A car culture website that should know better recently posted an article about how there are no cars named after dogs, and then invented some funny names as suggestions for future products. Of course, they'd missed Rover somehow, and cruised right past the AC Greyhound and the Aston Martin Bulldog. We'll get to those, but first we're going to start with the Willys-Overland Whippet, introduced late in 1926 as a 1927 model and produced into 1931. The examples above and below (righthand drive for Australia) are from 1929. Until the Great Depression prompted by the stock market crash of that year, the Toledo firm founded by John Willys in 1908 (the year Henry Ford introduced the Model T), Willys-Overland had been doing pretty well producing cars using patented Knight sleeve-valve system (Daimler and Minerva were other users), and at their peak popularity, Willys was selling around a quarter million Whippets a year...
The Whippet competed in price with Ford and Chevy, but the arrival of Ford's Model A in 1929, along with that economic slide, created problems for Willys. The 4 and 6 cylinder sleeve-valve Whippet engines were more expensive to build than Ford's or GM's, and this meant that profits were slim even in good times. A couple years after the demise of the Whippet in 1931, Lincoln offered this graceful cantilevered leaping greyhound radiator cap ornament. But the V12-powered car was just named the KB. "Greyhound", the bigger and more famous relative of the agile whippet, would've been a more inspired moniker, perhaps, but there was already a bus company named that...
When Lincoln introduced its landmark Continental, based on the Zephyr V12, in 1940, they associated the sleek new car with the greyhound's grace and speed. The ad below is from 1941...
In the same era, though, John Lencki built what became a successful race car, and called it The Pup. Under new regulations issued for 1938 by the AAA for their Championship racing series that included the Indy 500, cars would no longer need to allow room for a rider mechanic next to the driver. Taking advantage of this, Lencki built a slimmer car, and when comparing it with his previous design, reflected that it looked like a pup. Driver Jimmy Snyder won the 100-mile race at Syracuse, NY in fall of '38 driving The Pup, and the car competed in the Indy 500 twice. The best finish was 14th in 1941, when it became one of the first race cars to feature a seat belt, because driver J. Chitwood noticed how the suspension bounced him away from the pedals on Indy's brick paving. Despite the new-fangled seat belt, The Pup stayed with the twin-cam four-cylinder engine design pioneered by Harry Miller…
Of course, by that time, Rover had been building cars under that doggie-flavored name for over 3 decades, having started with a tricycle in 1883, a Rover Safety Bicycle in 1885, and before that first car in 1904, the Rover Imperial motorcycle in 1902. It is, however, the P4, known affectionately as Auntie Rover, that sticks in the mind for its pooch-like virtues of sturdiness and loyal service. Auntie was launched in 1949 after Rover brass bought two 1947 Loewy Studebakers and used them as models for their new postwar car. The 1951 version below has special Tickford drophead bodywork; most Auntie Rovers were saloons. They were so solidly built that Road & Track magazine cited them in 1952 as the best cars in the world, save for Rolls-Royce. That year, Rover changed the grille to delete the "cyclops eye" fog light.
One feature the P4 shared with Rolls Royce was the "F-head" (also called IOE) engine design, with inlet valves located over the exhausts. Initially, Rover offered only the 6-cylinder, 2.1 liter 75 model, but later expanded the line to include the 4-cylinder 60 as well as 2.6 liter 90. Gordon Bashford's Loewy-influenced body design, with its notchback and prominent "ducktail" rear deck seemed startling to the conservative British, but it turned out to be popular, and Auntie Rover overlapped the more square-rigged P5 series until 1964, selling over 130,000 cars.
That wasn't the end of innovation at Rover, either. The more compact P6, with its Citroen DS-influenced body (horizontal crease on flanks, roof line), debuted in 1963 with an overhead-cam, 4 cylinder 2 liter engine and De Dion rear suspension. This Rover 2000 became the Rover 3500 in '68 with the addition of the aluminum V8 based on GM's design for Buick. Both cars increased Rover's popularity...or is that pupularity?
Meanwhile, over at the Rootes Group, which made Hillmans and Sunbeams, a compact station wagon called the Husky was introduced in 1954. Initially, the Husky came with a side-valve 1.26 liter four, unlike the OHV unit offered in Hillman Minx sedans. But this Mark 1 Husky was cute...
