Lost Roadside Attraction: Chicago's Century of Progress, 1933

Their century was already old enough to have seen a world war, a pandemic and a worldwide depression, but young enough to foster hopes of a brighter future through democracy, industry and technology.  So, in the worst year of the worst depression in living memory, the people of Chicago put on a World's Fair called the Century of Progress. Celebrating the first 100 years of their metropolis, the Fair ran from May 27 to November 12, 1933 and May 26 to October 31, 1934.  The original plan had been to run the Fair for only a year, but its great popularity prompted the organizers to extend the run for another year. The NAACP and African American legislators won rules prohibiting racial discrimination at the Fair, in return for extending the run. The promise of the Fair was that despite the privations of the Great Depression, science and technology would build a bright future that was just around the corner...

The era of streamlined trains began with the Chicago Fair, including a record run from Denver to Chicago by the Burlington Zephyr and the exhibit of the Union Pacific's aerodynamic M-10000. The Travel and Transport Building shown beyond the trains was designed by Bennet, Burnham and Holabird, and featured the first catenary, cable-supported roof structure in the United States. Airborne visitors included a two-hour appearance over Lake Michigan by the Graf Zeppelin, and a trans-Atlantic airplane flight from Italy by Italo Balbo which stopped on the east coast and continued to the Century of Progress.

Inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller demonstrated his Dymaxion* car.  One of the few cars ever designed with a rear engine and front-wheel drive, it exhibited strange handling characteristics resulting from the extreme rearward weight bias, the driven front wheels and the single rear wheel, the only wheel that steered.  An accident on Lake Shore Drive prompted Fuller to require special instruction for anyone seeking to drive the Dymaxions.

Completed for the second year of the exhibit, architect George Fred Keck's Crystal House was perhaps the most visionary building at the Century of Progress.  Anticipating the exoskeletons of buildings like the Pompidou Center in Paris which appeared 4 decades later, the steel-structured, transparent cube posited a house made largely of prefabricated components.  In this night-time shot, a Dymaxion prototype slumbers in the translucent garage...

The year before, Keck had stunned the crowds with his House of Tomorrow, a largely transparent 12-sided polygon with two stories of living space atop a garage and utility level that offered power-operated garage doors.  The passive solar house featured the first General Electric dishwasher. 

Sitting in the drive of the House of Tomorrow in these two photos is the Pierce Silver Arrow, which must have seemed like a visitor from another time to fairgoers.  Designed by Phil Wright and built in record time for the New York Auto Show,  the V12-powered sedan explored themes that wouldn't show up on any American production cars until the second half of the next decade. These themes included front fenders flowing into the passenger cabin, allowing more seating width and eliminating running boards. Windshield and backlight are  "V"-shaped in plan, echoing the plan shape of the radiator, one of the few traditional references on this car.  The spare tire is concealed behind a panel in the front fender, while the headlights, which Pierce Arrow had integrated with fenders on its earlier cars, here are housed in a streamlined tube that runs all the way to the contrasting color molding that surrounds the windows.  Five of these SIlver Arrow concept cars would be built, and offered to the public at $10,000 apiece.

Henry Ford was initially opposed to building an exhibit when planning for the Century of Progress began in 1928.  He may have had other things on his mind, having launched the Model A the previous year.  Positive publicity attracted by General Motors plans to exhibit an automobile assembly line eventually caused him to grudgingly endorse an exhibit.  Architect Albert Kahn, creator of modern Detroit manufacturing plants, designed the giant Ford exhibit hall with its main rotunda echoing the theme of a gear wheel.  Two dozen 5000 watt projectors hurled pillars of light into the night sky.  Inside the rotunda, 67 vehicles summarized the history of wheeled vehicles, beginning with an Egyptian chariot.  Contrary to Henry's predictions, Ford's exhibit was the most popular of the two dozen companies represented at the Fair. Building exteriors were colorful, in contrast to the White City of the 1893 Chicago Fair, and led to the Century of Progress being called the Rainbow City.

John Tjaarda, designer of the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr and father of Tom Tjaarda*, designer of the Fiat 124 Spider and Ford Fiesta, produced a radical design for the Briggs Body Company's Dream Car. Featuring unitized body construction, a rear-mounted Ford V8, and an automatic transmission, the car paralleled the Czech Tatra*, a rear-engined V8 developed around the same time.  Ford applied early use of consumer surveys when it exhibited this car as a possible future Lincoln at the Fair, and concluded that American drivers wanted streamlining, but not rear engines, and not the steeply sloping nose of the Dream Car.  What they got in 1936 was Tjaarda's design for the Lincoln Zephyr, which kept the streamlining but moved the engine, now a V12, to the front.

