10th Anniversary Post: Remembering Watson, the World's Best Dog

Some long stories begin as short stories.  When architect intern Ben Lochridge left our office for graduate school in 2008, he took his dog Buster with him.  I missed having a dog around the office to walk during breaks (not that I didn't miss Ben) and decided that while I was still too busy with work to adopt a dog, a substitute plan could be volunteering to walk dogs on Saturdays for the local Humane Society*.  After I walked dogs awhile, someone on the staff suggested I take special training and work in the recovery section of the vet clinic.  There I would take care of dogs and cats emerging from anesthesia after surgery.  I'd take their temperatures, clean out their ears, see if nails needed clipping, and calm them as they'd awaken.

Six months into my six years there, the staff plopped a pup into my lap named Monday because that was the day he'd transferred from Denver's Dumb Friends League.  The vet said he was a Treeing Walker Coonhound / Lab mix.  I looked up Walker Coonhounds and they just looked like tall beagles to me.  He wasn't available for adoption because of a skin rash and food-guarding issues.  Naturally, I had to have him, and took him home on Feb. 22, 2009.  Nine months after adopting the pup I named Watson Sherman he felt so much like family we made a Christmas card to send friends.  Watson's first name came from a beagle a pal had long ago named after Doc Watson, the musician.  Watson's middle name was a character from an old TV cartoon series about Rocky (a flying squirrel) and Bullwinkle (a moose).  Dogs need middle names so you can say, "Watson Sherman, get off that school bus!"  More on that later...

After this 2010 Christmas card, we face a year of misadventures.  Near Christmas, Watson hits a metal display at the hardware store, injuring his right eye, but a trip to the emergency vet at illegal speeds saves his vision with medicated goo. In the summer of 2011, we encounter a mountain lion when walking after dark on our block.  Watson stops and  looks up into a tree maybe 25 feet away.  Seeing the green glint of the eyes and the tail curling down, and realizing we don't have wild monkeys in Colorado, I pull him back and we walk home, while I turn around frequently to see if the big cat follows.  The next morning, we see what looks like a stuffed toy on the lawn across the street from the tree where we'd seen the lion.  Approaching it, I realize it's the remains of one of two fawns that had sheltered in our yard, and then call the Division of Wildlife.  Not long after, they catch a cougar near University Hill.  Just before Thanksgiving, Watson barks and barks at 3 AM until this writer (who sleeps like a hibernating bear) finally rolls out of bed and runs downstairs to discover someone trying to break open the front door.  When the fast-arriving police open the door, the latch falls out.  Score two saves for Watson (you count that lion, right?) and one for Papa (well, I did adopt him).

By this time Watson has acquired a best puppy friend in Lovie the Lab (background above) and we spend lots of time with Lovie's best human friend Isaac in the corner park.  Also, later in 2011 Ben finishes grad school and brings Buster to the office.  He's seated and looking angelic below, while Watson stands near a tennis ball he's demolished.  One day we have all three dogs at the office, running up and down the stairs, chasing the ball and making noise, and eventually Ben looks a little flustered.  I need to go meet an engineer, though, so I just tell Ben to call Animal Control if it gets too hectic around here...

California work continues, so Watson and I take road trips out to Monterey County, Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley.  When in Monterey, WS stays at Casa de Amigos while I visit construction sites.  He doesn't even look back at me as he goes through the front door, because Casa de Amigos apparently gives him a chance to be a leader of a pack...

One day I'm walking WS on our block and he decides to get on the school bus.  The kids start yelling, "Let's take him to school; we'll bring him back" and the bus driver just laughs.  I pull Watson off and he gives me a look of injured dignity.  He's pretending that he was there to cheer up the kids on their way to school, but I know he was mainly there to sniff the lunch boxes.  When we get home, he pouts for a good while...

Somewhere along the line I figure that humans must have been kind to Watson in his 2.5 months of puppy life before I adopted him, because he rolls over on his back and patiently waits for belly rubs even when he meets a total stranger.  Sometimes in a completely inappropriate place, like the middle of a driveway, for example...

