It's kind of stunning to realize that the Allure of the Automobile exhibit is already 14 years in the past. Opening nearly 6 decades after MOMA's pioneering Eight Automobiles show of 1951, the Allure exhibit occupied an entire springtime season at Atlanta's High Museum, in 2010. As Detroit auto makers struggled to escape the effects of the Great Recession with a bailout provided by taxpayers, the exhibit looked back in nostalgia at the high points of automotive design, in America and in Europe...
Mid-20th century modern design was coming back into fashion in the world of architecture by the beginning of the 21st century, and the High Museum's curators chose to display two mid century automotive design landmarks together. The 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SLR road racer, made in only 9 examples, had no mechanical similarities to the 300SL production car, but the aerodynamic contours of its magnesium alloy bodywork in roadster and coupe form were similar enough to help sales of that modern classic.
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That "R" added to "300SL" signified an inline 8-cylinder engine of exotic "silumin" alloy, with twin cams operating desmodromic valves, mechanically opened and closed. Stirling Moss famously won the 1955 Mille Miglia in a 300SLR, but Mercedes withdrew its cars from that year's Le Mans (and then from racing) after Pierre Levegh's roadster catapulted into the stands after a collision and scores of spectators perished.
Sharing the spotlight with the 300SLR was this 1957 Jaguar XK-SS*, a customer version of the D-Type that had finished 1st in that tragic '55 Le Mans, and also won in '56 and '57. D-Type body designer Malcolm Sayer prioritized low frontal area along with strength and light weight, and his concerns with aerodynamics were reflected in the elliptical shapes of the riveted aluminum shell, which repeated ovals in section, plan and elevation, and in the front air intake.
The new car shared the D-Type's stressed-skin central chassis tub, and the high stressed-section sills made for tiny doors, which, along with sketchy weather protection, made the XK-SS less than practical daily transport. One thing that enhanced safety was the provision of 4-wheel disc brakes. The Mercedes 300SLR made do with drums, augmented at Le Mans by an "air brake", a mechanically-operated air foil behind the cockpit. It didn't work as well as those discs. The Porsche 550* coupe below used drum brakes in 1953, the year Jaguar went to discs on its C-Type road racers and won with them at Le Mans. The 550 had one feature, though, that predicted a future trend: its engine was mounted ahead of the transmission and right behind the driver. This mid-mounted engine layout would take over Formula 1 racing 8 years later...
The Dodge Fire Arrows* that appeared in 1953 were part of a series of show cars created by Chrysler design chief Virgil Exner and Ghia's Luigi Segre, in Italy, to perk up Chrysler's stodgy image. The hemi V8 engine was also part of that effort, and the smaller but related Dodge Red Ram is under the tapered hood of Fire Arrow III, the blue coupe below...
In a Chrysler publicity photo, the Fire Arrow IV convertible with wild diamond-pattern interior sidles up to Fire Arrow III.
In addition to the convertible and coupe, there were two Fire Arrow roadsters with minimal weather protection built for testing and display at car shows. Both the roadsters were different in detail, so all four Fire Arrows are pretty special. Fire Arrow I is below...
Here's a cockpit view of Fire Arrow III. When the car was sold at auction over a dozen years ago, the new owner paid $852,000 to sit behind this wheel...
The Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato* below was, like the Dodge Fire Arrow, an attempt to create more customer interest in an existing product. This existing product was already pretty interesting, being the lightweight Superleggera Touring-bodied road racing GT version of Aston's DB4, but the Zagato body, also in alloy like the production Astons, reduced weight and added sexy curves. Most sources say that only 19 of 25 planned were built between 1959 and '61. The original DB4 GTs all had the 3.7 liter twin-plug version of Aston's twin overhead-cam inline six. Standard DB4s, like James Bond's DB5, made do with a single spark plug per cylinder.
This Ferrari 250GT short-wheelbase (SWB) coupe was from the same '59 to '61 period, and very competitive in the GT class of road racing, including at Le Mans. Body design wrapped simple, harmonious contours around the mechanicals and was by Pinin Farina, who renamed his firm Pininfarina in the last year of SWB production. The SWB was a true "dual purpose" sports car, in that you could race it on weekends and drive it to work (if you had a job) during weekdays. One sign of the SWB's success was that around 170 were built.