General Motors took a more conservative approach with their Cadillac V16 coupe, which nevertheless predicted GM's design direction for the second half of the decade.  Fleetwood would build six more of these close-coupled coupes on the V16 chassis.

Nash Kelvinator, headquartered in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sent a fleet of its newest cars to outfit a display of a new idea for crowded cities, the elevator-equipped garage.  The glass-walled elevator tower could bring up new vehicles for display from subterranean storage...

Real estate development had begun to change the environment of what had been quiet wilderness in Florida during the boom of the Twenties, so the Florida House was one of the dozen modern prototype houses on display.  The design, by architect Robert Law Weed, featured generous glazing, flat roofs and broad terraces, and undoubtedly encouraged dreams of tropical escape by Chicagoans familiar with icy, snowbound winters...

Another kind of escapism was sponsored by the Indiana firm of Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg. The Duesenberg SJ Twenty Grand Torpedo Sedan was designed by Gordon Buehrig and built by Rollston specially for the fair.  It was named after its price, which would have bought nearly four dozen of the base model Ford V8s introduced the previous year.  Buehrig's design for the bid Duesy looks back to the Roaring Twenties with emphasis on separate elements like the sweeping, open fenders, external exhausts, side-mounted spare tires, and free-standing headlights.  These elements make a striking contrast with the Pierce Silver Arrow, where the front fenders flow directly into the doors, enclosing the headlights and hiding the side-mounted spares. Only the Twenty Grand's low-roofed cabin, with its sloping "V" windshield and notchback rear, seems to belong to the Thirties.  Buehrig would issue his answer, and A-C-D's, to the fair's concept cars with his groundbreaking design for the Cord 810*, which appeared in November 1935 and went into series production the next year.

Architect Walter Schuler designed the Wieboldt-Rostone House to showcase a new building material called Rostone, composed of limestone waste, shale and alkaline earth. The resulting precast panels were bolted to a steel frame.  The massing, sheer surfaces, and reliance on window shapes for decoration reflects Art Moderne influence*.  The exterior panels deteriorated by the 1950s, and the house was re-surfaced in another precast material.  A dozen buildings, including the Wieboldt-Rostone House, the House of Tomorrow and three others from the Homes of Tomorrow exhibit, were purchased by a developer  and moved to Beverly Shores in Indiana after the exhibit closed.  

This move wasn't possible for the house designed by Chicago architect Andrew Nicholas Rebori for the Brick Manufacturers Association. The forms Rebori created were compact, full of spatial intrigue, and more suited to an urban environment than the sprawling Florida house.  Rebori exploited the potential of brick in the articulated surface treatments at the base, the porthole window and around the cantilevered balconies, and used sharply delineated mass to cast sharp shadows, as at the stairway which passed under a square arch on its way to a rooftop terrace...

Packard's Model 1106 Sport Coupe was voted Best of Show among the new car designs.  It was one of two designs created on Packard's short-wheelbase V12-powered chassis by Le Baron. The open Runabout Speedster model, which shared the pontoon fenders connected by curved running boards (these were deleted on at least one), was actually built by Le Baron, while the teardrop-windowed coupe shown was built at the Packard factory in Detroit.  No more than four Sport Coupes were made, joining no more than half a dozen Speedsters.

By contrast, assembly-line production techniques were envisioned by architect Robert Smith Jr. of Cleveland for the Armco-Ferro house, the only surviving Homes of Tomorrow exhibit which actually met the criteria established by the Fair Committee, which were for a design which could be mass-produced and sold at a price affordable to families of modest means. Seen against the backdrop of our current housing shortage, the Armco-Ferro is intriguing. It was bolted together from enameled, insulated steel panels with corrugations to add stiffness, forming structure and enclosure at once. The Armco-Ferro might have provided a new product for idled automobile factories during the depths of the Great Depression, and thus put enough people to work that they could afford to buy one.  Instead, it inspired the Lustron homes for a short period during the housing shortage after World War II.  These houses, along with a series of gas stations built by Sunoco, also featured enameled steel panels...