Things are serene and peaceful on our California trips; maybe too serene for Watson.  In 2018 we need to rescue him when he jumps onto a roof.  In Los Gatos, we visit a friend to discuss a remodel, and WS dashes to the end of the driveway before I realize there's no guardrail to protect anyone from the 8-foot drop (a code violation, actually).  WS somehow sees the danger (or is lucky) and leaps across the 3-foot space onto the roof of a garden shed.  I yell at him to stay (unlike in obedience class, he stays) and we get a ladder to carry him down.  Later, at Lulu's Café in Santa Cruz, he celebrates his luck by fooling some admiring kids into thinking he's a puppy and giving him belly rubs...

One of Watson's favorite places in Boulder was Trident Booksellers and Café, where he could collect loving attention, including belly rubs and treats, from college students.  I could bring him to the Trident and get lots of work done on my computer, because he'd barely notice I was there...

WS had a kind of agelessness about him, and so much energy we nicknamed him the Permapup.  We'd play Special Ball in a usually-abandoned tennis court with a Kong toy (think of stacked doughnut shapes of decreasing size) and he liked guessing which way it would bounce.  Catching the ball on the first bounce yielded an extra treat; Watson learned that rule quickly.  When he got the ball, he'd huff and chuff and toss his head like a prancing pony... 

The photo below shows a sleepy nap on a California road trip when Watson was 11 years old.  I'd still get requests from complete strangers "to pet the puppy." I'd tell them that Watson was scamming them, and puppyhood was a decade behind him, but of course they could pet him. Before I'd get the words out, though, he'd be on his back, waiting and wagging.

The photo below was taken in summer of the same year, 2020, after the Pandemic arrived.  Watson managed to stay in fine shape because longer walks filled a vacant schedule. Four or five walks a day led to extra food, and I'd started cooking for him, which turned out to be cheaper than buying "premium" dog food...  

Watson was ready to take a ride in the old Jag to celebrate his 16th birthday back in December, on a day with oddly springlike conditions.  When springtime actually arrived, he kept on doing his job of making new friends.  One day, an RTD bus driver got off at our stop on Broadway, and I thought he was going to help a passenger with the lift.  But the driver introduced himself as Mike and said, "I see you walking all the time, and I just wanted to pet your dog."   In the summer Watson slowed down and we took shorter and slower walks in the shady gardens. Then he got some intestinal bug we fought with our vet's help for weeks, and last Friday night he heaved up his dinner and made some loud groans that I'd never heard from him.  I took him to the Humane Society vets the next day, and a vet who'd known us both from the beginning said, "If this were my dog I'd let him go today, because he's in real discomfort."  He ate some cheese treats with his usual enthusiasm, and I held him while he went to sleep for the last time.  Watson, it was a gift to know you.  I'll always be grateful to you for our 66 seasons of walks in all kinds of weather and landscapes, for improving my pitching arm, and for making me new friends in all those seasons. For the rest of my days, just hearing your name will be like getting a letter from home.

*Footnote:  

Our local Humane Society is the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, providing adoption services, taking donations and training volunteers at 2323 55th Street, Boulder, CO 80301.  Tel. 303-442-4030 and website boulderhumane.org.

Note to readers:  

This post, #402, marks the 10th year from the start of this blog, which has so far received over 340,000 visits. Though it is mostly concerned with subjects like car design, architecture, movies, painting and photography, a subject like adopting a dog (and not just a dog, but the world's best dog) seemed to fit under the Art of Living category.  