While the car below may look like a Corvette Sting Ray from the 1963-'67 period, it is, like the other cars in the exhibit, something special. It's actually the prototype Sting Ray from 1959, and it, like the Aston and Ferrari, was raced successfully. The body design came from a sketch by Pete Brock*, designer of the later Cobra Daytona coupe, with refinements by Larry Shinoda. The design, with its strong horizontal crease, may have owed something to Alfa Romeo's Disco Volante (flying saucer) prototype cars of 7 years earlier, but the crease surrounded the entire car, as on the Corvair GM was about to launch. The Corvair didn't have those fender bulges, though. They were something GM Styling VP Bill Mitchell may have absorbed from European car shows.
Unlike the production Sting Ray, the prototype lacks flip-up headlights. It does, however, feature the front-end lift of the final design. For road racing, Chevrolet engineers raised the rear of the car to counter this nose-up tendency at speed. The chassis was borrowed from the test mule for Chevy's stillborn 1957 Corvette SS* road racer, and featured a De Dion rear axle, coil springs all around, and drum brakes.
Like the Corvette SS donor car, the prototype Sting Ray featured Halibrand alloy wheels, and its wheelbase was 6 inches shorter than the 1963 production Sting Ray at 92 inches.
The Tucker 48*, Preston Tucker's dream car named for its model year, was intended as a production car, but only 51 examples emerged from the Chicago factory before Tucker abandoned production as the result of inadequate financing and a court case brought against Preston Tucker for stock manipulation. Tucker was acquitted of that, but the damage was already done. Styling by Alex Tremulis echoed the futuristic cars predicted by magazines during the long years of the war, and the rear-mounted engine, a Franklin flat six converted from air to water cooling, made 166 horsepower. The center-mounted headlight turned with the front wheels.
Three examples of the VW-powered Type 64* (not yet called a Porsche) were built to run in a Berlin-Rome road race scheduled for September 1939. Hitler chose that month to launch World War II in Poland, so the race never happened. Only one Type 64 survives; Porsche replicated the contours and the narrow cabin of the existing streamliner with this replica alloy bodywork.
At the 1937 Paris Auto Salon, Carrosserie Pourtout* exhibited designer Georges Paulin's most radical design, this Aero Coupe on the Delage* D8-120S chassis. The long hood houses a 4.3 liter inline eight evolved from sister make Delahaye's six, and teardrop fenders accentuate the low lines. The previous year, coachbuilder Labourdette had built a road racing coupe with similar lines including similar pillarless side glazing, called Vutotal...
The thin windshield pillars barely interrupted the wrap of the windshield into that side glazing, which plunges toward the rear fenders in a sweep unbroken by a B-pillar...
Teardrop shapes must have been in the air in 1930s Paris. In the same year that Pourtout released their Delage Aero Coupe, apertif mogul and inventor Andre Dubonnet collaborated with designer Jean Andreau and coachbuilder Jacques Saoutchik to produce this stunning Xenia*, adapting Dubonnet's Hyperflex coil-spring independent suspension to the front and rear of the Hispano-Suiza H6B chassis. Braking by hydraulically-operated aluminum drums was from the H6C, as was the engine, an aluminum block, 8 liter, SOHC inline six. Straight lines were not part of the design theme; windows curved upwards into the tapered, teardrop roof, as did the one-piece, wraparound windshield. Doors opened parallel to the body flanks on special outriggers, a favorite Saoutchik touch...
…and though Dubonnet intended the Xenia as an idea source for future production vehicles, it remains the sole specimen.
Jean Bugatti, founder Ettore's son, was responsible for the design of the Type 57, released in 1934, of which 710 were built. The Type 57S* (Surbaissé for low chassis) was introduced in 1937, and only 40 of the low chassis cars were built, 17 with this Atalante coupe bodywork built by Gangloff. 2 cars came from the factory with superchargers on their 3.3 liter, inline eight engines, but several were retrofitted with superchargers at the Molsheim (Alsace) factory before war stopped the whole program. That made them Type 57SC (C for compresseur). Though the Type 57 offered advanced engine features, with gear-driven twin overhead cams and aluminum engine blocks, chassis design was conservative, with mechanical brakes after Delage and Hispano-Suiza had gone to hydraulics.
