by Enzo's team to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Ferrari's founding in 1987, is unusual not only because it's a seldom-seen supercar, but because it's dark green...

No Cars & Coffee would be complete without a mystery car, and this one had a couple.  The first is what appears to be a 1931 Cadillac roadster.  But Cadillac made V8s, V12s and V16s in that year, and we're not sure whether this is a V8 or V12...

And here's another mystery, a 21st century supercar with De Tomaso insignia.  This is the P72 prototype introduced last summer.  It's supposed to recall Pete Brock's design for De Tomaso's P70* racer from the mid-Sixties. One of 72 examples planned, and powered by a supercharged Roush Mustang V8 with a claimed 700 hp.  At $800,000 a copy, interested parties will need more technical details, and maybe financial assistance...

*Footnote:  The Lime Rock Concours is surveyed in our post for Sept. 17, 2019, while the Cisitalia saga is detailed in "Fiats as Fine Art", from April 15, 2017. The story of the BMW 507 is recounted in "That Other Five Series," from Oct. 20, 2019.  Franco Scaglione's designs for Bertone and Alfa Romeo are analyzed in "The Arc of Success", our post for Dec. 20, 2017.  And the racing career of the Jaguar E-Type is reviewed in "Racing Improves the Breed", from Aug. 13, 2017.  Finally, Pete Brock's design for the original De Tomaso P70 is pictured in "Unsung Genius: Pete Brock, Car Designer", our post from Jan. 16, 2017.

Photo Credit:  All photos were taken and submitted by LT Jonathan D. Asbury, USN.  

That Other Five Series: How BMW's Baroque Angel Led to the 503 and 507

BMW resumed building motorcycles in 1948, but didn't get around to resuming car production until late in 1952, over 7 years after World War II.  Part of this was because the car factory at Eisenach was now in Soviet-controlled East Germany, where the new management would continue to build prewar designs labeled BMWs until 1951, when protests from BMW in Munich convinced them to change the name to EMW.  BMW management was unsure of what to offer the public, and considered building old designs under license from Ford or Simca, reissuing versions of the pre-war BMW 327, or tooling up for the tidy little 331 prototype shown below.

The 331 resembled a much scaled-down version of the prewar 327, and had the advantage of a 600cc engine based upon a BMW motorcycle unit. It would have given BMW an entry in the small car market, like the Isetta 300* and 600 that eventually saved the company. Instead, BMW decided to contend with Mercedes for a share of the much smaller market for luxury sedans. After looking at a design from their in-house staff, BMW commissioned a prototype of the new 501 from Pinin Farina...

…but soon decided that this car too much resembled PF's work on the recently introduced Alfa Romeo 1900.  So BMW returned to the design penned by Peter Schimanowski, which featured plump, swooping fenders and a glassy (for the era) cabin mounted on a new platform chassis with torsion bar suspension front and rear, independent at the front. Unusual engineering details included a 4-speed transmission mounted well back of the engine, adding foot room to the front cabin but giving a remote feel to the column shifter. Other intriguing details included a version of rack and pinion steering with a semicircular rather than linear rack.  The M337 engine, however, was a version of the 1971cc inline six familiar from prewar BMWs, and also the source design for the Bristol which had been in production since 1947 in England, based upon BMW's drawings.

The new 501 appeared late in 1952 and was soon nicknamed the Baroque Angel for its chubby, somehow friendly-looking contours. Owing to small production capacity and an austere postwar economy, it took until September 1953 to build a thousand 501s, and bodies for the first couple of thousand cars were built by Baur, which also built special versions like cabriolets.  Below is a 502...

That 502 designation signaled the arrival in spring 1954 of a new, aluminum-block overhead-valve V8.  Designed by Alfred Boning (father of the 331 prototype) and initially sized at 2.6 liters, it went into the existing sedan bodies as well as coupes like the Autenreith-bodied version shown below.

BMW also considered offering a sports car to appeal to the type of customer who had bought their 328 in the Thirties, and who had supported engineer Ernst Loof's BMW-engined Veritas* specials the late Forties.  Now Loof had returned to employment at BMW, and he sketched a two-seater based upon the new V8 engine in early 1954.  The car echoed some of Loof's Veritas details, such as the grille and headlights, but the details were not tied together by any strong visual theme.  When US distributer Max Hoffman* saw the car below, he recommended that BMW hire an ex-Loewy Associates industrial designer named Albrecht Goertz...  

