Forgotten Classic: Matra——Maybe It Was Rocket Science

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I happened upon the treasure trove below in France just over 30 years ago in a museum where I seemed to be the only visitor. It's a lineup of history-making race cars from Matra, an aerospace firm run by Jean-Luc Lagardere, who decided in the mid-Sixties to put France back on the map in Formula 1 and endurance racing.  Heading up the line, we see an MS670 of the type that won Le Mans three years in a row, followed by an MS650, an MS630 coupe, and an earlier single-seater related to Jackie Stewart's Championship-winning car.  Matra had come a long way since I'd first heard of them...

Like any high school student studiously ignoring a pile of homework, I'd written to Matra Sports back in 1967 to find out about their new mid-engined road car, the Djet 6. To their credit, the company sent me two brochures, even though they would never get around to having a US importer for their cars... 

The Djet 6 was sort of familiar to a kid who studied Road & Track.  But there was this other car I hadn't seen, the M530, a new design with a wild mix of angles and curves, and resolutely eccentric proportions and details that could only be French.  What was this car, and why was an aerospace company making futurist mid-engined road cars?

Between 1962 and '64, René Bonnet* had built around 200 of his mid-engined Djet coupes, powered by Renault fours of just under 1,000 cc.  When Matra decided to offer road cars in addition to a planned run of Formula 2 cars, the aerospace firm took over the Bonnet operation.  The Matra version appeared with winding side windows and bumpers, unlike most of the Bonnet cars, which were aimed at weekend racers.

The Djet appeared to be an alternative to the Alpine A110*, also Renault-powered but a rear-engined design.  Between 1965 and 1967, Matra sold about 1,500 Djets, but did not develop the car as intensively as Alpine did with its A110...

This was because Matra was planning a car with more universal appeal. When Philippe Guédon's design appeared in 1967, it was clearly aimed not at weekend racers or rally drivers, but instead at people who wanted a practical car offering sharp handling, comfortable seating, and a good blend of performance and economy. The M530, named after an air-to-air missile from Matra's aerospace division, featured a longitudinal Ford Taunus V4 of 1.7 liters behind a cabin with 2 + 2 seating and a removable hard roof panel.  It was roomier and more distinctive than the Porsche 914 which would appear over 2 years later. The Ford transmission had the same relationship to the engine as it did in the front-drive Taunus, and it's likely that Ford was willing to supply engines in large quantity as Matra was using Ford-based engines in all its racing cars at this point.  Matra's bet on the M530 paid off, and over 9,600 were sold before production ended in 1973.

1967 turned out to be a busy year for Matra Sports.  They'd launched a Cosworth Ford powered F2 car two years earlier, and Belgian driver Jackie Ickx, shown here going airborne in Matra's MS7 at the Nurburgring while contesting an F1 race, won the '67 Formula 2 Championship for Matra...

The next year, Jackie Stewart won 3 GP races in the MS11 developed by Matra from that Formula 2 car, and finished 2nd in the Championship standings.  The new car, campaigned by Ken Tyrell for Matra, was powered by the Cosworth Ford DFV, the 32-valve V8 that would soon dominate Formula 1.  In 1969 Stewart and Matra would startle the GP fraternity by winning the Championship in the new MS80, still powered, like Matra's production cars, by Ford.

The rocket scientists at Matra were beginning to take an interest in endurance racing as well, and in 1966 they built a few of the MS620, the mid-engined coupe pictured below.  Body design was a mix of angled planes and curves, predicting the lines of the production M530, especially in the windshield and roofline.  The engine, however, was a BRM V-8 based upon their engine for the old 1.5 liter Formula 1, but punched out to around 2 liters...

By 1967 Matra had developed their endurance racer into the MS630, with lower profile, sleeker nose and narrower cabin, designed to take the new 48-valve 3.0 liter V12 that was originally part of a contract with BRM, but later switched to French supply sources. The engine, when ready, would show some similarity to the BRM, but the MS630 was campaigned with a Ford 289 at Le Mans in 1967, showing up for '68 with the new V12.  Intrepid Henri Pescarolo raced the MS630 in the rain that night after the windshield wiper quit, finally stopping after a tire puncture and fire at the 22-hour mark.

In 1968 Matra commissioned Robert Choulet to design a low-drag, aerodynamic coupe on the same chassis as the open MS650 that was being developed at the same time.  The design, with its steeply curved roof, low profile, partly covered rear wheels, and canted stabilizing fins, resembles the CD Peugeot SP66* Le Mans coupe Choulet had designed earlier.

During a practice lap at Le Mans in April 1969, the car took off and crashed on the high-speed Mulsanne straight.  Driver Pescarolo escaped with his life, but serious burns, and suggested the front bodywork was flexing and causing lift.  Choulet's theory was that the door tops flexed and caused lift.  In any case, the 640 was abandoned as a team car.  Instead, Matra engineers focused on the lighter, less aerodynamic, but more predictable MS650 spider as their endurance racer.  It was ready before the MS640, and it brought Matra closer to success, taking 4th, 5th and 7th at Le Mans in '69, and winning the 1000 Km of Buenos Aires and the Tour de France Auto the next year. 

