The Revs Institute, Part I: First Impression

The Revs Institute in Naples, Florida envisions its mission as providing a resource for automotive historians and a training ground for the next generation of car restorers.  In keeping with that twofold mission, it maintains a collection of around 110 historic cars, many of them race cars. The collection is as wide-ranging as it is deeply considered, though, so you will find everything from early bicycles and an 1896 Panhard & Levassor automobile to a 1988 Arrows A-10B Formula One racer and a 1989 Trabant from East Germany.  The latter, with its two-cycle twin cylinder engine, is simultaneously the newest car you may find on display and also one of the least sophisticated. Irony is not your first impression of the Revs, however.  When you enter the foyer you are confronted by the Class of '64, three competitors from the under 2-liter class during the 1964 road racing season in Europe and America.  Gleaming in bright red, the Abarth Simca 2000, Porsche 904, and Alfa Romeo TZ-1 exemplify three different approaches to chassis and engine design. The rear-engined Abarth Simca combines a modified Simca sedan chassis platform with an all-Abarth twin cam inline 4 making 192 hp.  The mid-engined 904 is the first Porsche to feature a fiberglass body, but houses a tweaked version of the familiar four-cam, air-cooled boxer four which was introduced in the mid-Fifties 550 sports racer.  The Zagato-bodied Alfa on the right features, like the Abarth, a water-cooled twin cam design, here based on the Giulia aluminum block, and is the most traditional of the three in chassis design, with a front engine in a tubular chassis, but trading the SZ model's live rear axle for a fully independent setup* with inboard disc brakes.  Weight was about 1,650 pounds.  At 1.6 liters it's the smallest engine of the three, but it was a fierce competitor...

Step to the left of the entry and you find a display with a different theme.  Here we have two cars which pioneered the use of plastic materials in chassis structure.  The first is Colin Chapman's Lotus Elite (Type 14).  The body, designed in 1957 by Peter Kirwin-Taylor, pioneered the use of fiberglass as a structural material.*

Just behind the Lotus, you stop to take in a McLaren F1, the mid-engined super car from 1995 with driver's seat located between two passengers.  Designed by Peter Stevens, it pioneered carbon fiber as a structural material.  As a result, it was able to offer a curb weight only slightly higher than a Mazda Miata while providing a strong, compact chassis to house the BMW-sourced V12 making 5 times as much power.  It was enough to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1995...

If you make a right turn after entering you will encounter a 1965 Ferrari 250 LM, Ferrari's attempt to convince European racing authorities that a purpose-built mid-engined racing car was really a variation of the familiar front-engined 250 GT.  Even the name was a bit of a deception, as Ferrari engines were named after their individual cylinder capacities, and the 3.3 liter V12 in the LM was really a 275.  Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt were convinced that their LM would be slower than the hotter Ferrari P2 prototypes and Ford GT40s at the 1965 Le Mans, so they decided to push the car to the breaking point.  Unlike its competitors, it never broke, and they won the race...

The Institute's LM was driven on Canadian streets by its original owner, and lived in New Zealand and Germany before finding a home here.  Like the other cars at the Revs, it gets exercised at least once a year.  The nose on the Scaglietti alloy body was repaired after an accident by Piero Drogo's bodyworks, and is profiled a bit differently than standard, with a more oval air intake.

After spending nearly an hour pondering the cars in the foyer,  you realize that there are over a hundred more cars to see, and that after lunch you'll have only about three hours to do that.  One of the docents mentions that there's one of every type of Porsche sports racer built, up through the Type 917, in the adjacent room, so you decide to get moving…

*Footnote & Errata:  We posted this with an error:  The Alfa TZ-1 did not share the live axle of the earlier SZ model; instead it pioneered (for Alfa) a fully independent rear suspension also featured on the TZ-2. It was the first Alfa offered to the public with fully independent suspension.  Sorry for this error!  For more on the Lotus Elite design, see our July 31, 2016 post entitled "Plastic Promise, Plastic Perils."