Goertz worked quickly, and proposed two different cars based on the new V8; they appeared at the Frankfurt Auto Show in fall of 1955. These turned out to be the 503, a 2 +  2 in coupe and cabriolet form on the 111.6" wheelbase of the 502, and the 507, a two-seater on a 98" wheelbase. A 503 cabriolet, one of 139 built from 1956 through 1959, is shown below.

Goertz had given the car the low, lean proportions of contemporary Italian designs, yet reinforced the BMW identity by retaining the traditional vertical twin-kidney grille.  Under the hood of this understated car was a new 3.2 liter version of the V8, a feature shared like the torsion bar suspension with the 507. Another aspect of the design shared by few American cars save the '53 Loewy Studebaker coupes, was that wheels were positioned close to the car's flanks, which tucked inward towards the rocker panels. This, along with the full, radiused wheel arches, gave the wheels a leading role in the first impression.  

The design was even more wheel-focused on the 507 above, where flanges formed into the forward wheel arches extend back into the doors and aft of the rear wheels to the tapered tail. The silver car also shows how well the Goertz-designed removable hardtop harmonized with the lines. If the 503 impressed show audiences with its careful proportions and restraint, the 507 just flat-out stunned them. There was nothing anywhere in BMW's previous offerings remotely like it. At the prow the twin grilles had been flattened to front the low hood line; a subtle air intake was formed into the hood, while a chromed vent aft of the front wheels offered the only area of bright metal trim beyond the bumpers, door and trunk handles...

The interior trim was in keeping with the car's GT theme, with integrated arm rests and map bins predictive of later Detroit luxury cars, and a distinctive x-pattern steering wheel.  Few drivers actually sat behind that wheel, however, owing to the $9,000 price tag, which disappointed Max Hoffman by exceeding the price of the Mercedes 300SL coupes he also offered in his showrooms. Relying exclusively on hand labor to form the bodywork, BMW managed to sell only 413 of the 503 and around 255 of the lovely 507, including 3 chassis for custom coachwork* (who on earth needed that?) during 3+ years of production, which ended in 1960. The 507 was such a well-remembered design, though, that when decades later BMW decided to offer another V8 roadster in the form of the  Z8, its exterior echoed the 507.   

*Footnote: Ernst Loof's involvement with the postwar Veritas cars based originally on prewar BMWs is reviewed in "Veritas and BMW: Truth and Consequences", the post from October 6, 2019. Max Hoffman's contributions to the postwar sports car boom are reviewed in "Max Hoffman:  An Eye for Cars" from May 1, 2016.  Raymond Loewy"s design for his personal 507, which was at least interesting, was reviewd in "Lines of Influence Part 2: Avanti Antecedents", posted Feb. 18, 2016.  

Photo Credits:

Top:  wikimedia

2nd:  Pinin Farina

3rd:  Ludwig Wegmann on wikimedia

4th:  wikimedia

5th:  flickr.com

6th:  coches.com

7th thru 9th:  the author

10th thru 12th:  Lt. Jonathan Asbury, USN

Veritas and BMW: Truth and Consequences

In the wreckage of Germany in the years immediately after WWII, BMW alumni Ernst Loof, George Meier and Lorenz Dietrich cooked up a scheme to manufacture and sell racing cars. This does not look like a good business plan in retrospect; it must have seemed even crazier in 1947, when much of Europe was involved in a daily struggle just to put food on the table. If there was any kind of export market, it wasn't in most countries the Nazis had invaded, and German cars were not exactly making inroads into the US market either (VW finally sold two Beetles there in 1949). Then there was the problem of sourcing an engine; recovery from the comprehensive wartime bombings hadn't yet happened. So the partners came up with the idea of scavenging pre-war BMW 328s for their engines, rebuilding them, and fitting them into a new, lightweight tubular chassis sheathed in alloy bodywork. Amazingly, there were some takers, and Karl Kling won the German 2 liter championship in 1947 with the first car...

Kling's car, shown above, looked a lot like the 1941 Berlin-Rome 328 below, bodied by Carrozzeria Touring for a planned race between the two cities.  Plans for the race were shelved as Hitler's war plunged Europe into darkness.  The simple envelope body forms, tiny door openings and skirted rear wheels are similar on Veritas #1 to the Touring-bodied 328. At a casual glance the only big difference is the twin-kidney BMW grille on the Berlin-Rome car.