Photo Credits:  

All photos are by the author except for the following:

Top:  Helen Andrews

3rd from top:  Humane Society of Boulder Valley

6th from top:  Casa de Amigos, Monterey, CA

2nd from bottom:  Veronika Sprinkel

Local Heroes: Sebring Winners at the Revs Institute

The Revs Institute in Naples, Florida is only 118 miles from the Sebring racetrack in the south-central part of the state.  The Cunningham* C4-R in their Collier Collection won the 1953 Sebring 12 Hours and was the first American car to do so.  It was built by B.S. Cunningham & Co. only 110 miles from Sebring, in West Palm Beach.  This meant that their Sebring effort was more convenient for the Cunningham team to stage than the one for their other target endurance race, the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Briggs Cunningham's C4-R racers, powered by a Weber-carbureted, 300 hp version of Chrysler's 331 hemi V8, were 900 lb. lighter, 6" narrower and 16" shorter than the previous C2, and came closer to his goal of winning at Le Mans than any other cars built by the team.  They were handicapped by the lack of disc brakes, but still took 4th place there in 1952, and 3rd as well as 5th place in 1954. The team did even better at home, where the C4 cars won a high percentage of races entered, including at Sebring, where John Fitch and Bill Spear won with this car, one of two alloy-bodied C4-R roadsters and a Kamm-tailed coupe called the C4-RK, also at the Revs, which has the best collection of Cunninghams anywhere.  

The surprise winner at the next year's Sebring was another local hero in a way, though it came from Italy.  Briggs Cunningham's team had acquired this 1954 OSCA* MT4 1500 from Alfred Momo's operation in NYC, where Momo's shop added the scalloped cutouts to the front fenders for brake cooling.  What they didn't need to add to the Maserati Brothers' handiwork was lightness.  The alloy-bodied OSCA on an 86" wheelbase weighed just 1,280 lb. compared with the Cunningham C4-R's 2,900.  Its 88.6 cu. in. inline four was more efficient at making power than Chrysler's hemi; with dual overhead cams and 8 spark plugs it made 130 hp, almost 1.5 per cubic inch.  Many of little car's competitors brought over twice the power to the race, including the C4-R, private Jaguar and Ferrari entries, the Aston Martin factory team, and the Lancia team's D24s, which experts favored to dominate it...

But the Cunningham team's OSCA entry brought more than lightness and mechanical efficiency to the fight...

Cunningham lined up a driver named Stirling Moss and partnered him with Bill Lloyd.  It was the English driver's first time racing an Italian car. Moss and Lloyd did well in practice, but their best lap times were over 20 seconds slower than the fastest Ferrari and Lancia, so nobody predicted the occupants of this tight little cockpit would win...

In the race, though, the blistering pace sidelined many of the more powerful competitors, while Moss, Lloyd and OSCA delivered a steady, reliable performance.  At the finish, the Moss / Lloyd OSCA was an astonishing 5 laps ahead of the 2nd place Lancia D24.  Moss captured the attention of American racers, and so did OSCA, because their MT4s finished in 4th and 5th place  as  well.  Overnight, SCCA drivers who could afford the $9K to $10K price wanted an OSCA.

Most of the roughly 6 dozen MT4s built featured OSCA's trademark "cheese grater" grille, and, unlike early Fifties Lancias and Ferraris, usually had left-hand drive.  Below we see the winning MT4 with the hood closed...

Ford followed in the tracks of Cunningham's '53 and Chaparral's '65 victory with their own '66 win at Sebring, becoming the 3rd American-engined car to take the checkered flag.  Unlike the C4-R and the Chevy-powered Jim Hall / Hap Sharp Chaparral 2A, the Ford GT-40* Mk. II had its chassis built outside the US (in England).  The Revs Collier Collection doesn't contain the GT-40 roadster driven to victory by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby because it no longer exists.  But it has this GT-40 Mk. II coupe, which after all won the Reims 12 Hours two weeks after retiring at Le Mans, so we're giving them credit for having a good specimen of the 427-powered beast, which is displayed with a lighter, 289-powered GT-40 Mk. I.  Weight is worth mentioning here because the Mk.II weighed at least 500 lb. more than the Mk. I, which Revs lists at 1,835 lb.