All Photos except 4 & 5:  the author
4th and 5th photos from top:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

Forgotten Classic: When Borgward Went Racing

Germany's Borgward, built in Bremen, was a liver dumpling of a car: wholesome, sincere, plump and a bit clunky.  Enthusiasts and historians alike bypassed it in favor of the more eccentric Porsche, the more charismatic Mercedes and the sometimes-elegant BMW.  If not for some bad management decisions and tricks of fate, however, we might be driving Borgwards today. Actually, in engineering terms, many of us are driving Borgwards today, because Borgward's engineers formulated the definitive modern inline four-cylinder engine in the late Fifties, a good twenty years ahead of the industry.  Features included twin overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, and direct mechanical fuel injection.  But these features were reserved for the racing engines that went into founder Carl Borgward's RS race cars, as well as the Cooper Borgward that Stirling Moss used to win the Formula II Championship in 1959 for privateer Rob Walker. Production cars like the Hansa 2400 six and the Isabella 1.5 liter four made do with pushrod-operated overhead valves.  The sturdy Isabella (1954-62), with its swing-axle rear suspension, might have seemed an alternative to Volvo in the USA, but eventually fell victim to the Swedish car's bigger dealer network, and to the inefficiency of Borgward's manufacturing policies.  These included completely different engine designs for the senior Borgward lines, the smaller Goliath, and the Lloyd mini cars.  This "separate companies" strategy was conceived to insure adequate supply of raw materials during early postwar rationing, but resulted in high tooling costs and almost no interchangeable parts between product lines.  It also resulted in a plethora of interesting engines, including a two cycle, fuel-injected twin (Goliath), an overhead cam air-cooled inline twin (Lloyd), and two distinct water-cooled boxer fours for Lloyd and Goliath.  

Hansa fastback sedan, 1952-55

Isabella, 1954-62 (1960 shown)

But it was the lightweight, twin cam fuel injected RS racing engine that caught English race team owner Rob Walker's eye.  He thought it would make a powerful alternative to the Coventry Climax fours then used in his Cooper Formula II cars, and approached Borgward about supplying engines.

The engine had first appeared in a limited run of RS (Rennsport) two-seaters, and these had competed in Mexico's Carrera Panamericana as well as on European tracks... 

The 1.5 liter cars gave the Porsches something to worry about, and the sleek alloy bodies were sometimes left unpainted to save weight...

Borgward's aerodynamic experiments included the tapered tail shown above and the Kamm-tailed car below.

But the RS engine achieved its greatest success in the Cooper chassis which established the template for the modern, mid-engined racing car.  With Stirling Moss in the driver's seat, the car won the Formula Two Championship in 1959, the same year that a Climax-engined Cooper won the Formula One Championship with Jack Brabham driving.

The resulting fame should have spurred sales of the Isabella, or at least garnered some orders for racing engines, but Borgward was spending critical funds on a bigger six cylinder P100 introduced in mid-1959.  That model sold only about 2,500 cars by the time of the firm's bankruptcy in August 1961; an additional 2,000 cars were assembled in Mexico.  At the time of the collapse it was widely reported that intervention by the Quandt family, which had recently taken over BMW, made sure that Carl Borgward could not get a loan to continue operations.  But a bit of Borgward influence survives in many cars sold today; the RS racing engine paved the way for modern twin cam, sixteen-valve fours, including (ironically) those made by BMW.  And Borgward's Lloyd 900 engine served as the template for the early horizontally-opposed fours from Subaru in Japan. Subaru maintains that boxer architecture in all its automobile engines sold in the US, along with four valves per cylinder.