Soon enough Veritas was building touring-oriented versions of the cars, like the Saturn coupe and Scorpion cabriolet, still with the scavenged pre-war BMW engines.  Bodies on these cars were built by Spohn, which had built some of the Maybach Zeppelins from the Thirties...

Veritas customers had other success with the cars as the Forties wore on, but problems emerged for the Veritas company as the decade ended. First of all, the supply of rebuildable, used BMW engines dried up.  And BMW, which would only get back to producing the inline 6 for its 501 (along with the 502 V8) in autumn of 1952, over 7 years after war ended, decided it didn't want the Veritas firm to call its cars Veritas BMWs.  Perhaps BMW management viewed the Veritas as a glorified used car...

So Veritas adopted another inline six, this time a single overhead cam design engineered by Eric Zipprich.  Displacement was right under the two-liter limit at 1,998 cc, and the engines were produced in small numbers by Heinkel. Veritas manufacturing moved to a larger headquarters in 1949, but fragile finances prevented filling the dozens of advance orders for the new car.  

The new Veritas engine initially proved less reliable than the old BMW unit, and the financially-strapped company soon ran out of maneuvering room...

So Veritas went bankrupt at the end of 1950.  Dietrich launched the enterprise of making Dyna Veritas cars based upon the French Panhard twin-cylinder cars.  The German bodywork was more attractive than the original postwar Panhard bodies...

Meanwhile, Ernst Loof reorganized the sports car operation and moved it into some abandoned pits at the Nurburgring track.  Veritas then built its final cars, mostly with more de luxe coachwork than the early BMW specials. 

These cars were offered in short and long chassis form.  The coupe above is a K3, for short chassis (kurz) and 3-passenger configuration. There were also cabriolets like the car shown below. The full-width bodywork on these last coupes and cabrios avoids a slab-sided appearance by featuring a dip in the fender line ahead of the rear wheels.  It's a more restrained approach than the vents, portholes and surface trim that adorned some of the early 328-engined cars.

There was at least one futuristic competition spider built, appearing near the end of production at the Nurburgring facility, which closed after 1952.  The lines predict the shape of the later Borgward RS* racers.  

Though this car has survived, no photos of the engine have appeared, so it's not clear whether it now has the Heinkel-built engine or a BMW unit.

From 1951 to 1953, the year the of this competition spider, about 20 of the Nurburgring cars had been built including racers.  Of the earlier BMW-based cars, it has been estimated that over 5 dozen were produced.  After the supply of the Heinkel-built 2 liter six ran out, Ford and Opel engines were used to power a few cars.  Ernst Loof would later assist BMW with their new product program, including a 2-seater prototype that eventually became the 507. But that's a story for another day...

*Footnote:  The Borgward racers are described in the post for March 3, 2017, entitled "Forgotten Classic: When Borgward Went Racing."

Photo Credits:
Top: automobilefandom.com
2nd: sleepingbeauties.com.au
3rd &. 4th:  carcatalogue.com
5th thru 10th + 12th:  de.wikipedia.org
11th:  ritzsite.nl
13th thru 15th:  motorbase.com 

Alfa Romeo's Genius Bar: Jano, Anderloni, Figoni and Zagato

This 1933 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 Gran Sport coupe has a unique body from Joseph Figoni's shop in Paris. The car's form and proportions anticipate the teardrop coupe bodies Figoni and Falaschi would produce in the mid-to-late Thirties. Alfa Romeo liked it so much that it was displayed on their stand at the 1933 Paris Show.  The handling of the roof form, with circular lid covering the spare tire, predicts those Delahayes and Talbots.  The incised lines that start on the roof above the doors, frame the tiny backlight and converge below the license plate are a deft touch. 

The light-colored scallop running from the radiator down the flanks relates to the curve of the roof and also emphasizes the separate forms of the front fender shells.  Figoni was content to keep the traditional Alfa radiator shell; it fronts a 1,750 cc inline six with twin overhead cams designed by master engineer Vittorio Jano... 

The Alfa Gran Sport also relates to the form of a unique Bugatti T55* roadster that Figoni designed and built this same year.  It shares the contrasting color swage on the flanks, but here Figoni substitutes semicircular hood vents for the louvers on the Alfa.

