Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 1: The Connaught V10 Type D Saga

We've seen so many examples of the "revive a classic marque" program since the 1990s that it seems there must be a script somewhere.  An investor or investors with some money (usually not enough) buys the rights to the name of an expired make, sometimes famous (Bugatti) but usually more obscure (OSCA) or utterly forgotten (A.T.S.*).  Then there's a  press release about the revival of past glories, and after awhile a prototype or concept car appears to wow crowds at the shows. Sometimes the prototype remains a lonesome one-off (the lovely OSCA Dromos*), and sometimes manufacture of a new car really begins, but the operation goes bust (the first Bugatti revival, in the 90s).  Fasten your seatbelts for yet another episode showing how car building greases the tracks on the way to bankruptcy...

The 2004 Connaught revival might have ended differently if the revivalists had paid more attention to Connaught's history.  Yes, the company founded by Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver in the late 40s went bankrupt in 1957, but one reason it had lasted nearly a decade was that Clarke and Oliver had mastered the art of using off-the-shelf components (engines, transmissions) while advancing techniques of aerodynamics (as in this '55 B3 Streamliner GP car) and introducing innovations like disc brakes to GP racing.

That "off-the-shelf" aspect is kind of important if you're operating out of a minor league garage and don't have a bundle to spend on machine tools.  Even the Connaught GP* racer made do with an off-the-shelf Alta twin-cam racing engine, which (along with the talent of novice driver Tony Brooks and those disc brakes) allowed the Type B to be the first British car to win a GP in decades, breaking the jinx* in 1955.  An open-wheeled  Type B like that Syracuse GP car is shown below...

Connaught sports cars like the 1954 AL SR below used the Lea Francis production car engine, which was available off the shelf until the company stopped production in 1954.  Note that even the sports cars had tight, economical and disciplined shapes, with no unnecessary details.  Really do keep that picture in mind, because in the early 21st century when a new team of Connaught revivalists bought the name, great things were expected  as they announced plans for a new hybrid car that would cater to the high performance market while offering low fuel consumption and emissions.  For context, the Toyota Prius Series 2 had appeared a year before, in 2003, after a 6-year run of the first model.  Hybrids were in the news.  There was a bit of puzzlement when Connaught Engineering announced it would feature a 2 liter narrow angle V10 engine, but still, there was hope of something lightweight, visually simple and maybe a little bit Lotusey...

The prototype of the Connaught Type D V10 hybrid that appeared in 2004 is shown below. "Wait a minute," you're probably thinking, "didn't you get the wrong photo here?  That looks like a customized Toyota Celica from an old SEMA show. You know, the one where they were trying to make it look like a late-60s Camaro."  Nope, this is it.  And so far as we know, the hybrid V10 powertrain was never worked out,  though the V10 engine was run on a test stand, and no press test drives of the hybrid or of a promised but apparently unbuilt supercharged non-hybrid GT were ever recorded. From a mechanical design standpoint, it may have been a costly mistake to design a new V10 to take on the prosaic role of being the internal combustion partner in a gas / electric duo. Even in the much more expensive (sticker price, not tooling cost) Fisker Karma that surfaced (briefly) 7 years later, that role was played by an off-the-shelf GM inline four.  

In visual design terms, the Connaught team got into trouble right away, with the car's blunt nose and chunky overall form, a form interrupted by annoying details like the tiny vents behind the angry-looking headlights and the contrasting color of the lower body cladding, where the discontinuity in the shape only serves to emphasize something most designers would try to hide: the door shut line. Details are not used to reinforce the overall form, and so the form has little continuity within itself, and none at all with the simple, curvaceous, aerodynamic forms of Connaught's Fifties racers. Remember, these guys were trying to revive a car brand here...

Is there a lesson in this tale of woe?  Well, one lesson might be that engineers sketching out concepts for a new car should be expected to know something about tooling and manufacturing costs. Another might be that it's a good idea to get industrial designers, rather than those same engineers, to design the body...

*Footnote:

The story of how the Connaught came to be, and of how it became the first British car to win a Grand Prix race after World War II, is told in "Celtic Rainmaker: Connaught Ended  the Longest Drought in Grand Prix Racing", in our archives for July 24, 2016. The Subaru-powered OSCA Dromos is detailed in "The Etceterini Files Part 16—OSCA Dromos and Jiotto Caspita: Subaru's Distant Cousins", posted October 28, 2018, while the A.T.S. revival is reviewed in "Forgotten Classic Revival Show: ATS 2500GT and GTS", from Nov. 11, 2018.