Only 5 GT40 roadsters were built, and only X-1, the Miles and Ruby mount shown below at Sebring, had an aluminum chassis.  At 1,900 pounds, X-1 was lots lighter than the "standard", steel-chassis, 427-powered GT40 Mk. II. Only one other Mk. II car was built with the aluminum chassis by Abbey Panels in England; it disappeared after being sent to Ford for testing.  After its victory at Sebring, X-1 was supposed to be rebuilt by Holman & Moody, but instead Ford allowed it to be destroyed to meet Customs regulations.  Too bad; it would've made a great exhibit at, for example, the Revs Institute.  A Ford GT Mk. IV with US-made chassis won Sebring in '67, and John Wyer's Gulf team of lightweight GT-40 Mk. I Mirages threw cold water on Henry Ford II's "bigger (and heavier) is better" approach by winning Le Mans in '68 and '69, amazingly, both times with the same individual car.  But we digress...

This somehow brings us to the winner of the 1968 Sebring 12 Hours, a Porsche 907K* which happens to sit in the Revs Collier Collection, looking fresh and sleek after a tedious restoration that involved removing a layer of fiberglass added to the car's lightweight (and fragile) form by a former owner who actually wanted to use it as a car.  Possibly not a wise idea, as the 907K's 1,320 pounds were moved by a 2.2 liter flat eight based on Porsche's 1.5 liter, 4-cam Formula 1 engine. The 2.2 liter version made 278 hp at 8,700 rpm, but was complex and temperamental for use in a road car.  When they won the '68 race at an average of 102.5 mph after taking the pole position, though, Jo Siffert and Hans Herrmann didn't seem too worried about any of that...

The 907 seems to have been a bit neglected by history, partly because it had a short career, first racing at the '67 Le Mans and giving way to the 908 during the '68 racing season.  In January of  '68, long-tailed 907s finished 1-2-3 in the Daytona 24 hours; this car is a short-tail; thus 907K.  If you've wondered why the 907 and 908 came after the 911 and 910, the short answer is Peugeot, who protested when Porsche showed off its 901 in fall of '63, claiming to have somehow copyrighted three-digit sequences with center zeroes (203, 403, 404 etc.).  Porsche renamed the 901 the 911, changed the 906 racer to the Carrera 6, and didn't abandon their nervousness about numbers until maybe someone in their legal dept. (if they had one) noticed all those BMWs (502, 503, 507) and Bristols (406 through 409) built without challenge from Peugeot.  So the 907 and 908 showed up out of sequence, years after the 911.

Even though it was the Hoods Off festival at the Revs when our trusty photographer friends visited, the 907's engine lid was down, the better to show off the car's aerodynamic form.  The photo below shows that even with the lid up, you don't get an especially clear picture of the engine.  This has been a problem with Porsches for a while...

The shot below shows the 907 engine from the front; it was time-consuming to construct and to rebuild between races, and for this reason (as well as its 2.2 liter displacement limit) it gave way to the 3 liter flat eight in the 908.  That engine, based upon the design of the production 911 flat six but with 2 more cylinders and 2 more cams, offered the Porsche team more horsepower and a more cost-effective way to go racing.  But that's a story for another day...

*Footnote:  

Briggs Cunningham's race cars and road cars were featured in "A Moment Too Soon: The Cars of Briggs Swift Cunningham", posted April 15, 2017.  For a survey of OSCA history beginning with the founding Maserati brothers, see our posts entitled "The Etceterini Files: When a Maserati is Not a Maserati", posted Dec. 29, 2022, and "Almost Famous" in the archives for April 20, 2016.  We delved into the history of Ford's GT40 in "Roadside Attraction: Shelby American Collection Part 2", posted Dec. 31, 2017, and the brief life of Porsche's 907 in "Paranormal Porsches Part 2: Porsche's Forgotten 907", posted May 11, 2019.

Photo credits: 

All photos were generously provided by Paul Anderson except for the following:

Top:  the author

2nd:  RIch Harman, featured at racingsportscars.com

3rd:  The Revs Institute

7th:  pinterest.com

8th & 9th:  the author

10th:  Ford Motor Company

14th:  Sports Car Market

15th:  Wikimedia Commons

Annals of Design: The Vanished Art of Hood Ornament Design

We like bears, having seen one in our back yard here in Boulder, where we also have a museum* full of AC cars, so we're beginning this survey with the brass bear radiator cap made by the AC company for one of its early motor cars.  In the design, our shy teddy bear motorist peers attentively through the gaps in a giant steering wheel encircling the letters "AC", which first stood for Autocars and then Auto Carriers, the delivery vehicle the company first offered to the public in 1904.  The designer is not listed, but we wonder if engineer John Weller, who designed the pioneering overhead cam six AC released in 1919 (same year as the SOHC Hispano-Suiza six) may have sketched it in his spare time.  Our bear mascot, like all ornaments presented here in color, is featured at the Revs Institute* collection in Naples, Florida.  