While engineer Jano worked in-house at Alfa Romeo, the other members of the team of geniuses that defined Alfa Romeo were either independent body designers like Touring's Anderloni, or race drivers like Tazio Nuvolari. This was the era of upper crust car makers supplying their chassis to coachbuilders like Figoni, Touring and Zagato for bespoke bodywork. One stellar example of the latter is the Flying Star, designed and built by Carrozzeria Touring in 1931 on a 6C 1750 Gran Sport chassis. A comparison with Figoni's work on the same chassis type shows how designers used these chassis as mere takeoff points for wild flights of fancy.  On the blinding white Flying Star below, those flights include the overlapping wave-form fender-cum-running boards, the bright metal "check mark" trim that emphasizes the cut-down doors and conceals their hinges, and the elongated hood vents following that trim... 

Anderloni's Touring firm also produced bodies with more conventional fender lines.  The red car below is an 8C 2300, and features Jano's innovative inline eight formed of twin block units (each with its own integral head) with the central cam-drive gear tower between the blocks.  This avoided the crankshaft and camshaft flex common in inline eights.  Note that the car's flanks feature the bright metal trim with the pointed drop at the cutdown doors that also showed up on the more adventuresome Flying Star design. 

The 8C 2300 below was bodied in 1934 by Ugo Zagato's firm, which focused on lightweight racing car bodies.  Zagato-bodied 6C1750s won the Mille Miglia in 1929 and again in 1930, when they took the first four places, with Nuvolari in first and Achille Varzi in 2nd. Alfa followed it with the 8C 2300 in 1931, in long and short chassis versions. Prices matched the Bugatti T55 at around $10,000, but over 5 times as many were sold, making the 2300 a popular car compared with the T55, which was made in around 3 dozen copies. The Alfa, like the Bugatti, featured mechanical brakes and solid axles front and rear.  Despite the conservative chassis design, the 2300 was known as a stable, sweet-handling car.

With the  8C 2900 series, Jano's engineering team introduced a modern, GP-derived chassis to match the output of the twin-supercharged inline 8.  In the 8C 2900A, introduced in 1935 and built in 10 units, this 2.9 liter engine developed 220 hp. For the 2900B, shown below and offered in short and long chassis, the engine was detuned to 180 hp in order to improve reliability, and to suit smooth, comfortable touring and road use. The cars used trailing arm independent front suspension which Alfa had licensed from Andre Dubonnet, and swing axle independent rear suspension along with 4-speed transaxle. Driver-adjustable suspension dampers were also offered. The smooth contours of the long-chassis coupe below, bodied by Carrozzeria Touring, typifies the work of Anderloni's firm, which made most of the 8C 2900 bodies.  The tiny, center-mounted tail lights, which would appear barely adequate on a modern motorcycle, were also typical of Touring bodies.

The Jano-designed engine shows the trademark center gear tower enclosure which drove the twin overhead cams.  Roots-type superchargers were employed along with Weber carburetors to generate 180 hp at 5200 rpm.  Weight of the long-chassis car was just over 2,200 pounds.  For a modern comparison, that's a bit less than the original Mazda Miata.  

Even in long-chassis form, about a foot longer than the original 2900A, the 8C 2900B was a true dual purpose sports car, as happy competing in road races as it was comfortable as a weekend tourer.  The gray coupe below, a near-twin to the blue car above, was built in 1938 and competed in the 1947 Mille Miglia without its superchargers, which were ruled out that year. Despite competition from new designs by Maserati and the first Ferraris, and Nuvolari's epic drive to 2nd place in the super-light 1100cc Cisitalia, this nine-year-old car managed a victory in the hands of Clemente Biondetti and Emilio Romano...  

The inclined, shield-shaped grille with surrounding slots was typical of most Touring-bodied 2900Bs, as were the separate headlight housings.  

The Touring-bodied roadster version of this chassis revived the side trim pattern from their earlier roadsters.  The slotted pattern of the rear fender skirts, which appeared in less open form on the coupes, may have been intended for increased brake cooling, or just curb appeal.  The car still has plenty of that...

*Footnote:  The Bugatti Type 55 was featured in these posts on August 31, 2019. 

Top & 2nd: the author
3rd: classicauctionreview.co.uk
4th: wikimedia
5th: Paul Anderson
6th: wikimedia
7th & 8th: the author
9th: wikimedia
10th: the author
11th: Paul Anderson
Bottom: wikimedia