A Moment Too Soon: The Cars of Briggs Swift Cunningham

Four years before Briggs Swift Cunningham II captained the winning yacht in the 1958 Americas Cup, his efforts to win the biggest prize in road racing landed him and his namesake cars on the cover of Time.  By 1950 American cars had been absent from the 24 Hours of Le Mans for an age; a Duesenberg J entered by a Romanian prince had lasted 38 laps in 1935. For the 1950 event, Cunningham entered a largely stock Cadillac coupe he nicknamed Le Petit Pataud ("clumsy puppy") as well as a Caddy roadster with a slab-sided, boat-like body which reporters quickly named Le Monstre.  Le Mans regulars criticized the size and weight of the American entries but admired Cunningham's sense of humor. Clumsy Puppy finished in 10th place, with Le Monstre in 11th, having lost some time while Briggs dug it out of a sand bank with a borrowed shovel.  The next year he would be back with a team of purpose-built cars.  The prototype C-1 set a pattern with its Ford-based independent coil-sprung wishbone front suspension, De Dion rear end, and Cadillac drum brakes. Wheelbase was 105 inches and overall weight 4,000 pounds. This was pudgy compared to the Jaguars, Ferraris and Mercedes contesting Le Mans, where the new C-2s raced with the latest Chrysler hemi V8s replacing the Cadillac unit in the externally similar C-1….

                                C-1

Of three C2s entered, one car finished 18th after running in 2nd place as late as the 20th hour; the 250 hp engine, suffering from valve problems, needed to be nursed along in the final hours.  So Team Cunningham went back to the drawing board in their West Palm Beach workshops, and came up with the C-4R, with similar tubular chassis with a live rear axle replacing the De Dion, and shaving 5 inches off wheelbase,  4 inches off width, and a whopping thousand pounds off overall weight.  Body design was by George Weaver.  At 3,000 pounds it wasn't a lightweight, but for perspective one is reminded that's about 400 pounds less than a modern VW Passat, and the modified Chrysler 331 hemi was now up to around 300 horsepower...

    C-4R

Cunningham sent the two C4-R roadsters and C-4RK coupe to Le Mans in 1952, and Briggs and co-driver Bill Spear took 4th place.  The team did even better at home, where the C4 cars won a high percentages of races entered, including the 1953 Sebring 12 Hours...

                                C-4RK

                               

The fierce-looking coupe was the product of a design collaboration with German aerodynamicist Wunibald Kamm, a proponent of managed air flow and the source of the "K" in the name.

Dr. Kamm was also the source of the abrupt tail surfaces on the coupe, which featured the then-novel division of the rear window into two surfaces by a metal arc.  The lower window surface is nearly vertical, and the transversing arc  presages the tail spoilers of the 1960s...

Cunningham entered a C-4RR roadster and coupe again for the 1953 running of the 24 Hours, and also brought the new C-5R, lighter than the previous roadster by over 400 pounds, and making 310 to 325 hp.  The new car was swiftly dubbed the "smiling shark" by spectators at practice, where the new radar guns introduced that year showed the car to be faster on the Mulsanne straight than the rival Jaguars. The Cunningham team had been extremely careful during pre-race preparation, so they were confident the cars could last the distance.  What they hadn't reckoned was that Jaguar would introduce Dunlop disc brakes at this race, and Cunningham driver Phil Walters noted that this allowed them to brake later for the corners. The result was that the Jaguar C-types finished 1st, 2nd and 4th, with the Cunninghams in 3rd, 7th and 10th places.  It was a tribute to their preparation and reliability of their cars that among the teams in real contention only Jaguar and Cunningham saw all their cars finish.  This distinction was also shared with the French Panhard team, whose two-cylinder cars were never in contention for the overall win.

    C-5R

The torsion-bar suspended C5-R, the only one built, was piloted by John Fitch and Phil Walters to 3rd place in the '53 Le Mans race; the C4-R roadster finished 7th and the coupe 10th. Along with the intrepid Fitch, the C-5R survived flipping end over end at the subsequent Reims 12 Hour race. The car was rebuilt in the US with this original body design in aluminum.  As with the Jaguar racers of the era, the front fenders and hood is an impressive piece of hand-formed alloy that tilts forward to allow easy access to the engine. Unlike the Jaguars, the Cunninghams returned to Le Mans in 1954 with drum brakes, because Jaguar exercised its veto option when Briggs approached Dunlop about supplying them.  Still, they finished well, with the C-4R of Spear and Johnston in 3rd behind a Ferrari and D-type Jag, and the other C-4R in 5th.  It was driven by J.G. Bennet and a guy named Cunningham...