Robert the Policeman was designed in the 1910s by British cartoonist John Hassall, and named after British P. M. Sir Robert Peel, who had actually founded the London police force. The whimsical cartoon cop was available through S. Smith & Sons in London, an early purveyor of automotive accessories.  The figure's proportions and the graphic design of that red face seem predictive of cartoon characters that would appear decades later.

The Crossley Lady, adopted by Crossley Motors, shows another side of the British approach to visual design.  It is as concerned with expressing motion and grace at speed as Robert the Policeman is with expressing a kind of well-meaning haplessness.  The Lady appeared on the 20.9 (taxable, not actual) hp model in the late 20s and early 30s.  Crossley, which was no relation to the American Crosley, made cars from 1904 to 1938, and military vehicles from 1914 to 1945.  Bus production continued from the mid-20s until 1958.

Two figures above highlight the West's Eqyptian obsession from the 1920s, with titles like "Winged Egyptian" and "Egyptian Archer."  The Egyptian fad extended to the design of movie theaters and public buildings, as well as fashion and visual arts.  The heroically posed "Indian with Snake" from 1920 reflects a fascination with America's original inhabitants that, like the Egyptian fad, did not extend deep enough to offer much beyond decorative visuals. "Mr. Jorrocks", shown riding to the hunt below, was a comic character rendered in a realistic rather than cartoonish way.  Jorrocks was created by sports writer Robert Surtees, and sculpted as a mascot in 1922 by watercolor painter Charles Johnson Payne.

Despite the privations of wars and  depressions, the knack for whimsy never seemed to desert the Brits, at least not as evidenced by their radiator cap mascots.  Artist W.K. Windridge came up with the delightful skiing penguin below in the 1930s.  The silver-plated bronze casting depicts a very determined penguin heading down a mound of snow attached to a radiator cap.

Penguin car mascots were popular with designers, perhaps because these birds symbolized a hardy spirit able to survive harsh conditions. The one below is from American painter Arthur Faber, who described it as a stylized penguin...

Below we see a blocky sculpture of a horse from 1925-30 and a more slender and graceful version of a stork as designed in August 1919 by the young French sculptor Francois-Victor Bazin. The stork ornament adorned the radiator cap of the new Hispano-Suiza H6 that appeared at the 1919 Paris Auto Salon.  The stork was a fitting symbol for a car with engine design inspired by Hispano's V8 aero engines, featuring a single overhead cam and aluminum engine block in its inline six.  The H6 was the first car with power-assisted four-wheel brakes, a system later licensed to Rolls-Royce.

The stork was a fitting symbol for another reason. Aviator Georges Guynemer had adopted the stork for his French Air Corps squadron as it symbolized Alsace Lorraine, which had been under German control since the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Many of the planes in Guynemer's squadron were powered by Hispano-Suiza engines known for reliability. Sculptor Bazin had volunteered to serve in the Aeronautique Militaire as well, and had received his pilot's license a year before designing this elegant radiator mascot.  

The designer of the Flying Mascot radiator cap below was not noted, but the mascot received a favorable notice from Britain's The Autocar magazine in 1910.  The design was based on that of a 7-cylinder rotary Gnome aero engine; the bronze propeller and cylinders rotate around a fixed central shaft.

The designer of the rabbit mascot below was not noted in the display, but the appealing exaggeration of features on this circa 1925-30 hare, like the rendering of the cartoonish policeman mascot, anticipated approaches to cartoons and animations that emerged decades later...