In addition to all the serious efforts to advance innovation in design and engineering at the Century of Progress, there was also plenty of show business.  Studebaker's team traveled from South Bend, Indiana to assemble this giant model of the 1934 Studebaker* Land Cruiser for the fair, despite the fact that the company had gone bankrupt a mere two months before it opened. Concealed in the base of the Land Cruiser display was an 80-seat auditorium. The company was reorganized by a new management team, which discontinued the entry-level Rockne line and sold Pierce-Arrow, which had merged with Studebaker in 1928.  While this move erased Studebaker's bragging rights to the Pierce Silver Arrow at the House of Tomorrow, it allowed the company to move into the late Thirties with new designs by Raymond Loewy. By the end of the that decade, war dashed the hope of universal progress through democracy and technology expressed at the Century of Progress, and the ingenuity and resourcefulness that built the fair (and the New York World's Fair* in 1939-40) was called upon to build thousands of tanks, planes and ships instead of affordable cars and  houses.  Studebaker, Packard, GM and Ford would all suspend car production for more urgent business of the war that, instead of the brighter world promised by the Fair, was around the corner and just down the road from the Rainbow City...

*Footnote:  Fuller's Dymaxion is detailed in these posts in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 1" from 5-7-17. We presented a survey of prefabricated house designs exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art in our post entitled "Mobile vs. Prefab" on 8/3/17.  Tom Tjaarda's designs were given a retrospective in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 4" on 5/11/20. Tatra automobiles have been featured once in "A Word About VW" (11/27/15) and pictured on two other occasions: "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile" (7/30/17) and "Roadside Attraction: Rolling Sculpture" (12/31/16).  A Cadillac V16 bodied by Pinin Farina is featured with later Caddies in "Jets vs. Sharks: Pinin Farina Cadillacs" in the Archives for 5/15/16.  The Cord 810, Studebakers and other cars built in Indiana are surveyed in "Looking Back: When Indy Was Indie" from 9/1/15.  And we featured the Phantom Corsair, a car based on that Cord 's drivetrain and exhibited at the New York World's Fair in 1939, in "Phantom Corsair: Shadows Over Tomorrowland", posted July 17, 2016.

*Postscript:  One reader e-mailed to say the Wieboldt-Rostone House looked like a mausoleum, and this made a connection with a subconscious impression that I hadn't been able to name.  The style of the house, with its sparse decoration, geometric windows, and absence of humor, could easily have served as a template for many of the mausoleums that were built in the Chicago suburbs after World War II.  

Photo Credits

Top:  architecture.org

2nd:  Encyclopedia of Chicago

3rd & 4th:   Hedrich Blessing Collection, from Chicago History Museum

5th:  pinterest.com

6th:  chicagology.com

7th:  motorcities.org

8th:  General Motors

9th:  Kaufmann-Fabry Agency, from Chicago History Museum

10th:  Nash Kelvinator, from theoldmotor.com

11th:  archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com

12th:  customcarchronicle.com

13th:  visitindiana.com

14th:  Packard Motor Company, from theoldmotor.com

15th:  indianalandmarks.org

Bottom:  motorcities.org

Talbot-Lago: Darracq by Another Name

We begin our story with a few Talbot logos from Talbot Lagos.  Their story goes back to the dawn of the automobile, and involves founder Alexandre Darracq, Clément Talbot, an early attempt at a transnational combine involving the British Sunbeam firm, and cars variously named Darracqs, Talbots and Talbot-Lagos.  Like a lot of stories about how to make (and especially, lose) a fortune in the car business, it's a complicated one.  Alexandre Darracq began with bicycles in 1896 and built a car in 1900; the early cars were successful enough that Darracq was able to sell shares to an English consortium, maintaining control himself until the failure of a rotary-valve engine design in 1911*. The English company, which also built vehicles under the Clément Talbot name, dropped the Darracq name from its cars in 1922.  A merger with Sunbeam led to Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq, and the French cars were called Darracq in England to avoid confusion with the English Talbots. This all came to a crashing halt in 1934, with the Depression-hastened collapse of S-T-D. An Italian-born engineer employed by S-T-D, Antonio Lago, managed to buy the French part of the operation, including its factory in Suresnes, near Paris, in 1935...