     C-3

During this period there were Cunningham road cars too, and one was chosen by the Museum of Modern Art for its design exhibit, called "Ten Automobiles", in 1953*.  The C-3 coupe and convertible were based on the C-2 chassis, and the bodies were produced by Vignale to a design by Giovanni Michelotti..  The C-3 was offered to the public because Le Mans race regulations would only count the C-2 as a production car if 25 examples of the same chassis were offered to the public.  Cunningham's original plan was to build 25 cars in '52 and another 50 cars the next year.  But sales were limited by prices in the $9k to $10k range, and ultimately only 27 were sold*. Even at these prices, Cunningham lost money on every C-3, the result of sending the chassis on an Italian vacation for treatment by craftsmen who took 2 months to complete each body.

C-6R

Cunningham made one last attempt at Le Mans in 1955 with this C-6R, a new chassis design with drastically reduced weight at 1,900 pounds, a return to coil springs with independent front suspension, and a De Dion rear suspension with inboard drum brakes.  Most interesting was a special version of the Offenhauser twin-cam, sixteen-valve four of Indy 500 fame, reduced to 3 liters and reconfigured to run on the mandated French pump gas rather than methanol.  Chassis and alloy body were designed by Herbert Unger, and the car ran Le Mans in the open-headlight, flat-grille form shown in the photo on the wall.  In the event, pilots Cunningham and Johnston went 196 laps before the engine burned a valve; the Offy had consistently run hot after the switch to gasoline.  But at least they had run safely, and in a race overshadowed and then defined by an appalling accident which killed 84, mostly spectators, and prompted the retirement of the Mercedes team from all racing before it ended. At Cunningham, Phil Walters and Sherwood Johnston retired from racing, and Briggs indicated he could not blame them.  Back in the States, Briggs finally got his disc brakes, but only attached to Jaguars after signing on as a Jaguar distributor and running the firm's US racing program, where he had plenty of success. The nose on the lone C-6R was changed to a D-type Jaguar profile with enclosed headlights, and it received a Jaguar engine transplant after blowing another Offy at Sebring.  Tax laws would have classified the money-losing Cunningham manufacturing operation as a hobby after 1955, and so perhaps a change was inevitable.  Still, it is tempting to wonder what might have been…If Cunningham had persuaded Dunlop to sell him disc brakes, or Goodyear-Hawley to make bigger ones (they had made the discs on the tiny 1949-50 Crosleys), or if Chrysler had spent the kind of money on racing that Ford spent in the 1960s.  In the interview for the Time cover story in April 1954, the reporter noted that it appeared that Cunningham had made a small fortune in the specialized business of building and racing sports cars.  Briggs replied that this was only true because he'd started with a large fortune...

                                C-6R Offenhauser engine

*Footnotes:  Other American cars in the "Ten Automobiles" exhibit included a Loewy-designed 1953 Studebaker Starliner and a Nash-Healey coupe from the same year.  The latter car had an English chassis to go with its Italian body, however.  The Cunningham Registry indicates that 25 of the C-3 model were bodied by Vignale, and 2 "pre-production" prototypes were bodied by Cunningham.  The $15,000 cost of these convinced the team to outsource bodywork to Vignale. Counting the single C-1 and 8 race cars, total Cunningham production amounted to 36.  All photos were taken at the Collier Collection of the Revs Institute, which houses the most complete collection of Cunningham cars anywhere.

Photo credits:

Top:  Paul Anderson

2nd:  the author

3rd:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

4th:  Paul Anderson

5th:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

6th:  Paul Anderson

7th & 8th:  the author

The Revs Institute, Part 3: Porsches by Another Name, More and / or Less

Along with the comprehensive selection of sports racing Porsches in the Collier Collection at the Revs Institute, you will find some cars which are powered by Porsche, bodied by Italian coach builders rather than Porsche itself, or featuring chassis which were provided by other makers but powered by Porsche.  The 1958 Porsche-Behra was created when French driver Jean Behra, then racing sports cars for Porsche and Formula 1 cars for BRM, decided that he could produce a more focused car for Formula 2 than single-seat version of the RSK he'd been driving for Porsche.  The Behra car, designed with the aid of ex-Maserati engineer Valerio Colotti, had a narrower front and rear track than Porsche's new open-wheel F2 car, and a sleeker alloy body, all in the interests of better aerodynamics.  Despite the substitution of the old rear swing axles for Porsche's newer all-independent design, the new car proved competitive. It was fast enough in the hands of Hans Herrman (shown driving below), in fact, to beat the factory Porsches and Ferrari Dinos at Reims, the best-supported event of the '59 F2 season, where it finished ahead of everything except the Cooper-Borgward of Stirling Moss.* 