The Belgian make Minerva may be remembered as much for its radiator cap ornament as for its smoky sleeve-valve engines.  Minerva was the Roman goddess of war strategy as well as wisdom and the arts.  The chrome-plated bronze ornament shown below was the winning entry in a 1921 design contest for sculptor Pierre de Soete, and became the official radiator cap for the marque from 1922 to 1933.

De Soete produced numerous mascot designs during this period including the Aigile (like "Aigle", the French for eagle but with an extra "i") below, designed for the Belgian Ford Automobile Club and offered through its magazine, Le Fordiste.  The silvered-bronze bird seems ready to launch into space from the half-globe atop the radiator cap, and is modeled in an angular Deco style that creates a vivid impression of movement.  In this it is unlike the Bentley mascot below it, which somehow never quite takes off...

British sculptor Charles Sykes designed the Bentley Flying B Single Rear Wing mascot in 1933, over 2 decades after designing a mascot for Rolls-Royce, which became the owner of W.O. Bentley's car firm in the Depression year of 1931.  This mascot was only used on the 3.5 liter Bentley for one year, and we suspect it looked a bit clunky to the Thirties audience that was increasingly interested in streamlining.  The small, single wing is unconvincing juxtaposed with the scale and blockiness of the B.  There was also a B ornament with 2 wings, but it wasn't much more graceful.  Luckily, Sykes had turned in a more elegant performance when he'd designed an ornament for Rolls...

Four years before World War I, Rolls-Royce Managing Director Claude Johnson was concerned that R-R customers might want to mount undignified hood ornaments on their cars (no cartoon cops or skiing penguins for him) and commissioned the same Charles Sykes to design something elegant.  The silver-plated bronze sculpture, titled "The Spirit of Ecstasy", first appeared early in 1911, and was modeled on the figure of Eleanor Thornton, who had worked at The Car Illustrated Magazine.  In the pose that became famous, the lady's gown billows behind her in the wind, like angel wings.  It was a more graceful and memorable symbol than the boxy flying B Sykes created for Bentley after that make was acquired by Rolls-Royce, and what could be the best-known hood ornament ever seems a good place to conclude our survey.

*Footnote:  This blog surveyed the Shelby American Museum's collection of AC Cobra and Ace cars in "Roadside Attraction—Shelby American Collection Part 1: AC and Cobra", posted 12/28/17.  Our survey of the Revs Institute's wide-ranging collection of cars began with "The Revs Institute, Part I:  First Impression", posted 3/6/17.  The posts on AC cars include "AC Part 4: Shelby's Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow" posted 8/20/17, "AC Cars Part 3: The Shelby AC Cobra" from 1/9/17, "Forgotten Classics—AC Part 2: There Was Life Before the Cobra", from 12/25/16, and the first piece, "Happy Accidents with Bristol Power: AC Ace & Aceca", from 12/24/16.  

Photo credits: 
All color photos were generously provided by Kelly Anderson.

The monochrome shots of the Hispano-Suiza stork ornament, and of the Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy ornament, are from Wikimedia.

The Beauty of Racing Engines Part 3: GP Designs + Oddities at the Revs Institute

This year's "Hoods Up" fest at the Revs Institute* in Naples, Florida launched on June 10th and will conclude on July 19th.  It's also called a "Hoods Off" event, because for many of the race cars on display, you remove the hood altogether to see the engine. We're beginning our tour with this Gurney Eagle Formula One car from 1967.  In that year, driver Dan Gurney's Belgian GP victory with his Eagle was the first win for an American constructor in Formula 1, and only the 2nd GP win by an American driving an American car.  Jimmy Murphy won the 1921 French GP with a Duesenberg, but it wasn't called Formula 1 back then.  And Gurney was the first American to win with a car from his own firm, in this case All American Racers. While the Eagle Indy racers for 1967 used a 4-cam, 4.2 liter Ford V8, the Eagle GP car ran with a 3 liter, 60-degree V12 with 4 valves per cylinder designed by Aubrey Woods and Harry Weslake at Weslake Engineering in England.  It produced around 410 hp at a lofty 10,000 rpm, enough to turn the 1,192 pound Eagle into a road rocket.  Prior to that victory at Spa in Belgium, Gurney had lightened the F1 Eagle (which shared its chassis with the beefy Indy Eagles*) by employing more magnesium and titanium in this version.  