One feature that distinguishes low-chassis S and SC from the "standard" Type 57 sold to ordinary (but prosperous) mortals is the V-shaped plan of that trademark horseshoe radiator, as shown below.
The tapered rear and low-slung profile show Jean Bugatti's flair for dramatic effects; he had already laid down plans for a Type 64 to succeed his design for the Type 57 when his career was cut short while testing a car. In August 1939 Bugatti swerved to miss a cyclist and hit a tree with fatal results. A month later, World War II began in Europe.
The 1934 Packard Twelve Runabout Speedster* is one of four bodied by LeBaron in this style. Even at Detroit's conservative Packard firm, the trend to streamlining was beginning to have an effect. LeBaron's Streamline Moderne touches include teardrop fenders, cantilevered oval running boards, a V-shaped windshield, and a jaunty boat tail somewhat obscured by the spare tire. The 67-degree, 445 cubic inch V12 made 160 hp that year, and in 1935 it received aluminum heads. Conservative engineering still ruled at Packard; the top-of-line Twelve would wait until 1937 to receive hydraulic brakes and independent front suspension. This 1934 model was good enough for Clark Gable, though...
Studebaker of South Bend, Indiana, owned Pierce-Arrow from 1928-33, and provided funds to the Buffalo firm to update their product line. Then the Great Depression hit. The cash-strapped combine managed to produce Phil Wright's design for the V12-powered Silver Arrow* in time for the 1933 Century of Progress fair in Chicago. Five examples were made in three months...
Though Pierce promoted their new top-line model with a "Suddenly it's 1940" theme, most of its design features would only appear on mass-produced cars in the late Forties. These included a full-width passenger cabin with front fenders flush with the doors, with rear fenders flowing into the fastback deck. Headlights integrated into the front fenders were a longtime Pierce feature, while the high-mounted, V-shaped rear window echoed the V-shaped plan of the windshield, and both were novelties in 1933. Fortunately, the windshield actually offered good outward vision, while that rear window offered only privacy...
Pierce Arrow sold its last car in 1938, a victim of the Great Depression. The stillborn Silver Arrow may have prompted visitors in 2010 to think of some makes more recently lost to the Great Recession; these included Pontiac and Saturn. The automobile was changing along with the world; Toyota introduced their 3rd generation Prius hybrid the year of this exhibit, while Nissan had introduced their all-electric Leaf the year before. Two years before this exhibit, an obscure company named Tesla Motors had released their all-electric 2-seat roadster, with the promise of a network of solar-powered charging stations, for consideration by a skeptical automotive press. Having recently seen the bankruptcies of once-mighty car makers like GM and Chrysler, many predicted Tesla would go the way of Pierce-Arrow and Packard. Headlines began to give as much attention to global warming as to economic recession, and drivers caught in freeway jams probably had a hard time appreciating the allure of the automobiles around them as works of art...
*Footnote: Some of these cars and designers have been featured before on this blog. Here's a list, with dates in parentheses.
Jaguar XK-SS (5-31-24), Porsche 550 & Type 64 (6-12-18), Dodge Fire Arrow (8-29-15), Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato (3-31-24), Corvette SS (7-18-20), Corvette designer Pete Brock (1-16-17), Tucker 48 (7-26-20), Delage (5-20-18), Pourtout designs (1-17-20), Xenia (5-13-24; see footnotes for earlier Xenia posts), Bugatti Type 57S (6-11-17), Packard Twelve LeBaron (7-30-20), and Pierce Silver Arrow (6-26-20). We also featured the 1954 Plymouth Ghia Explorer, a close relative of Dodge's Fire Arrow (4-30-24).
Photo Credits
All color photos: Ronald Budde
Monochrome photos: Chrysler Corporation
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