Also during 1959, Porsche began to search for ways to extend the racing life of its aging steel-bodied 356 Carrera in production sports car racing while engineers were busy with its F1 and F2 efforts. This led them to approach Carlo Abarth, the Austrian-born specialist builder who had worked on the Porsche-designed Cisitalia Porsche 360 GP car in 1947, to build a lightweight car on the 356 Carrera platform.  Abarth in turn commissioned Franco Scaglione of Bertone and Alfa fame to design the alloy body shell.  The first body was built by Viarengo and Filliponi, as Zagato was busy building bodies for Carlo's Fiat Abarths and for arch rival Alfa Romeo.  The new Abarth Carrera GTL looked so much sleeker than the old 356, it's hard to believe both cars are on the same stubby 82.7 inch wheelbase.  It's narrower and lower than a 356 coupe; the Revs crew have parked it between a 356 coupe and Speedster and this serves as a reminder of why these cars were called "bathtub Porsches."

The first car produced is pictured, and even though Porsche needed to add cooling slots to avoid overheating and the cabin proved leaky during the rainy Le Mans of 1960, this car won its class. Twenty cars were commissioned, and some experts have suggested that improved workmanship on later cars resulted from moving body production to Rocco Motto.

Our last example carries both Porsche and Elva labels on its nose, but the chassis and body are entirely the work of specialist Frank Nichols in England, who had long experience building lightweight chassis when approached in 1963 by Porsche distributer Oliver Schmidt and dealer Carl Haas to provide a version of his Mark VII for an effort in the then-new U.S. Road Racing Championship.  Porsche agreed to supply copies of their four-cam engine in 1.7 liter, 183 hp form, and Nichols redesigned the tubular space frame layout to fit the wide engine.  The final product weighed an amazing 975 pounds.

The name "Elva", by the way, is a riff on the French for "she goes", and she did indeed.   The Porsche-powered Mark VII won its first race at the 1963 Road America 500 at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin against stiff competition.  Planned production of fifteen cars sold out, but the car acquired a reputation for unpredictable handling owing to the rearward weight bias.  As a result, the Mark VIII Elva featured a longer wheelbase.  Most of those cars, however, also featured BMW engines.

*Footnote:  For notes on the Cooper-Borgward, see our posting from March 3, 2017 entitled "Forgotten Classic: When Borgward Went Racing."  There are excellent photos of the Behra Porsche on the Revs Institute website, but we preferred a rare shot of the car in action.

Photo credits:

Top:  uncredited photographer, at 8w.forix.com

2nd:  Ian Avery-DeWitt 

3rd:  the author

4th:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

5th:  Paul Anderson

6th:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

The Revs Institute, Part 2: Pantheon of Paranormal Porsches

1.

It first dawned on my childhood awareness that people could use Porsches for transportation when my family moved to LA in 1957; we already knew about Porsches for racing because of James Dean.  My dad's friend Isadore pronounced Porsche "pushy" in his Italian accent, and marveled that anyone would pay a Cadillac price for a tiny car with Fiat levels of power.  The standard Porsche you'd see in our neighborhood was the 1500 Normal with about 55 hp.; the 1500 Super was good for all of 70.  But the Stuttgart firm worked steadily at obtaining more power and better race performance from small-displacement engines, and by 1970, when they first won Le Mans, their reputation had attained mythic status. At the Revs Institute you'll find at least one example of each of the air-cooled sports racers that founded the Porsche myth, from the '51 356SL coupe built in Gmund, Austria (72 hp from a VW-based flat four) to the 917PA flat-twelve from '69 and a '71 917K Le Mans racer, each with over 570 hp, and on a display stand, the all-conquering 917-30 engine from the 1973 Canadian-American racing series, with a tire-shredding turbocharged 1,100 hp.  If the modest little 1500 Normal represented Porsche's ambitions in the 1950s, by the late 1960s, you could say the attitude and even the esthetic impact of the cars bordered on paranormal.  The endlessly fascinating Revs website describes Porsche engineering talent for weight reduction as "supernatural"...

2.