The Weslake engine's valve layout would prove to be predictive of the next trend in GP engines.  When the Cosworth Ford DFV debuted with Jim Clark's Lotus victory in the 3rd race of 1967 at the Dutch GP, it combined 4 valves per cylinder with a lighter weight than the Weslake.  It would soon become the dominant engine in the 3.0 liter phase of Formula One. 

Six years before Gurney's Eagle F1 effort, another American, Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow* had built a trio of GP Scarabs with bespoke 2.5 liter desmodromic-valve fours in what looked like an attempt to prove Briggs Cunningham's dictum that you can make a small fortune building racing cars, but only if you start with a large one. By the time development delays allowed the Scarab onto F1 tracks in 1960, the car's front-engined layout and mechanical hiccups had doomed the effort, and in 1961 Formula One changed to 1.5 liter engines, of which Scarab had none. This 1961 Scarab Intercontinental shows what Reventlow's RAI might have done with a mid-engined F1 car.  It used a modified Buick aluminum V8, and eventually finished 4th in a Formula Libre race in Australia in the hands of SCCA star Chuck Daigh, behind former World Champ Jack Brabham, John Surtees (Champion in '64), and Bruce McLaren.  Not bad for a first try...

Scarab built 8 cars including 3 sports racers with Chevy V8 power in front (they won the SCCA Championship in '58), those 3 F1 cars, a successful mid-engined V8 sports racer, and this Intercontinental. All showed careful attention to workmanship and detail, but this Intercontinental is an essay in what might have been.  If chief engineer Phil Remington had followed the mid-engined trend, or Reventlow himself had applied what he'd learned in a brief fling with a Cooper F2 car, Scarab might have had a mid-engined GP car.  We're supposed to be concentrating on engines here, so below is a shot of the Leo Goossen-designed, leaned-over inline desmodromic four that powered the front-engined F1 Scarab in 1960...

Cooper earned its place in the history books not by providing anything special in the engine department, but by placing the engine behind the driver and ahead of the transmission.  This allowed the driver to sit lower in the car, and provided a lower center of gravity along with better weight distribution for more responsive handling. Supply of the 2.5 liter twin-cam inline four was outsourced to Coventry Climax, which also powered the first Lotus GP cars, which were front-engined and less successful than the Cooper.  But then again, few GP cars were more successful; Jack Brabham won back to back World Championships in 1959 and '60 driving Coopers like this '59 T-51.

Though Cooper would take the first F1 Driver's Championship for a British car in 1959, it was the almost-famous Vanwall* that would win the first Manufacturer's Championship for a British team in 1958, when Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks each won 3 races. The Vanwall, combining the names of team owner / bearing manufacturer Tony Vandervell and his Thinwall bearings, was both an example of the British talent for muddling through, and a prediction of the global car industry to come.  In the muddling through dept., the  inline four was composed of 4 water-jacketed cylnder castings, each 500cc, from Norton Manx motorcycles (Vandervell was on Norton's board), a special twin-cam alloy head design, and a crankcase adapted from a Rolls-Royce military engine but now cast in aluminum. Displacement was bumped up from F2 specs. to 2.5 liters for F1.  The driver sat on the transmission in Colin Chapman's chassis design, so Frank Costin was hired to clean up the aerodynamics on the resulting tall racer.

It worked, though, because despite giving away power to more complex engines from Maserati and Ferrari, the Vanwall's aerodynamics made it the fastest GP car in a straight line.  And Vandervell was not afraid to go global in his search for effective components.  Vanwall made its own disc brakes based on designs licensed from Goodyear's American aircraft brakes, and Vandervell pressured Daimler Benz into allowing the use of Bosch mechanical fuel injection because they were, after all, clients for his bearings, and they woudn't want the supply of bearings for Mercedes to stop...