One reason S-T-D expired was its failure to share components; there was needless duplication and waste.  But Lago liked the French division's six-cylinder engine, and went to work on it, combining it with the Wilson pre-selector transmission, which allowed remarkably quick shifts, and began to think of going racing. Within a year the Talbot engine, which American driver Phil Hill later likened to "a Plymouth with Ardun heads" began to score some victories in road racing, and the chassis attracted the attention of designer Joseph Figoni.  The bodies crafted by Figoni et Falaschi soon began to establish the Talbot Lago as a modern performance car, the appropriate equipment for a session on a road course or on the lawn at a concours d'elegance...

By 1937 Figoni had launched a series of spectacular teardrop coupés with kidney-shaped windows and sine-wave fenders with ellipsoid leading edges; straight lines seemed to have been banished for good.  So was any concern for budgets, with prices starting around $10,000. The couple dozen coupés and cabriolets built in this style would have an influence far beyond their numbers, especially on cars to be built after the war that was fast approaching.  Before war came, Talbot Lago took 2nd at Le Mans in 1938. 

The Nazi invasion of France in 1940 interrupted this expensive extravaganza, but Antonio Lago came back after the war with an engine he'd had his engineers scheme during the Occupation. The prewar six was expanded from 4 liters to 4.5, with hemispherical combustion chambers and valves operated by twin, laterally placed camshafts. The engine received aluminum heads and lightweight pistons in Lago's single seat GP cars, and in the Grand Sport versions offered for the road. Jacques Saoutchik* bodied several Grand Sports with lush, sweeping curves emphasized by contrasting colors and artful application of trim. He offered other styles as well, including notchback coupes, a coupe de ville, and a cabriolet. The coupe below is from 1948. Prices were astronomical, with one cabriolet selling in the US for $17,000.

Henri Chapron*, whose work appeared more frequently on Delahaye and Delage chassis, bodied the Grand Sport coupe shown below in the same year.  The car shares its roofline, fender shapes and proportions with two Delahaye 145 racers Chapron rebodied as coupes during this period. These Talbots still used the Wilson pre-selector gearbox offered in the prewar cars.

Coachbuilder Hermann Graber*, also the Talbot Lago dealer for Switzerland, bodied several of the cars between 1947 and 1953. Swiss laws waived import taxes on chassis to be bodied by Swiss coachbuilders, and this kept specialists like Graber and Worblaufen going well into the postwar era. Graber also applied the rounded envelope style of the cabriolet below to contemporary Bentley chassis.

The Graber coupe design, with its fenders flowing into the flanks, resembles Touring Superleggera bodies on the Alfa Romeo 6C2500 chassis from the 1940s.  Graber was still offering this style in 1950 and '51.

In 1951, Dutch coachbuilder Pennock got into the act with a one-off car for an affluent amateur. One of the rare short chassis Grand Sports built (the GS total is estimated between 30 and 39), it reflects a focus on function as a rally car, rather than as a show car on the concours circuit. Compared with efforts by Figoni and Saoutchik, there is less emphasis on any formal theme, and some elements, like the concave rectangular grille, seem at odds with the prevailing convex curves...   

At the rear, abrupt tail fins frame the gently rounded backlight with its neatly hinged, opening center section, and an ovoid deck lid.  Note that on the deck the car is identified as a Lago Grand Sport; there's no mention of Talbot...

In the same year, Stabilimenti Farina (founded by Giovanni, Battista "Pinin" Farina's older brother) showed a more modern interpretation of the Grand Sport chassis with this cabriolet. It was also a one-off, but except for G. Farina's attempt to create a modern Talbot identity with that horizontal grille, it very much resembled his Ferrari 166 convertible from 1950.

In 1952, Rocco Motto's* carrozzeria produced another Italian version of the Grand Sport. Like the Pennock coupe, the focus is on function, but because the function here is road racing, the forms and details are pared down to an expressive, lightweight alloy shell.  The overall effect is more harmonious than the Pennock coupe, and the car echoes Motto's work on smaller chassis like Siata and Salmson, as well as his Ferrari 212 Export.

Hermann Graber updated his designs for Talbot a couple of times before arriving at this handsome solution in 1953.  The wide, low proportions and gently rounded contours are accented by restrained trim, as at the forward-leaning chrome that delineates the leading edge of the rear fender.  The hood completes its forward arc well below the arc of the fenders, emphasizing the low stance.  This car would influence Graber's later designs for Alvis*, which would provide work for his specialist firm until the late 1960s.