Photo credits:

Top & 3rd from top:  wikimedia

2nd:  de.academic.ru

4th: borgward.com

5th through 7th:  pinterest.com

8th: Auta5p.eu

Roadside Attraction----Denver's Linger Eatuary: Let Them Eat Crickets (and Other Delights)

My old friend Mike Jackson, who was for nearly three decades the State Architect for Illinois, visited Denver for a conference recently.  As Mike likes old things made new through the application of foresight (he was a champion of preserving historic buildings years before "adaptive reuse" became a catchphrase) and wit (he drove a Bulletnose Studebaker for awhile), I suggested we try dinner at Linger, a restaurant housed in a clever adaptation of the old Olinger Mortuary in Denver's Lower Highlands neighborhood…or LoHi in hipspeak.  Linger's satirical approach to mortality begins before you get inside.  On the roof, the old "Olinger Mortuaries" sign glows in white and blue neon…but the "O" has been turned off, and "mortuaries" has been finessed into "eatuaries."  Linger bills itself as "Denver's finest eatuary."  

Inside, the humor continues.  Water is served in carafes that look suspiciously like formaldehyde bottles cadged from a morgue.  The menu mixes cultures (Latin American, East Asian, Caribbean) and attitudes (vegan to carnivore with a few stops at vegetarian) with cheerful and heedless abandon, and there's the expected range of artsy microbrews as well as a long wine list.  When Mike told me he'd skipped lunch in training for this experience, I decided to drop any concerns about my new boring diet (not even worth describing) and Just Say Yes. We ordered a Bao Bun full of Mongolian BBQ Duck and another called "Dragon" (no reptiles involved, but unagi sauce, tempura avocado, wasabi etc.), a crispy Vietnamese Crepe which shared space in a bowl with lotus root chips, baked bean curd and butternut squash, and a plate of Thai Fried Rice (poached egg over charred pole beans, thai basil, five spice cashews, coconut).  Here's a Dragon Bun:

It was a feast of subtle and memorable flavors, but some flavors were more memorable than others.  Mike's favorite was the Dragon Bun, and I placed it close to the top for sneaky flavor entrapment, like a tune you can't identify but which won't leave you alone.  Maybe the mystery ingredient is the unagi sauce (that's eel); another mystery is what happened to the eel itself, as there was plenty of tasty vegetable crunch but no meat in evidence.  Then there was the Thai Fried Rice, which had plenty of crunch defining the edges of a soft, subtle flavor territory which got even more mellow when you mixed in the poached egg...

There was an order of bacon-wrapped figs which made me glad I'd ditched my diet  Just This Once, and the Vietnamese Crepe which had a secretive, circular character that provided the last bite with a kind of built-in nostalgia for the first.  It turned out to be my favorite.  But Mike stared at the menu; he was still hungry.

"Wow, you really didn't eat lunch, did you?" 

"Here, look at this; you missed the Cricket and Cassava Empanada.  Gotta try it."

Mike took some pictures of the menu and texted them back to his family.  Apparently crickets are not a common menu item in Springfield, Illinois.  I was beginning to regret my Just Say Yes policy…but we ordered anyway.  The menu listed "micro ranch crickets" as a central ingredient in the empanada.  I wondered if the "micro" part referred to the size of the ranch or the size of the crickets.  Maybe they'd be too small to notice, I hoped…

But the v. nice Gen. Mgr. Shannon Jones came over to chat with us, and maybe to buck me up just a bit ("they're a lot like roasted sunflower seeds", she said) and I thought fondly of sunflower seeds (and peanuts and really, anything but crickets) as I took a couple of hopeful swigs of dry cider. Then the informative, ever-helpful waiter showed up with a complimentary plate of toasted crickets to tide us over while we awaited the main event…

That's not a very big picture, but then again they weren't very big crickets.  Big enough to notice, though, so I tried a few.  Yes, they are kind of nut-like and crunchy, but the flavor is not as perky as your average sunflower seed.  Maybe that's because they're not as salty.  We were just getting our minds around these when the empanadas arrived...

These turned out to be less dramatic, with the crickets hidden inside and also in the cricket flour used in the dough.  There's an argument to be made for crickets as a more sustainable source of protein than, say, cattle or pigs, but I think the empanada would be a more effective case in point for that argument if they hadn't also used fried pork belly inside it.  Overall, the taste was mellow and subtle, not unlike a veggie burger, with extra flavor provided by cilantro-lime creme and some welcome crunch from some unidentified toasted seeds (pomegranate?) in the foreground.  When the bill arrived, it was on a mock-up of a toe tag from the old mortuary.  We decided on dessert at Little Man Ice Cream* right next door, and maybe as evidence that the evening of wild experimentation was over, selected a vanilla and a chocolate...

