Boulder Classics and Coffee: August 29, 2021

The Boulder Classics and Coffee show returned to 8th Street just south of Pearl on Sunday, August 29.  This time around, air-cooled Porsches vastly outnumbered the more recent water-cooled variety, and included this cream-colored '59 Convertible D, snoozing under a tree between a white 911 and two green 912s, a '67 and a '68.  Air-cooled Porsches made up the most populous category, but there was a record turnout, and more variety than ever...

That turnout included two BMC Minis (ancestors of the current BMW-made Mini Cooper), 3 Alfa Romeos, 3 Jaguars, a Lancia, a BMW, a Saab, an Auburn Speedster, a vintage 1930s Packard, a vintage 40s MG, and what's rapidly becoming a Boulder tradition, the Ferrari of the Month. 

Above, a Porsche Boxster fronts a lineup including a yellow Jaguar E-Type Series 2,  a Jaguar 3.8 Mark 2 sedan, a barely visible MG TC, and that Ferrari (we'll get there soon enough). Across the street as shown below, the lineup includes a red Alfa 1750 GTV, gray 1970 Lancia Flavia 2000 coupe, '67 Jag E-Type (late Series I with open headlights), Datsun 280Z with backdated bumper, '91 Alfa 2000 Spider, and Porsche 911 Targa.  

The Lancia Flavia 2000 coupe was the last new body style planned by the company before the 1969 Fiat takeover, and appeared the year after. It's a front-driver based on the Flavia powertrain that appeared in 1961, a horizontally-opposed pushrod four but with two cams because Lancia engineers did things their own way. This one's a 4-speed, but 5-speeds were available, and the scarce HF version offered fuel injection. The Pininfarina coupe was never officially imported into the US, but you see them now and then.

Moving north along the same side of 8th, we encountered another Alfa GTV, this one a 2 liter, a BMW 1600 (the car that saved the company) from the late Sixties, a Saab Sonnett III, the V4-powered 2-seater that appeared in 1970 with fiberglass body redesigned by Coggiola in Italy, another 911, and those Minis. Anyone attempting a run to the grocery store on the corner may have been daunted by the lack of parking...

Neighbor Ron Farina brought his 1962 Jaguar 3.8 Mark 2 sedan with its original English plate. These were the Jags the police drove to catch gangsters…who drove the same model.  Next to the Mark 2, Dan McCarthy parked his 1949 MG TC...

The TC from Morris Garages was the car that started the sports car boom in the USA.  The Morris-based overhead valve four made 54 hp from 1,250 cc (around 72 cubic inches) and gave the 1,700 lb. car sprightly performance. Returning GIs that had seen the cars in England bought copies and often went road racing in events sponsored by the Sports Car Club of America, founded in 1944. Compared with the VW Beetle, an import that arrived on our shores in 1949 (2 were sold), the cars have similar weight and the same 94" wheelbase, but the MG was almost twice as powerful.  There was a price for the performance, though; at $1,895 the MG was around $600 more than the VW. Despite this, in those early postwar years, many more MGs than VWs were sold Stateside.

The 19-inch wire wheels and flat external gas tank enhance the spindly proportions of what seemed to Americans a romantic, 1920s era design in 1949. The separate, folding racing-style windscreens add a dashing touch.  An MG TC was selected by the Museum of Modern Art for its pioneering 1951 exhibit, Eight Automobiles, the first time that automobiles were presented to the public as art.

Also disobeying the No Parking signs is a 1970 Ferrari Dino 246 GT, demonstrating how far engineering and industrial design journeyed in two decades.  Though to be fair, the MG TC (1945-50) was close in its design to the first of the T Series, the TA which appeared in 1936. The year before that TA, Gordon Buehrig's design for the Auburn 851 Speedster* was released by the Auburn Cord Duesenberg combine in Indiana.  The inline eight cylinder boat-tailed roadster was more Streamline Moderne than the MGs, and it hinted at the lines of Buehrig's design for the landmark Cord 810...

This Auburn 866 Speedster is not an original 851, but instead one of 138 replicas built by Auburn enthusiast Glenn Pray between 1967 and 1981. Fiberglass bodywork was molded from an original 851 Speedster and mounted on a V8-powered Ford F150 pickup chassis.  The T-handled shifter is evidence of a modern automatic transmission.

The boat tail design was a feature of earlier Auburn Speedsters, including the V12. One external clue that this is an 866 instead of an 851 is that all four external exhausts line up on the driver's side of the hood on the 851, as it was an inline eight.  Here there are two on each side...

Steve Tebo, the owner of the Auburn, also brought this 1933 Packard Super Eight Touring. Attractive design details include the traditional Packard radiator with trademark cormorant hood ornament. Note the way the headlights echo the the V-shape plan of that radiator.  

This phaeton style was the most open of the 142" wheelbase Series 1004. As with other luxury cars of this period, the cabin was long but narrow, owing to the space occupied by the external running boards.  The 6.3 liter, side-valve straight 8 made 145 hp, and sent power to the rear wheels through a 3-speed synchromesh gearbox.  Drum brakes were servo assisted, but they had to stop a car that weighed over three times the weight of, for example, the MG TC...

Perhaps to compensate for needing to rely on side curtains instead of winding windows in cold weather, rear seat passengers got their own removable windshield. As the decade of the Thirties progressed, 4-door convertibles with padded tops and winding windows became more popular than touring cars and phaetons.  Packard built 788 of this long-wheelbase chassis for 1933.  The Depression meant this was the lowest production year for Packard in the Thirties.

