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.