*Footnote:  For notes on Little Man Ice Cream, see "Little Man and Big Dog in Denver" in these posts for May 14, 2016.

Photo credits:

Top:  The author
2nd & 3rd from top:  Linger Eatuary
4th from top:  yelp.com
5th:  Mike Jackson
Bottom:  Mike Jackson

Frazer Nash, Part 2: When a Replica Is Not a Replica

In the late 1970s I lived near the train tracks in Evanston, Illinois in an apartment building which also housed a shop where an affable mechanic named Dave specialized in classic, sports and other odd cars.  The location was especially convenient as I often took the train to work, and when my used-but-loved Jaguar got the hiccups I just moved it from the garage across the street to the back one, where Dave would have a look.  He drew the line at working on my old Renault, as I recall (here's where I remember how much I rode my bike). There were always interesting cars lurking around Dave's shop, including a Zagato-bodied OSCA coupe* and once, a Lotus Elan which had been trampled by a panicked (or jealous) horse.  Possibly the rarest one I encountered was nearly identical to the car pictured below. As nearly identical as something made by hand and subject to special customer requests can be, and thus the name: Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica. By "replica", AFN Ltd., the maker of all things Frazer Nash, was signaling that the nearly 3 dozen customer versions they built from 1949 to '54 were replicas of the car they'd raced at Le Mans in 1949. This was a replica that wasn't a replica, you see... 

It was as if, in order to assure you that your Beetle was genuine, Volkswagen had labeled each of the 21 million copies they churned out as a Type 1 VW Prototype Replica...  

No matter; the Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica was light enough and sturdy enough to do well in endurance racing, taking 3rd at the 1949 Le Mans 24-hour race, and winning the 1951 Targa Florio and the 1952 Sebring 12 Hours.  The car I saw in Dave's shop belonged to Chicago collector Ben Rose, and like all Le Mans Reps, featured a 2 liter six derived from the prewar BMW 328.  It was a tight little torpedo of a car, with low-cut doors, cycle fenders and a little plate identifying the engine builder as the Bristol Aeroplane Company. During the vintage racing boom of the 1970s, after Frazer Nash had abandoned manufacturing cars to concentrate on selling Porsches, the UK restoration shop Crosthwaite & Gardiner built six new replicas of this model using the original chassis and body design along with the Bristol engine.  These cars are known as Le Mans Replica Replicas.  They truly are replicas...

The Le Mans Rep was the most famous and numerous of the postwar cars built by AFN, but there were others worth noting.  The Fast Roadster introduced in 1949 quickly morphed into the Fast Tourer and then into this Mille Miglia.  If you're into English cars of the 50s you'll notice the similarity to the MGA which came 6 years later, especially in the fender shapes front and rear and the way the bonnet and surrounding valence curves down to the wide, flattened version of the traditional grille.  Later versions of the Mille Miglia, like the one below, reverted to the vertical grille and a smaller bonnet opening.   But the Aldington brothers, who ran AFN, were such good sports they apparently never took up the issue of the cribbed design with the British Motor Company.  In any case, the latter company's MGA outsold the much more expensive Mille Miglia (11 examples made) by almost 9,000 to 1.

By the mid-1950s AFN was becoming aware that the 20 plus-year old Bristol engine design had reached the limit of its development, so they looked at other alternatives, checking out the more modern 3.4 liter Armstrong Siddeley six, which they judged to be too heavy.  A prototype aimed at larger-scale production and a lower price was built with a 2.6 litre Austin four for the 1952 Motor Show, but it was immediately upstaged by Donald Healey's spectacular Healey Hundred with the same engine, and that car became the Austin-Healey 100-4. The Targa Florio model which had formed the basis of the Austin experiment was modernized into the Mark II, with sleeker nose and tail and the old standby Bristol six, and one of these was brought to California and successfully raced by Marion Lowe.  