By the time Matra engineers developed the MS660 with its lower profile nose, the V12 was making 450 hp at 10,500 rpm.  Their strategy of using basing an endurance racer around a Formula 1 engine was beginning to show results.  Jack Brabham and Francois Cevert won the 1000 Km race at Paris in 1970, and another MS660 finished 4th.  When I drove around the Sarthe circuit at Le Mans in autumn 1970, the Matra team was doing tire tests, and the cars blasted past our Simca 1100 with that distinctive blaring V12 noise, flames shooting out the back.  Oh yes, we should mention Simca here.  By this time, Simca had signed a deal to sponsor the Matra team, so their name appeared on the cars.

It was with the MS670 that Matra cemented its reputation in endurance racing.  The lighter, more powerful cars took 1st and 2nd places at Le Mans in '72, 1st and 3rd the next year, and  1st and 3rd in 1974. Beyond Le Mans, Equipe Matra won enough races to win the World Championship for Makes in 1973 and '74, the year Matra retired from racing.  Recently the '72 Le Mans winner, Chassis 001 (below), was listed for auction by Lagardere Group in order to pay off the judgment of a successful lawsuit by 296 workers laid off when Matra quit producing cars in 2003.  Henri Pescarolo, co-winner of the '72 Le Mans with Graham Hill, protested the sale...

Luckily for Matra and Simca, their June '73 Le Mans victory coincided with the official launch of the Matra Simca Bagheera, the replacement for the 530 series named after a fictional black panther. The new design by Jean Toprieux and Jacques Nochet featured 3-abreast seating and transverse mid-mounted engines from the Simca 1100 four, from which the new car also borrowed gearbox and some suspension pieces.  Wheelbase was 93" and overall length 13 feet, so Bagheera was the same size as Mazda's first Miata, but a couple hundred pounds lighter. Engines were offered in 1294 and 1442 cc versions, and the car's blend of performance, fuel economy, handling and practicality powered the company through the fuel crisis that came in 1974...  

Styling reflected the wedge theme which had appeared on more expensive GT cars from Bertone and Ghia, and this helped sales, which ultimately amounted to more than 47,000 units. Matra engineers proposed a U8, below, configured with parallel inline fours making just under 170 hp, but this was doomed by the fuel crisis. Despite strong initial sales, the Bagheera image suffered as the car gained a reputation for early rust problems in the steel stampings that supported the fiberglass body.

The Murena which replaced it in 1981 adopted a galvanized steel chassis to address the rust problem, and offered a 1.6 liter mid-mounted transverse pushrod four as well as a new 2.2 liter overhead cam four.  Designer Antonis Volanis kept the three-across seating as well as the fiberglass body construction, tempering the angularity of the wedge with front fenders that curved into the A-pillar.  Unlike the Bagheera, the Murena (Italian for moray) offered a 5-speed gearbox.

Matra's design had begun before Peugeot bought Simca from Chrysler, essentially taking on Simca's debt (but also its dealer network) for $1.  Simca had bought the Talbot* name in the late Fifties, and PSA Peugeot Citroen decided to revive Talbot, gluing the name onto the Murena.  Why this effort to badge-engineer a sporting heritage was needed is a mystery, as Matra had already encoded its racing successes into the memory banks of a younger generation.  In any case, PSA's Talbot strategy failed when their boxy Talbot Tagora sedan flopped, Matra sold just under 10,700 of the famously sweet-handling GT before production ended with the 1984 model year.  Around that time, Lagardere Group, the aerospace firm, bought Matra back from PSA and contracted with Renault to produce the new Espace minivan.  While the Espace succeeded, the Avantime, a "monospace" that attempted to be all cars in one (GT, luxury cruiser, minivan), built from 2001-'03 to Patrick Le Quement's design, found few buyers, much like the later Nissan Murano SUV convertible.  The Matra design studios would produce more prototypes for Renault, which formed an alliance with Nissan in  1999, but the Renault Matra Avantime would be its last production car.

*Footnote:   Deutsch Bonnet, DB, CD, and Rene Bonnet sports racers are surveyed in our post from Feb. 29, 2020, "The Path of Least Resistance."  We took a look at Alpine Renault road cars, the A110 and A310, in "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310" on Jan. 9, 2021. Talbot-Lago cars were given a retrospective, with a trove of previously unpublished photos, in "Talbot-Lago:  Darracq by Another Name", in these posts for May 22, 2020.

Photo Credits:
Top: the author
2nd & 3rd: Matra Sports

3rd & 4th:  bonhams.com

8th (MS7 in flight):  twitter.com
10th (MS620):  autopuzzles.com 
11th (MS630):  slotforum.com 
15th: (MS660): autotortenelem-blog.hu

16th (MS670):  goodwood.com

18th (Bagheera rear):  youtube.com

All other photos:  Wikimedia