Photo credits:
Top & 2nd:  Auto Classics on youtube.com

3rd & 5th:  wikimedia
4th:  planetcarsz.com
Bottom:  Connaught Engineering

The Etceterini Files Part 25: OSI-Ford 20M TS, The Anti-Fiat from a Fiat Ally

This OSI-Ford 20M TS is a hard car to categorize.  It's not a Ford Motor Company offering, as the name hints.  Note that "OSI" precedes "Ford", indicating that something else was going on here. In 1965, when Ghia's Sergio Sartorelli produced the design for Officine Stampaggi Industriali, the Ghia offshoot had been producing bodies for the Ghia-designed (and labeled) Fiat 2300S coupe for 4 years.  But OSI, founded in order to provide stampings for series production cars that Ghia's small facilities couldn't handle, must have been looking for new contracts.  The Italian coachbuilding scene was a very competitive one, and perhaps Ghia, and thus OSI, were aware they'd not be getting the contract for the Fiat 2300S replacement that would appear in 1966. Indeed, the Fiat Dino coupe contract went to Bertone, while Pininfarina got to design and build the spiders.

So perhaps knowing that orders for the 2300S coupe would soon end, OSI built a prototype coupe using the German Ford Taunus 20M 2 liter, 60 degree V6.  An interesting choice, as the upcoming Fiat Dino was also a 2 liter V6, but a more powerful, complex design.  When the OSI-Ford 20M TS went into production for 1967, it was in direct competition with the Fiat 2300S coupe, which OSI was still producing.  Soon enough, the more powerful, 125 hp 2.3 liter Ford V6 was offered, which must have made Fiat management unhappy.  The fastback lines of the new car were clean enough, with functional air extractor vents taking the place of decorative chrome.  The front fender vents on the prototype shown here were deleted on most of the production cars.

Size and weight were similar to the Fiat coupe shown below, with the wheelbase 2 inches longer at 106.4 inches. The OSI-Ford's design cannot, however, be rated as any kind of brave  leap into the future.  If anything, the front of the Ford was less distinctive than that of the Fiat...

…while comparing the rear views of the Fiat above with the OSI-Ford below reveals that the glassy greenhouse of the Fiat sits more happily on the lower body.  Note that on the Fiat, the rear window meets the deck where the roof slope ends, providing good visibility to the rear as well as visual clarity (the designy kind). On the Ford the backlight ends too high for good rear vision, and the roof slope takes another window's-worth of space to reach the short, visually-indecisive horizontal surface of the deck.  And as the side profile (3rd from top) reveals, the blunt front end and the roof proportions place visual weight over the front wheels rather than the rears, odd for a rear-drive, fastback design.

The grille enclosing the quad headlights is tidy, but looks like lots of other cars from the period. Still, the car was reasonably popular during its two-year production run, with at least 870 of the 2.0 liter model produced, and 409 of the 2.3 liter.  Some sources claim that as many as 2,200 of the OSI-Ford were built, but the marque club's figure of around 200 survivors casts some doubt on the higher total. OSI produced at least one convertible prototype, and the top, when erected, seemed to have a happier relationship with the lower body.  Sadly, the OSI facility closed after 1968, when production of the Fiat 2300S and its upstart competitor, the OSI-Ford, ended...

The convertible survives, along with a couple hundred coupes, a variety of OSI-bodied Fiats and Innocentis, as well as the wildly innovative OSI Silver Fox*, a twin-hulled, mid-engined (well, sort of) competition prototype, and the Scarabeo, the mid-engined prototype OSI built for Alfa Romeo before closing down. That car, along with a couple of other Ford-powered entries in the etceterini hall of almost-fame, will be the subject of a future chapter.

*Footnote:  For a detailed look at that last, radical OSI-designed and built concept car, see "The Etceterini Files Part 23—OSI Silver Fox:  And Now for Something Completely Different", posted here on Feb. 9, 2021.  Several other designs by Sergio Sartorelli for Ghia bodies on  chassis ranging from VW to Maserati were posted here in "The Italian Line: Ghia Part 2--- From Custom to Corporate" on October 31, 2020.

Photo Credits:
Top thru 3rd from top:  Officine Stampaggi Industriali (OSI)

4th & 5th (Fiat 2300S):  the author

6th & 7th:  wikimedia

8th:  OSI

Bottom:  osi20mts.com

 

Steve McQueen's "Le Mans": Star Vehicle Needs Roadside Assistance

Rain pounds relentlessly on a night highway, but the hypnotic sweep of the wipers across your windshield fails to clear the view forward. You press on, not because you have any confidence in what's ahead, but because someone is chasing you.  Is this a nightmare?  Well, if you were competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans on the night of June 13, 1970, this was your job…

The rain that began an hour and a half after the 4 pm start fell in torrents by 8 on that almost-summer night over half a century ago, but the  Solar Productions crew assembled by actor Steve McQueen kept filming. McQueen's idea had been to make a drama as close as possible to a documentary about road racing, and he'd arrived with Solar's crew, director John Sturges, a Porsche 908 camera car that actually ran in the race, and a team of professional drivers, but no script. He was more than an amateur himself, having taken 2nd place in the Sebring 12 Hours (and with a broken foot) on the first day of spring that year. By the time my college roommate took the photo below, it was mid-autumn, the film was behind schedule, and the desperate production team was spray-painting the trees green to make it look like summer.