So AFN continued to offer the Bristol engine while searching for more power.  They offered a Le Mans coupe (9 built) on the Le Mans Rep chassis with alloy bodywork, and a delectable competition roadster, the Sebring (3 built) on the Le Mans Mark II parallel tube chassis with De Dion rear axle.  And if one of the major manufacturers complained that they had licensed that name, AFN could reply that they had, after all, won the race*…The Sebring may have been aimed at American racers, but in the two-liter class their attention had been captured by the AC Ace Bristol (see our post for 12-24-16), which cost around half as much.  

There was a last-ditch effort to outfit the Le Mans chassis with a 3.2 liter BMW V-8, and two were built, based upon the Porsche 356 body shell (as the English concessionaire, AFN had easy access to those) but with a long bonnet and trad grille.  This car was too expensive to be competitive, even against Aston Martin, and looked like the compromise that it was.  Those of us who remember the Frazer Nash will instead remember those sharply-focused racing torpedoes, and the iconoclastic chain-drive cars* that came before them.

*Footnotes:  For the OSCA Zagato 1600 GT, see "Almost Famous", our post for April 20, 2016. AFN's customers must have taken the naming business seriously; of the 9 Le Mans coupes produced, 6 competed in their namesake race.  Marque expert David Thirlby (Frazer Nash, Haynes Publishing, UK, 1977) estimated a total postwar production figure of 85 to 87 cars.  And for a brief history of the pre-war chain-drive Frazer Nash, please see the previous post, "Not Your Grandpa's Nash", from January 27, 2017.

Photo credits:
Top &  2nd from top:  the author
3rd:  flickriver.com
4th:  wikimedia
5th:  bringatrailer.com
Bottom:  frazernasharchives.co.uk  ('54 Sebring on left; '55 Le Mans coupe on right)

Chain-Drive Frazer Nash: Not Your Grandpa's Nash

As part of our long-running series on car manufacture as a tool for achieving bankruptcy, we thought of presenting the Frazer Nash saga. Then we noticed something odd: the company never quite went out of business.  It's true that founder Archibald Frazer-Nash and his modest motor works skidded into receivership in 1927, three years after starting production of his spindly little roadsters.  But then the Aldington brothers bought the concern in 1929, and kept it going through the end of the chain-drive era and (against all odds) into postwar success as England's Porsche distributor.  The chain-drive cars, though, were among the first sports cars to be recognized as classics, and it's their aura which interests us here. Minimalism wasn't much of a word in 1930, but it's hard to look at a Frazer Nash chassis from that year without having it float to the top of your mind.  It's a car that made an impression because of the things it lacked.  The list begins famously with the absent gearbox and continues with the absent differential, missing driver's door on most models, and largely absent weather protection. Forget about effete nonsense like bumpers, radios and heaters.  In fact, forget about having the shifter and the emergency brake inside the car. If you wanted to operate the shift, you'd hang your arm outside, and if it was raining (nearly every Frazer Nash lived in the British Isles) your arm got wet.  But then again, Frazer Nash tops were sketchy (when present at all) and time-consuming to erect, so in the event of rain you were likely getting soaked anyway...

Wait a minute, we just mentioned the shifter after telling you there was no gearbox.  A contradiction? Time for a bit of history.  In 1910 Archie Frazer-Nash formed a partnership with H.R. Godfrey to make the G.N. cycle car.  In those early motoring days, cycle cars were a modest step up from drafty, hazardous motorcycles.  They offered the added stability of 3 wheels (the Morgan trike) or 4 (Amilcar, G.N.), and usually space for two smallish, friendly people.  In order to save weight and cost, Godfrey and Nash came up with a chain drive and dog-clutch system, with different diameter sprockets offering various speeds as on a bicycle. There was a separate idler shaft for the reverse effect; the diagram below also shows the quarter-elliptic springs which were the source of the car's memorable ride qualities (think of an unhappy wild pony).  When a move upmarket failed and G.N. wound down, Archie Frazer-Nash took his chain-drive system and some G.N. parts, and started making cars on his own.  It was 1924...