When Lago decided to offer "factory" coachwork on the Grand Sport, he commissioned a design from Carlo Delaisse. The resulting Grand Sport Longue (GSL) appeared in 1953, and like the Graber design above, employed a flattened version of the traditional Talbot grille to reflect the horizontal modernity of the design.  While the chassis design was beginning to show its age, the 4.5 liter engine was uprated to 210 hp.  Note that these cars, like most French luxury cars, had right-hand drive.

Undecorated flanks support the gentle arc of the roof; glazing is more generous than on earlier Grand Sports by Chapron, Graber or Saoutchik. The reverse slant "C" pillar points to the meeting of the front fender's arc with that of the rear one.  

Some of the GSLs had air extractor vents behind the front wheels, and there were detail differences between these cars owing to their hand-built construction.  The GSL was a large car with a 104.3 inch wheelbase.  By the time it appeared, it was no longer the most powerful production car. Jaguar was offering the same power from the high performance version of its XK120 at less than half the price; Ferrari was offering more power, allied with lower weight, in the Talbot's price range. So the GSL wound up being not quite a production car, with between 19 and 21 examples built between 1953 and '55.  It was pretty, though...

So when Tony Lago decided to introduce a smaller car at a more affordable price, he was able to scale down the GSL design on a wheelbase half a foot shorter, with a tighter roof profile and a lower hood.  A new version of the Talbot four was designed with five main bearings and sized just under 2.5 liters. The heavy Wilson pre-selector gearbox gave way to an all-synchromesh Pont-a-Mousson 4 speed. Produced in various levels of trim and reflecting Lago's tentative approach to naming things, the car was called the 2500 Sport, the Rapide, and the T14 LS. With tubular steel chassis and aluminum body, weight was quoted around 700 pounds less than the GSL. After the first show cars, body construction switched to steel. But the new engine proved rough and unreliable, and only 54 cars were sold from 1955-'57.

Desperate for sales and unable to afford design and tooling costs for yet another new engine, Lago explored obtaining engines from Maserati and then BMW, and settled on a version of the BMW V8* reduced to just below 2.5 liters to avoid steep French sales tax above that limit.  He finally had the idea of seriously marketing his cars in the United States, and called the revised 2500 Sport the America upon its 1957 introduction. As a result the Lago America was the first Talbot Lago to feature left-hand drive, abandoning the conceit among French luxury car makers that right-hand drive embodied more class.  Most cars shipped to the US had roll-down side windows rather than the sliding ones shown below. The use of the special 2.5 liter version of the V8 may have suited the French market, but the 3.2 liter version would have better suited the American one, especially at the $7,400 price quoted by Otto Zipper's LA dealership...

There were also a couple of "high-roof" versions, and the glassier greenhouse not only provides more room in the cabin, it makes the car look even more modern, especially with the revised door window frames, which finally fit the arc of the roof. Time was running out though, and by 1959 Tony Lago's final fling with the idea of a production car would sell only a dozen units.  Other than a handful of cars built with Simca V8s (née flathead French Ford) to use up parts after the Simca takeover that year, the Lago America was the last Talbot Lago offered to customers.

But that's not quite the end of the story.  Tony Lago commissioned two road-racing barquettes powered by Maserati 250F engines to contest the 1956 Le Mans, which limited prototypes to 2.5 liters in order to slow down the field after the catastrophic crash that marked the 1955 race. The cars were conventional in chassis design, with the frame dominated by 2 large diameter steel tubes, independent coil front suspension, and a rigid rear axle on leaf springs.  The car shown, piloted by veteran Louis Rosier (left) and Jean Behra (right), went 220 laps before transmission trouble ended their run; the winning Jagaur D-type went 300 laps.  The other Talbot crashed. The alloy bodywork, by Pichon Parat, is marked by a mix of Italian style and French pragmatism, with tight overhangs and a short tail...

One of these two Lago Maseratis was re-bodied by Modenese coachbuilder Campana  to a design by Franco Reggiani echoing his Stanguellini* racers for the 1957 Le Mans, and sponsored by Andre Dubonnet.  While the car stalled on the starting line owing to clutch trouble, it survives to this day as an example of the kind of car that might have saved Lago's car company if offered with the right engine at the right price.  The Jaguar XK-SS lurking in the background is a reminder that 4 years later, Jaguar did that with its E-Type.  Ultimately Talbot Lago's demise resulted from relying on artisan techniques to compete with the assembly line adopted by Jaguar, Mercedes and Alfa Romeo, as well as an insularity that prompted Lago to ignore the American market until it was too late.  Simca bought Talbot Lago in 1959, and Antonio Lago died at the end of 1960. The Peugeot Citroen combine, PSA, bought Simca from Chrysler in 1978 and rebadged some Simca sedans as Talbots, but this effort ended in 1984. Tony Lago probably would not have recognized any of those boxy sedans as Talbots. 