McQueen's original plan had been to share a Porsche 917 with Jackie Stewart in the race, but that had been nixed by McQueen's insurance company. And while McQueen and Sturges had originally planned the film as "Day of the Champion" with Warner Brothers, the project moved to Cinema Center Films as "Le Mans" when McQueen's multi-picture contract was cancelled after the studio was sold. While it wasn't unheard-of for filming to begin before a script was written (directors like Jean-Luc Godard bacame famous for avoiding scripts), the sheer size of the operation began to make Cinema Center nervous. Director Sturges disagreed with McQueen about how to proceed, and was replaced mid-project by Lee Katzin. During and after the actual 24-hour race, the story line remained unresolved. In lieu of a finished story, Katzin and the production crew threw their energies into solving technical problems. They mounted cameras on the front of their 908 camera car (McQueen's Sebring Porsche) with quick-release hardware for fast film changes, and mounted cameras outside the windshields and door windows on John Wyer's Gulf Team Porsches to get real-time driving portraits, like the one below.  The vague story line of the fictional race called for Porsche to win, so Enzo Ferrari declined to cooperate with the filming, and the crew borrowed Ferrari 512s from privateer Jacques Swaters.  Ironically, the Gulf Porsche team actually won the real race, a first for Porsche.  That victory could've been described as going according to the script, except of course, there still wasn't any script…

The risks posed by the project went well beyond financial ones. McQueen insisted that the supplemental footage be filmed at racing speeds.  What were those speeds? The big Porsche flat-12s and Ferrari V12s were hitting 230 mph on the long Mulsanne straight. The previous year, the winning Ford GT had averaged over 120 mph.  During the downpour, three of Ferrari's contenders were taken out in a single accident, and another soon retired with mechanical damage.  Luckily, no major injuries resulted, but later in the race, track marshal Jacques Argoud was killed when Ferrari driver Jacky Ickx crashed due to brake failure. During filming of supplemental scenes, the Solar Productions crew had more accidents. Pro drivers Derek Bell and David Piper were involved in separate accidents. Bell suffered burns and Piper lost a leg after an accident during a re-take that might have been avoided had there been a script.  And McQueen had a wreck after driving co-star Elga Andersen to dinner; she was lightly injured and his personal assistant took the blame so the project could continue.  This incident may have been more credible as story than the actual plot, involving Michael Delaney (McQueen ) and Lisa Belgetti (Andersen), the widow of a driver killed in an accident involving Delaney the previous year...

It's possibly a sign of the weakness of the plot line that the crash scenes are more believable than the interactions between Michael and Lisa. The crashes were filmed using obsolete racers, Lola T70s, re-bodied as Porsches and Ferraris.  It seems the feminine contingent got all the thankless roles. For Elga the co-star, it was "convince us you're mesmerized by this incommunicative, distant guy."  For Lola the car, it was "crash into this steel barrier over here…"

After that long-ago visit to Le Mans, my college pal took a photo of the Porsche 917K (Kurz, for short tail) that had won that rainy race 4 months earlier in the hands of Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood.  Herrmann immediately retired from racing.  Car #23 had headed up a short parade of cars that survived the race, including a 917L (langheck for its long tail), and a Porsche 908 in 3rd ahead of 2 Ferraris.  Only 16 cars (12 of them Porsches) out of 55 were running at the finish, and only 7 were officially classified due to minimum distance requirements.

In 8th place was the Solar Productions camera car, a Porsche 908 driven by Herbert Linge and Jonathan Williams. The production crew joked that if the car hadn't pitted so often to change film, they might've done better than taking 2nd in the 3 liter prototype class. That probably would not have consoled the studio, as the film was way over budget as well as behind schedule. Over a million feet of film had been shot, and McQueen had given up his salary and his percentage of any profits to finish his dream film. Eventually, two documentaries would be made about the filming. But evidence supporting McQueen's original documentary impulse precedes his riveting footage of live racing, and goes back to a movie released 5 days after his race at Sebring. Michael Wadleigh's documentary "Woodstock", also of a big spectacle nearly derailed by rain, cost $600,000 and made $50 million at the box office.  "Le Mans" cost around $7.6 million (if you can ignore the personal cost of those accidents), and took in about $5.5 million. 

*Footnote:  Porsche's 917 is featured in our survey of Porsche's sports racers from the 50s into the 70s, "The Revs Institute Part 2: Paranormal Porsches", posted March 19, 2017.

Photo Credits:

3rd from top photo (McQueen with Porsche 917) and bottom (winning 917):  Ronald Budde
All other photos:  Solar Productions