Specialist car builders in Roaring Twenties England were catering to racing aristocrats, and to possibly less-expensive thrill-seeking by men (and some women) who'd managed to survive the Great War, and saw nothing especially scary about racing up a muddy hill in a flimsy little car which exposed you to the elements almost as much as a motorcycle.  Hill climbs became popular contests, and none was more famous than the one at Shelsley Walsh, which gave its name to the twin-supercharged s.o.h.c. 4 cylinder Frazer Nash Shelsley model.  Unlike G.N. which made its own two-cylinder engine, Frazer Nash usually sourced its engines from specialist suppliers, including Meadows, Anzani and Blackburne, which made a refined twin overhead cam six, at 1,657 cc the biggest of chain-drive 'Nashes.  After being purchased by Frazer Nash, the British Anzani division built the overhead cam 4-cylinder Gough-designed engine across the street from the AFN works.  None of the cars had differentials, so there was a bit of sliding in the rain and on tight corners.  Steering was startlingly quick, as little as 7/8 of a turn lock to lock on some models. The great automotive writer Ralph Stein likened driving a Frazer Nash to being on two motorcycles bolted together...    

The magic never faded, but the business of selling chain-drives suffered from competition with upstarts like Jaguar, which offered bourgeois luxuries like interior shift levers, windshield wipers, and even heaters.  Production slowed to a trickle, with only one chain-drive car produced in 1939, by which time Frazer Nash had signed up to distribute BMWs in England, an effort derailed by war.  The loyalty and enthusiasm inspired by the chain-drive Frazer Nash greatly exceeded what would be expected from a total production of 350 cars.  A high percentage have survived, along with this limerick about them:

Nash and Godfrey hated cogs,

Made a car with chains and dogs.

It worked.  But I wonder, would it if 

They had made it with a diff.?*

*Footnote:  The Frazer Nash was, of course, unrelated to the American Nash or to the Frazer produced by Kaiser-Frazer in the USA.  The author of our limerick is unknown, but it was popular in England's Vintage Sports Car Club, and I found it in William Boddy's The Sports Car Pocketbook, from Sports Car Press, New York, 1961.  If you need help telling a Schneider from a Salmson or a Senechal, Boddy's your man.

Errata:  We'd originally credited the Albert Gough-designed Frazer Nash SOHC engine to an outside contractor, but as Frazer Nash vintage racer Erich Volkstorf points out in his expert notes in the Comments section, by the time British Anzani made this engine it was owned by AFN Ltd.

Bibliography:  Beyond  The Sports Car Pocketbook, our sources were the following:

The Great Cars by Ralph Stein, Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1967.

Automobile Quarterly Magazine, 1st Quarter 1973, Vol. XI, Number 1.  The Frazer Nash issue, including "Tales of the Chain Gang and Other Stories" by Bill Morgan, and "Chain Gang Impressions."

Frazer Nash by David Thirlby, Haynes Publishing, Somerset, England, 1977.

Photo Credits:
Top:  giddins@porsche.blogspot.com
2nd:  Giddins Racing
3rd:  oppositelock.com
Bottom:  Linda La Fond 

Unsung Genius: Pete Brock, Car Designer

American race car designer Peter Brock has rare talent, and he had the good fortune to live and work in Southern California during the golden age of American road racing.  His luck was not so good, however, when it came to persuading car manufacturers to put his creations into volume production.  The most famous product of his imagination, the Cobra Daytona coupe, is so well-regarded today that replicas far outnumber the meager six cars that were hammed out of alloy sheeting over a wooden buck in the mid-sixties.  But even though none of Brock's car designs broke out of single digits in terms of production, they had an influence far beyond their numbers. In his regard for formal purity and his intuitive sense of aerodynamic fitness, Peter Brock is America's answer to England's Malcolm Sayer, who created the iconic C, D, and E-Type Jaguars. Here are some favorites among the stable of Brock-designed competition cars...