*Footnote:

Alfa Romeo has its roots in a company founded in 1910 to produce Darracq vehicles under license in Italy; Nicolo Romeo would take ownership in 1915. Talbot Lagos with special bodies were presented in our posts "The French Line Part 1" (bodies by Marcel Pourtout, 1-17-20) and "The French Line Part 4" (bodies by Jacques Saoutchik, 3-8-20). Designs by Henri Chapron for Lago rivals Delahaye and Delage were reviewed in  "The French Line Part 3" (2-12-20). We'll focus on Figoni & Falaschi in an upcoming post. Carrozzeria Motto's work is surveyed in "Unsung Genius: Rocco Motto, the Closer" (3-25-18). The Talbot Lago America, along with other cars named America, previously appeared in our post entitled "The Other America: Talbot Lago 2500" on 7-3-16. Talbot's main domestic rival, Delahaye, was profiled in "Golden Days of Delahayes" from 6-30-18.  Finally , you can compare the last Talbot Maserati racing car with a similar design for Stanguellini in "The Etceterini Files Part 5" in these posts from March 21, 2016.

Photo Credits: 

Top left:  pinterest.com          Top right:  wikimedia                        

2nd:  George Havelka 

3nd thru 5th:   the author

6th:  madle.org

7th:  Linda La Fond

8th:  en.wheelsage.org

9th:  motorbase.com

10th & 11th:  Lt. Jonathan Asbury, USN

12th:  wikimedia

13th:  en.wheelsage.org

14th:  alvisarchives.com

15th thru 17th:  Linda La Fond

17th thru 19th:  wikimedia

20th:  classiccarcatalogue.com

Bottom:  Linda La Fond

Rescued from Obscurity: Aston Martin in the Fifties and Sixties

It is easy to forget that the Aston Martin, while always a specialized car aimed at sporting drivers, has not always been a big, powerful car, or a famous one.  Founded the year before World War I by Singer dealers Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford, the new firm built specials raced at namesake Aston Hill.  The first car was a based on an Isotta Fraschini chassis with a 1.4 liter Coventry Simplex engine.  Other examples used Singer* engines, and Count Louis Zborowski (of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fame) commissioned Aston Martin to build specials for him (including one with a twin cam engine) before fatally crashing his Mercedes at Monza in 1924.  The sudden loss of a wealthy patron pitched the firm into bankruptcy, and it was up to  Italian-born A.C. Bertelli and Bill Renwick  to rescue the firm. A.C. Bertelli assisted by designing a new 1.5 liter inline four with single overhead cam driven by a chain. Features included pump-driven cooling of the head only; the block had to settle for thermo-siphon cooling.  The engineers tried dry sump lubrication on the '28 Le Mans cars, and made this a standard feature of the low-chassis 1930 International model. 

Depression conditions meant that a second group of rescuers appeared in 1932, but Bertelli stayed on.  By the 1934 this team had produced the Ulster shown above and below, based on the 1.5 liter engine and their Mark II chassis.  It made 85 horsepower, a lot for 90 cubic inches during that era, and light weight allowed sparkling performance.  It's the most coveted Aston from the Thirties, a status enhanced by elemental good proportions and a shapely boat tail.

The Mark II  sports saloon model shown below, made in 1.5 and 2 liter forms, was produced during the same years as the Ulster, 1934-'36.  Other makes offered some enclosed sports cars during these years, but few reflected such an obviously split personality in their visual design. Above the belt line, the car is a sober two door sedan.  Below the belt line, the cycle fenders and external exhaust scream "weekend racer"... a bit like somebody a wearing sport jacket and tie over jogging shorts. After 1936 Bertelli left, and new management under Gordon Sutherland concentrated on touring cars, including a streamlined prototype saloon called the Atom designed by Claude Hill.  That was in 1939; then war interrupted testing.

In 1947, machine tool maker David Brown saw an ad in the Times with a car company for sale, went for a drive in the prototype Atom, and bought Aston Martin.  He asked for a sports convertible to be designed for the Atom chassis, but felt the Hill-designed pushrod inline 4 was too tame for the resulting 2 Litre Sports shown below.  