The new-styled Husky introduced for 1958 (confusingly called the Series 1, but also the Audax version) expanded the 7 foot wheelbase of the previous Mark 1 to 86 inches, which it would share with the new Sunbeam Alpine when that car appeared in 1960. Engine was an OHV inline 4 of 1.4 liters. The side-opening rear door was a Husky feature...
Also in 1958, Polish manufacturer WFM Fafik produced the Puppy prototype, in the then-growing microcar class, powered by a 148cc engine. The wraparound windshield and backlight fit the period perfectly. The door hinges seem to have come from a much larger car. It seems odd that nobody in the industry has since picked Puppy or Pup as names for minicars or city runabouts...
But AC Cars, better known for their Ace and Cobra products, called their new 2+2 fastback coupe Greyhound when they introduced it at the Earls Court show in fall of '59, the same show where the BMC Mini first appeared. The alloy-bodied Greyhounds, on a wheelbase 10 inches longer than the sleeker 90-inch Ace roadster and Aceca coupe, were offered with Bristol engines in 2 and 2.2 liter versions. Eleven of the 83 Greyhounds built from '59 to '63 were fitted with Ford Zephyr 2.6 liter sixes. Discontinuing the Greyhound and Aceca perhaps allowed AC to better keep up with demand for the then-new Cobra...
Chassis designer Len Terry, later famous for mid-engined Formula 1 cars such as the Lotus 33 and 38, and the Eagle Mk. 1, produced some front-engined Formula Junior cars under the Terrier name starting in 1960. These were Ford Anglia powered, meeting the requirements for production engines of under 1,100 cc, and were briefly competitve until eclipsed by mid-engined cars. The Terrier name was clever though, especially as applied to a racer. There have since been Terrier military vehicles, and there was a Ford Greyhound armored vehicle, but these weren't cars, so we're ignoring them.
In 1979 Aston Martin Lagonda showed the prototype Bulldog, a mid-engined, very wedge-shaped supercar designed by William Towns, who had done the wedge on the Lagonda saloon three years earlier. The ruler-straight parallel window lines are at odds with the tapering wedge idea, but may have made hinging easier for the gullwing doors. That curved indent at the door sill may indicate that Towns had second thoughts, though. AML management had second thoughts when they considered production costs for the twin-turbocharged Bulldog, and then cancelled the project, meaning that this is the only one. Why, however, current Aston Martin management decided not to use the Bulldog name for their new SUV (forgettably named the DBX 707) is a mystery.
The motor sports enthusiasts at Goodwood, though, have not lost their enthusiasm for dogs, and in 2022 they instituted Goodwoof, a weekend-long doggie festival held in May in front of the Kennels. It was such a success (the English do love their dogs) that it was held again on May 18 and 19 of this year, and was expanded to include an architects' design competition for something called Barkitecture...
It has not been reported, however, whether the pooch below was dissuaded by the shape of the topiary sculpture from doing what male dogs usually do on shrubbery...
Watson Sherman, the Activities Manager at the Bone Lounge where all these posts are written, seems a little miffed that he was never notified of, let alone invited to, these Goodwoof events. Well, I tell him; there's always next year...
*Footnote:
Gary Axon, on Axon's Automotive Anorak at the excellent goodwood.com website, came up with 8 cars named after dogs, admitted he cheated a bit by including the Ferrari Boxer (named for its engine configuration, not a pooch), and identified those Terriers as well as a Whippet made by designer Luigi Colani, but he never found the Pup or the Puppy. But we'd be cheating if we didn't admit he got us onto this trail, and that we're envious that he lives so close to the Goodwoof Festival...
Photo Credits:
Top: Bonhams Auctions
2nd: BGS Classic Cars
3rd: Steve Brown on flickr.com
4th: Ford Motor Company
5th: Museum of American Speed
6th thru 9th: Wikipedia
10th: Rootes Group
11th: Wikipedia
12th: reddit.com
13th: Amberley's Museum
14th: racecarsdirect.com
15th: flickr.com
16th: La Escuderia
17th & 18th: goodwood.com
Bottom: the author
No comments:
Post a Comment