A gentleman named Pietro brought the Ferrari of the Month, and a real crowd pleaser.  This immaculate, award-winning 1970 Dino 246 GT has been in Pietro's family since 1976. The Dino line of cars, named for Enzo Ferrari's son, began with front-engined V6 racers but led to a production mid-engined road car in 1967.  That 206 GT featured a 65-degree, all aluminum V6. Fiat used the same engine at the front of their Dino coupes and spiders.  The Dinos were the first Ferraris to use electronic ignitions.  By 1969, Ferrari and Fiat schemed to make the car competitive with the Porsche 911S, and expanded the engine to 2.4 liters, now with a cast iron block. British testers found the new 246 GT to be faster than the Porsche, and only slightly more expensive as priced in England.

The 246 version of the GT looked much like the 206, but the Pininfarina body was now primarily in steel, where the 206 GT had been all alloy.  The packaging is compact and tidy, on a 92.1" wheelbase (the 206 GT was 90").  Weight was around 2,400 pounds, about like the original Mazda Miata, while the 206 GT had been just under a ton.

While the mid-engined Dino racers had longitudinal engines, all the production Dino GTs used the tidy transverse mounting you see here.  This makes for extra space in the cabin. It also means there's room for luggage under the deck lid behind the engine...

…which made about 195 hp in European market form.  As on the 206 GT, the four cams were operated by a toothed belt. The 5 speed gearbox, unlike the transmission in the transverse-engined Lambo Miura (or contemporary Mini Cooper) did not share its oil with the engine.  Ferrari engineers selected the 65 degree angle between cylinders after trying 60 degrees on some of the Dino race cars (+ Ferrari V12s) because Ferrari still used carburetors, and wanted more space for the intake plumbing. It's striking what a successful exercise in packaging this power plant installation was, and it's also striking how immaculate this example is.

These are the original seats, which were, and are, covered in vinyl.  The gated shift lever is a Ferrari trademark.  The Dino 246 GT is a reminder of how serious Ferrari was in aiming at a broader section of the sports car market, the upper-middle served by Porsche.  It was the first Ferrari to sell in large numbers (over 3,500 cars) and it may have been the first Ferrari to turn a profit.  It's also a reminder that Ferraris were not always powered by large engines, or V12s.  The first Ferraris sold to the public were 2 liter Type 166 V12s, and these were followed in the early Fifties by a series of sports racers with inline fours and sixes...

The British contingent included Mini Coopers, the current BMW kind (around 12 feet long and containing air bags, microchips and software) as well as the original BMC kind (10 feet long and originally containing none of that).  The '72 version below had been modified though...

It was now powered by a Honda VTEC 16-valve four making at least 100 hp. more than old Mini Cooper in which it's installed, with the aid of software and microchips galore.  The wheels are upsized 3" from the original 10 inchers, and the Honda engine, unlike the Austin / Morris original, no longer has to share its oil with the transmission...

This Austin Healey Sprite, nicknamed the Bugeye for those headlights, showed up mid-morning, and happily the owner parked it next to the Packard to provide a sense of scale.  At 80 inches, the Bugeye's wheelbase is 62 inches shorter than the Packard's.  At 1,460 pounds dry, it weighs 2 tons less than the Packard, and 240 lb. less than the MG TC on display.  That makes an interesting comparison, because the Bugeye (1958-61) was British Motor Company's idea of a basic, entry-level sports car, something like the MG TC had been a decade earlier.   By 1958 BMC owned MG as well as Austin and Morris, and also made the big 6 cylinder Austin Healey.  The Sprite had a smaller engine than the old TC, but it was easily modified and the Bugeye was adopted by SCCA racers, who liked the easy engine access and the low price; at $1,795 in 1959, it was a hundred bucks cheaper than the TC a decade earlier.

Some of the crowd stayed after the official closing to trade stories. The Brazilian ladies pictured had stories of cars in their native country (Willys, VW) and we hope the field expands to include some cars we haven't yet seen, like the Brazilian Puma that we spotted downtown.  The next Classics and Coffee is on Sunday, September 26, between 8 and 10 AM on 8th Street, just south of the intersection at Pearl Street.  We can hardly wait...

*Footnote:  The July 25 Classics and Coffee in Boulder's downtown appeared in "Classics and Coffee in Downtown Boulder", in our post for July 27, 2021, while the June 2021 Boulder show as well as an earlier show in Lafayette, Colorado show, figure in "Classic Cars & Coffee in Boulder (City and County)", from July 16, 2021.  Auburn Speedsters were featured in "Auburn Speedsters: In the Shadow of Cord & Duesenberg", posted July 8, 2020.

*Postscript, Errata + More Local Car Shows & Events:  We got the weights right for all the cars listed except the Dino 206 GT; that was just under 2,000 lb. of course, not "under 2 tons." Also we originally guessed the Alfa Spider was a '94 instead of a first-year for this style, 1991. And the Datsun Z had me fooled with its 240Z front bumper; should have noticed the 280Z hood vents…apologies!  The Colorado English Motoring Conclave hosts its annual all-British show of cars and bikes at Oak Park in Arvada, Colorado Sunday, Sept. 19.  An associated Ride the Rockies event is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 18.  There's a fee for exhibiting cars, but the show is open to the public at no charge.

Photo Credits:

Top 5 photos, plus photos 12 & 13, 15-17, 19-22:  Matt Kennan

Remaining photos are by the author.