Brown was right. To survive at all at its heady price altitude, Aston Martin needed a performance engine.  Luckily, Brown was able to buy Lagonda Motors later that same year, and gain the rights to its new twin overhead cam inline six, which had been designed by W.O. Bentley.  As the decade ended, he had Frank Feeley design an aerodynamic coupe body around the 2.6 liter engine, placed it on a modified version of the 2 Litre Sports chassis and called the result the DB2. These cars performed well enough that in July 1949 a pre-production prototype finished 3rd in the Spa 24 hour race in Belgium.  By 1950 Aston Martin Lagonda had a competitor to the Jaguar Xk120, also introduced in 1949, and it was in production. The first 49 cars built had the 3-part grille shown below, along with the large air extractor vents on the one-piece forward-tilting hood, formed out of aluminum sheets like the rest of the body.   After releasing the DB2, Aston Martin Lagonda renamed the 2 Litre Sports the DB1.

In 1953 Aston introduced the DB2 / 4, which included a redesigned cabin with rear seats for children. The rear of the re-profiled fastback now featured a large, side-opening hatch with larger rear window.  In 1955 the Mark II version appeared with squared-off rear fenders. Up front, the one-piece hood now opened along the shut line delineated by a chrome strip, and the sides of the fenders stayed put.  A 165 hp version of the engine with larger valves was optional, but Jaguar was already offering 210 hp in the MC version of its XK140.

By 1956 AML had added a new notchback coupe with conventional trunk lid called the fixed head coupe, but only 34 of the 199 Mark II models were this style.  Note that in this period, Aston was selling in the hundreds, while Jaguar was selling in the thousands.  The reason was that Jaguars outperformed Astons on road and track; they'd won Le Mans twice by 1953. That carried more weight than tradition, especially in the critical US market. In England, some considered Jaguars a car for show-offs and cads; gangsters drove them and by the late Fifties, the police drove them too.  For class-conscious customers in England, the latter might have been the last straw.  Some people bought Astons because they had too much money to afford a Jaguar, socially anyway...

Perhaps because Astons denoted class to Alfred Hitchcock, he gave a Mark II drophead coupe to Tippi Hedren drive in his 1962 suspense feature, The Birds*.  By the end of the tale, this car was in far better shape than many of the hapless residents of Bodega Bay, California, where much of the movie was filmed...

In 1957 Brown and his engineers introduced the Mark III version of the DB2 / 4.  The inverted "T" of the grille was smoothed into the shape we know today, the twin-cam engine shared with the Lagonda sedan was punched out to 3 liters,  and most of the cars had front disc brakes, something that showed up that year at all four wheels on Jaguars.  At the rear, vertical Humber tail lights completed a handsome restyle.  At nearly twice the price of a Jaguar in the US, however, the DB was still at a disadvantage.  Road & Track tested one the next year and praised it, but called the price "astronomical."

While all this was going on, Aston Martin was trying to catch Jaguar on the race track as well. Jaguar had, by the end of the new DB's first year, won Le Mans five times, including a hat trick from '55 to '57.  AML's first purpose-built road racer was '51 DB3; it looked like a lowered DB2 hot rod, which in fact it was.  David Brown's team replaced it in '53 with the lighter, more  graceful DB3S on a short 87 inch wheelbase and a 3 liter version of the Lagonda six and De Dion rear suspension.  31 cars were built, including 20 customer cars. The "works" cars raced by AML featured versions of this engine with an aluminum  block and twin spark plugs per cylinder. The cars were known for their svelte looks and sweet handling, but lacked the torque and horsepower to cope with the Jaguars and Ferraris at Le Mans.  

Something had to be done about that, and after an unsuccessful Le Mans run with a Lagonda powered with a new 4-cam V12 based around the six (it looked like a bigger DB3-S) David Brown ordered up a new design.  The aluminum block engine was further refined, and designer Ted Cutting came up with a tubular chassis with 4 wheel disc brakes and a 5-speed transaxle for better weight distribution...luckily, David Brown was also a gearbox manufacturer.  In 3 liter form the engine was good for 300 hp, and a more aerodynamic body was prepared, even lower and sleeker than the DB3-S in the background below.