In the photo above, the aluminum body of a Daytona Coupe* is fitted to the AC Cobra chassis during the early days at Shelby American.  Brock conceived the Kamm-tailed coupe body to reduce air resistance compared to the 289 Shelby AC roadster; it added 20 mph to the top speed and was timed at 191 mph. Below we see all six of the original Cobra Daytona coupes reunited at the 2015 Revival Weekend of racing at the hallowed Goodwood track in England, over fifty years after their first appearance.

In his next assignment for Shelby, Brock was tasked with designing a body for a mid-engined racer to compete in the SCCA program that became the Canadian-American (Can-Am) Series in 1966. The 1965 P70 used the De Tomaso backbone chassis that later formed the basis of the Mangusta. While De Tomaso fell behind schedule developing special heads for a bored and stroked version of the Ford 289, Shelby sent Brock to Italy to work with Carrozzeria Fantuzzi on forming the alloy bodies (and not incidentally, to keep an eye on De Tomaso).  This time, Brock's design incorporated the adjustable rear air foil which he had originally suggested for the Daytona coupe. The spare, fluid forms were startling on first exposure, but once studied they seemed almost inevitable, like much good design and a whole lot of good music.  This characteristic carried over into Brock's independent work.

                             

Shelby cancelled the project when it fell too far behind to be ready for the 1965 race season, and De Tomaso kept the two cars of five planned, outfitting the second version with a windshield and doors complying with European racing regulations.  After taking over Ghia, De Tomaso credited that firm with the P70 and the revised Sport 5000 shown below, but the design was all Brock's.

The designer formed Brock Racing Enterprises after leaving Shelby American, and eventually had great success racing Nissan products. But his first team success involving Japanese imports was with the Hino 1300 Contessa, a MIchelotti-styled rear-engined coupe loosely based upon a mechanical format established by Renault.  Encouraged by BRE's competition success, Hino authorized Brock's design of a more focused sports racer built around the Hino engine.  The resulting car garnered plenty of attention, both from industry insiders and the press, and appeared on the cover of Road & Track in 1967.

The Samurai project allowed Brock to explore a more advanced expression of his philosophy, in that except for the engine, it was a completely new car.  The mid-engined chassis allowed a lower profile, and like the P70, the form prioritized smooth air flow above concerns with mere styling. The alloy body panels were tailored to the tubular chassis by Troutman and Barnes, experienced race car builders who had turned out the bodies for Lance Reventlow's Scarabs*.

Like the Shelby-DeTomaso P70, the Samurai featured an adjustable air foil at the rear.

The publicity surrounding the Samurai caught the attention of Triumph racer Kas Kastner, who then managed the firm's US racing department.  He approached Pete Brock about designing a Triumph prototype for racing and possible production. This car, released during the 1968 race season, duplicated the Samurai's success in attracting admiring attention, and it appeared on the cover of Car and Driver.

The prototype, christened the TR-250K and based on the just-introduced TR-250 (a TR4 with a six cylinder engine transplant) went from first sketches to final design within two months, but owing to delays in gaining approval from Triumph's home office, construction of the car in time for the 1968 Sebring 12 hour race was compressed into three months.  Still, the final product exhibited tight contours and deft control of proportions, achieved partly by moving the engine back for better weight distribution and a lower hood.  In the photo below, the photographer has cleverly accented the curves by using  tire tracks on the pavement as a compositional tool...

Those compound curves were accented by horizontal creases breaking along the car's centerline, and the compound curved glazing and steeply sloped parabolic windshield recall the work that Franco Scaglione had done for Bertone.  In the photo below, the adjustable spoiler, by now a familiar theme on Brock's designs, is visible.

   

The TR-250K's 1968 Sebring run was cut short by the failure of improvised hub adaptors for wheels obtained from the Chaparral team.  The overall design showed great promise, and was promoted by Kastner and automotive journalists as the shape of the future for Triumph. But that company's management, distracted as it was by the 1968 merger with BMC, decided against financing series production...