This 550A from 1956 makes 135 hp from the Ernst Fuhrmann-designed 4-cam four.  This Type 547 Carerra engine was the first purpose-built Porsche racing engine.  The "A" indicates that this car has a tubular chassis which offered greater rigidity and thus more predictable handling than the earlier 550 platform, the earliest examples of which also had the pushrod engine.  Of course, the Revs people have a couple of those as well… 

3.

Here a visitor inspects the interior of a 718 spyder, otherwise known as an RSK, with the 550A and a rare 550 coupe in the background.

4.

The RSK offered a lower profile with better aerodynamics along with a lighter and more rigid space frame chassis, and from 1957 through '62 it allowed Porsche to expand their competition record from class wins in the small-displacement categories to overall wins in the Sebring 12 Hours in 1960, and in the Targa Florio in 1959, '60 and '63.  This is a four-cylinder RS-60 from 1960.

5.

The RSK had a long enough life to serve as a development tool for the four-cam  4 cylinder Carrera engine as well as a new air-cooled flat 8.  As a result, the car was built with two different wheelbases, and the Institute has examples of both.

6.

Here's a '59 RSK with the weight-saving paint deletion showing off the workmanship on the alloy body, which, like the 550 bodies, was built by Wendler. 

7.

Despite the success of the versatile RSK, an overall win at Le Mans still eluded Porsche.  In order to satisfy FIA requirements for the GT class in 1964, Porsche would need to make at least 100 of their new contender, which featured a steel ladder frame bonded to a stressed fiberglass body to save production cost.  Most of the 106 Type 904s built (many bought by private customers) in '64 and '65 featured the proven but complex 4 cylinder Carrera power plant, while 20 were built with the new Type 901 sohc, dry sump flat six.  A few factory test cars were fitted with a flat eight engine, but engineers experienced exploding flywheels with these. Porsche renamed the car the Carrera GTS in response to the same legal issue which had caused them to rename the new 901 the 911*.  

8.

In 1966 for the 906 (also called the Carrera 6), Porsche reverted to a tubular frame, this time  with unstressed fiberglass body.  Some think this was due to problems with variable thickness and complex repairs on the stressed 904 body, and note that the more expensive tubular route was OK'd because only 50 copies of Type 906 were required under new FIA rules.  Regime change may also have played a part, as this was the first racer completed under the new Ferdinand Piech management. It marked a turn away from the four-cam, four-cylinder engine to the flat sohc dry-sump six then becoming common in the 911, and yet another step away from dual-purpose road / race chassis to designs focused strictly on racing... 

9.

When Porsche finally won its home endurance race at the Nurburgring in 1967,  it  was with this particular 910-6, with smoother contours than the somewhat graceless 906, and making 220 hp. with a fuel-injected version of that car's 2 liter flat six. 

10.

Still chasing a Le Mans win and a Championship, the Piech team hatched the 908LH.  The  3 liter flat eight took over from the 2.2 liter 907* flat eights after the latter cars narrowly lost the World Championship of Makes to the Ford GT40s campaigned by John Wyer in 1968.  The "LH" derives from the German langheck, or "long tail."  The photo conveys just how long.

11.

Despite the movable rear airfoil for downforce, the long-tailed cars could weave unexpectedly at high speeds.

12.

There was also a 908-02 Flunder ("flounder") from the same year, with short-tailed open spyder design aimed at producing rear downforce and weight saving, up to 220 lb. compared with the long-tailed coupes.

13.

When Porsche finally won the Manufacturer's Championship in 1969, it was with the help of cars like this 917 (this one's a '71), a 4.5 liter flat 12 which defied Porsche's reputation for doing a lot with a little, unless the sole judging criterion was chassis weight, and not the cubic yardage (or cubic meters in this case) of money expended. As the Institute's historians point out, while John Wyer won the 1968 Championship with a team of only 3 Ford GT40s, the 1969 Porsche effort involved no less than 52 new race cars, most of which were only raced once before being reconditioned and sold to privateers.  We will leave it to the reader to ponder which cars were more efficient, the 5 liter Fords, or the 3 liter and 4.5 liter Porsches…

*Footnotes:  For a discussion of the renaming of the Porsche 901, see our posting from July 10, 2016 entitled "Roads Not Taken, Porsche 911s We Missed".  For anyone wanting more information on the cars pictured, the Revs Institute website at revsinstitute.org is a fountain of technical details and entertaining stories.  In case you're wondering what happened to their Porsche 907, it was in the restoration shop, and off-limits to visitors, during our visit.

Photo credits:

1, 2, 4 & 7:  the author

3, 5, 8, 9, 10 & 11:  Ian Avery-DeWitt

6, 12 & 13:  Paul Anderson

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)