John Wyer's team management skills, along with the driving skills of a Texan ex-chicken farmer named Carroll Shelby and co-driver Roy Salvadori, won Le Mans finally in 1959 with the DBR1.  Aston Martin also won the Manufacturer's Championship that year after winning at Nurburgring and the Tourist Trophy.  Aston Martin was rescued yet again...

Luckily for David Brown, AML already had a new GT car to exploit the long-awaited competition success by generating showroom traffic.  It was the DB4, with alloy fastback body styled by Superleggera Touring in Italy, and a brand new 3.7 liter twin-cam six under the hood.  Disc brakes were featured, and zero to 100 to zero was advertised as taking 20 seconds.

There was also a DB4-GT version with a shorter wheelbase (93 inches to the saloon's 98) and twin plugs per cylinder.  AML built 75 of these cars.

There were also 25 even lighter, more aerodynamic DB4-GTs bodied by Zagato in Italy. Some, like the car shown below with its sliding side windows, were aimed at road racing...

..while others like this red car were outfitted for the road, with roll-up windows, radios and heaters.  Bumpers were not a common feature.

There were other detail differences between these Zagato DBs.  The car shwon above lacks the covered headlights of the others, because Italian law banned these for a brief time, forcing other makes like Lancia and Ferrari to adapt as well. Other Italian coachbuilders besides Touring and Zagato took an interest in the latest Aston chassis; in 1961 Bertone released the Jet* with DB4GT drivetrain, long after a small run of Bertone-bodied DB2s*. Designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, this silver car is the only DB4 with a steel body, and shared several design themes with Bertone's Ferrari 250GT SWB Speciale* from a year later...

AML pulled out of racing after that '59 championship, but dealers persuaded David Brown to allow his engineers one last endurance racing project, the DP212 below, based on a 4 liter version of the DB4GT...but lowered, lightened and streamlined. Graham Hill and Richie Ginther ran strongly at the 1962 Le Mans for 6 hours.  Aston dealers would see their showroom traffic increase anyway, however, when a secret agent would drive the company to its greatest fame in Goldfinger, released in 1964.  Bond's DB5 was only lightly revised from the DB4, but no matter.  It would soon be the most popular Aston Martin yet built.

David Brown decided to hold off on the total redesign of the line like the Jet or the 212, and instead went with a tasteful remodel of the DB5 into the DB6, which allowed more room for rear seat passengers under the re-contoured fastback roofline with 3.7 inches more wheelbase , and a lower version of the Kamm tail with spoiler shown on the Project 212...

The car stayed in production from September 1965 through the end of 1970, overlapping with the DBS that appeared in 1967.  The car shown here is a Mark II version, introduced in late 1969 with subtly-flared wheel arches to fit wider tires;  the Mark II was also available with optional fuel injection.  This was a planned feature of the Tadek Marek-designed V8 which was being readied for the first truly new Aston since the DB4...

In 1966 Touring of Milan built two prototypes of a new model engineered  by AML's Dudley Gershon.  He shortened the wheelbase, moved the engine back in the chassis for better handling, and sized the engine bay to take the new 4-cam, 5.3 liter V8 then being readied. The car was clearly aimed at customers checking out that generation's Ferraris, rather than the more conservative clientele who thought of Astons as easy-to-park Bentleys. David Brown, still in charge at Newport Pagnell, decided to cancel DBS project and produce a bigger, more conservative namesake styled by William Towns. The new car was not a lightweight at 3,500 pounds, and when it appeared in 1967 the V8 was still 3 years in the future.  This decision had consequences, but that's a story for another day...

*Footnote: The following cars were featured in previous posts in this series.  Dates are in parentheses:  Singer Le Mans (3/28/18), Bertone-bodied Aston DB2s (10-15-16) and both Aston Martin DB4GT Bertone and Ferrari 250 SWB Speciale (12-26-18).  And a couple of scenes from "The Birds" showed up in our essay on American gas stations as roadside attractions (11-9-19).

Photo Credits

Top & 2nd:  wikimedia

3rd:  bonhams.com  

4th:  autovehicle.info

5th & 6th:   wikimedia

7th:  bonhams.com

8th:  imcdb.org

9th thru 11th:  wikimedia

12th thru14th:  Linda La Fond

15th:  Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd.

16th & 17th:  the author

18th, 19th & 22nd:  Linda La Fond

20th & 21st:  the author

23nd & 24th:  uk.news.yahoo.com

Bottom:  Touring Superleggera