Late the next year, Nissan Motors, which was providing cars for BRE to race in the USA, introduced the Datsun 240Z, a curvy coupe with a wedge profile.  The car quickly took over the American market for popular-priced sports cars, a market which had once been dominated by British manufacturers.  Triumph would build its last car, based by then on a Honda platform and mechanicals, in 1984.

*Footnote:  The Cobra in the 2nd photo, CSX2287, is the prototype Daytona coupe being fabricated at Shelby American's Venice shop, which had previously been home of Reventlow Automobiles. It was the only Daytona to be built there; alloy bodies for the 5 cars which followed were built at Carrozzeria Gransport in Italy.  Lance Reventlow's Scarab sports racers are reviewed in the posting called "Timing is Everything: Reventlow Scarab Saga" in the archives for June 2, 2017.

Photo credits:

Top: the author

2nd:  carbuildindex.com

3rd:  youtube.com

4th:   carbuildindex.com

5th:   hemmings.com

6th:   thegentlemanracer.com

7th:   Hino Motors on pinterest.com

8th:   mycarquest.com

9th:   Road & Track Magazine

10th:    theroaringseason.com

11th:  Car & Driver reprinted on pinterest.com

12th:  centralcoastbritishcarclub.com

13th:  farm5 on flicker.com

AC Cars Part 3: The Shelby AC Cobra

The Shelby AC Cobra story has been told so many times that we're just giving a brief account, mainly so that we can talk about what came after.   By the time AC Cars persuaded Ford of England to supply their Zodiac inline six to replace the Bristol during 1961, Ford of Detroit was preparing to release their new lightweight "thin wall" cast iron V8 in the 1962 Fairlane, first in 221 cubic inch capacity and later as a 260.  It was the latter engine which Shelby persuaded Ford to supply for his first Cobra in 1962, and it powered the first 75 chassis which AC sent to Shelby in LA.  After AC engineer Alan Turner substituted rack and pinion steering and a ball joint front suspension, the next 528 chassis were powered by the punchier 289 cubic inch V8, and the 260 Cobra became known as Mark I.  Contrary to postmodern myth and legend, it was the 289 Cobra in Mark II form, not the 427 Mark III, which made the car (and Shelby) famous in road racing, and won the FIA Manufacturer's Championship in the over 2000cc class for Shelby American in 1965.* By the summer of 1973, the Cobra had reached the bottom of its value curve as a used car, but the rise of vintage racing was about to re-ignite interest in these shapely, lightweight roadsters.  I was offered a well-used example like the one below for $4,700, and turned it down because it needed a paint job and had a busted speedometer.  Today, of course, you could put three kids through Stanford on the proceeds from selling a car like it.  Pretty, isn't it?  Even with torn upholstery and a dent in the nose...

Not everyone agreed that the Cobra  Daytona Coupe, penned by Shelby designer Peter Brock, was a looker.  After the first alloy prototype was hammered out over a wooden buck in  California, the final 5 bodies were built in Italy by Carrozzeria Gransport.  The Italians did not love the appearance, but Brock (pictured with the car below) was convinced that the new contours would cheat the wind enough to raise the car's top speed; they actually added 20 mph.  The Daytonas contributed mightily to Shelby American's success in endurance racing... 

And they clean up nicely, making for an effective museum exhibit or living room display.

During that championship year, 1965, Shelby and AC turned away from the 289* to make the final Cobra, and production lasted through 1967.  The coil-sprung 427 Cobra Mark III (Mark I and II had transverse leafs, like the AC Ace) has claimed the distinction of the first computer-designed chassis (the computers belonged to Ford) and a rabid cult following which may have produced enough fiberglass-bodied Cobra replicas to outnumber the 348 alloy originals by at least 5 to 1.  It was a fearsome brute, but as we shall see, it was a hard act to follow...

*Footnote:  2nd place in the FIA Manufacturer's Championship in 1965 was taken by arch rival Ferrari.  After introduction of the Mark III, AC offered the new chassis design with the 289 engine for the home market and Europe, but produced fewer than 30 examples.

Photo Credits:

Top:  wikimedia
2nd:  simeonemuseum.org
3rd:   wikimedia
4th:   hemmings.com