We're concentrating on engine designs here, but showng the body of Lancia's D50, designed by Vittoriano Jano in 1954, because context is everything in this case.  If you look closely you'll note that the engine is at an angle to the longitudinal centerline of the car, about 12 degrees. This was so that the driveshaft to the 5-speed transaxle could run at that angle too, leaving more space to get the driver down and out of the wind.  If you're wondering why Jano didn't just place the engine behind the driver, as Cooper would soon do, the answer is that Lancia had powered a mid-engined F2 car designed by Enrico Nardi*(they even tried disc brakes), but decided to relate their F1 car to the front-engine, rear-transaxle approach on their Aurelia production cars... 

He may have missed the boat on the mid-engined trend, but engineer Jano spared no effort on the 2.5 liter, 4-cam alloy V8 sitting at that funny angle in the engine bay. Along with sparing no effort, the Lancia design team spared no expense, and this, along with the 4-cam V6 racing sports cars that took 1-2-3 in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana, helped bankrupt the firm.  Gianni Lancia handed the D50 cars over to Enzo Ferrari's team, where Juan Manuel Fangio fulfilled their promise by winning the 1956 World Championship with them.

Fred Frame took 2nd place in the 1931 Indianapolis 500 with the 1930 Duesemberg engine below.  It was an inline eight with dual overhead cams and four valves per cylinder, showing how the influence of pre-WWI French engineer Ernest Henry percolated through American designs from Harry Miller to become mainstream racing practice.  

In its final version, the engine in the Fred Frame Deusenberg made 200 hp from 168.7 cubic inches with the aid of a centrifugal supercharger. The car received a new chassis and body in 1933 to go with single-seat specifications.  After the car's racing career was over, it disappeared for a while, only to be found in a Santa Rosa barn by Briggs Cunningham.

Arthur Duray's 2nd place finish in the 1913 Indy 500 with this 3 liter Peugeot had a bigger influence than the Delage that won with twice the displacement.  Ernest Henry's design for Robert Peugeot was an example of how to get more with less.  A year before hidebound, traditionalist thinking led to the catastrophe of World War I, Henry's fresh approach to problem-solving brought us twin overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, a counterbalanced crankshaft, and dry-sump lubrication.  As we shall see, just five years earlier a Mors GP engine had required 12.5 liters to produce just 10 hp more than this Peugeot's 90.  In the years after WWI, most successful engines at the Indy 500 were patterned after this Peugeot.

The Coupe de l'Auto Peugeot is jewel-like in its detail refinement...

We'll finish our tour with a look at an even earlier French design for a GP engine, the Mors Grand Prix engine from 1908.  The inline four with pushrod-operated overhead valves (and visible valve springs) produced all of 100 hp from its 12.5 liters.  It's astonishing to realize that the pioneering Peugeot twin-cam racing engine was only 5 years in the future when Mors ended racing in 1908.  A victim of the financial panic of 1907, the firm was reorganized under a guy named Andre Citroen.  The world would hear more from him in years to come...

*Footnote:  For more shots of racing engines taken during a previous "hoods off" session at the Revs Institute, see "The Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 1:  Classic Era (Delage, Bugatti and Alfa)" posted August 18, 2019, and "The Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 2:  Postwar Era from Abarth to Offy and McLaren", posted August 25, 2019.  An Eagle Indy racer with the same body design as the beautiful Eagle F1 car is pictured in "Monterey Car Week 2024: Historic Racers in the Paddock at Laguna Seca", posted Sept. 15, 2024.  For a survey of the other Scarabs built by RAI, see "Timing Is Everything: Reventlow Scarab Saga", posted June 2, 2017.  For more on the Vanwall GP cars, including the aerodynamics that made them successful, see "Air Craft: Vanwall and the Formula One Championship", posted Aug. 31, 2017.  And a photo of the mid-engined Nardi-Lancia Formula 2 car appears in "The Etceterini Files Part 14---Enrico Nardi and His Cars: Present at the Creation", posted Feb. 26, 2018.

 
Photo credits: 
All color photos were generously provided by Paul Anderson.

The monochrome shot of the Eagle Weslake Type 58 V12 is from forix.com.