Roadside Attraction: 1st Impressions of the Academy of Art University Auto Museum

It's been a long time since I walked past a showroom window displaying Packards, and I can't remember ever seeing like-new vintage Bugattis, Duesenbergs or Delahayes on display.  But you can see these great makes, and others which expired long before today's dreary corporate fad for labeling makes mere "brands", if you visit a former Chrysler dealership now occupied by San Francisco's Academy of Art University Automobile Museum. It's a long moniker, but then again it's a big collection, with around 240 cars in all, of which 52 are on display at their 1849 Washington Street showrooms as part of a rotating display that changes every autumn.  Before entering, you catch a glimpse of two cars sharing nothing but an appealing roundness of form: a lightweight Alfa Romeo 2500 road racing coupe built right before World War II, and behind it a lush boulevardier, a Delahaye 175 from the immediate postwar period...

Standing nearby, there's one of the 17 Bugattis bodied in the Atalante style; it's a Type 57 from 1937 and is believed to have been used originally by Jean Bugatti.

This Type 57 features the flat, horseshoe-shaped radiator rather than the vee-shaped prow of the lower-chassis Type 57S and SC. No matter; it has enough presence to distract attention from some imposing land yachts across the showroom floor...

The 1926 Belgian Minerva pictured above featured a sleeve-valve 6.6 liter six cylinder engine built upon Knight patents* and was bodied in aluminum by Le Baron in the United States.  It's thought to have been the New York Auto Show car when new.  

The very British Daimler Double Six from the same era is even larger, and features sleeve-valves like the Minerva, but here in a V12 engine.  The Hooper-bodied car was built for a bus company magnate in Australia.  Perhaps it was appropriate that his personal transport was bus-sized, but in the cavernous interior he would have avoided anything like the crowding associated with public transportation.

This Duesenberg Model J is one of around 480 produced by the Auburn Cord Duesenberg combine from 1928 to 1937, with 2 cars completed after the bankruptcy. That figure includes all variants, including the supercharged SJ, the JN  and the  short chassis, two passenger SSJ. Like many modern cars, the Duesenberg's 265 hp engine features twin overhead cams and four valves per cylinder.  Unlike any modern cars, however, the Duesy's engine is an inline eight... 

So is this Auburn 851 boat tail Speedster introduced in 1935.  The body design, by Gordon Buehrig (who also designed the revolutionary 1936 Cord) was actually a clever restyling of the previous V12 boat tail.  The Speedster was built for two years, and with supercharging, the flathead 280 cubic inch engine would propel the car to 100 mph. 

*Museum Notes and Thanks:  
I want to thank Gogo Heinrich for arranging a special tour of this collection, and Museum Coordinator Paul Borgwardt for spending over two hours with our group, graciously opening up engine compartments and answering questions. Tours are normally available on Tuesdays from 11 AM to 1 PM, and on Thursdays from 2 PM to 4 PM.  Museum proceeds go to the Rotary Club, and Boys and GIrls Club.  Tours can be scheduled at the web site: academyautomuseum.org.

*Car Notes:  The Museum seems to have an interest cars with sleeve valves, and has a rare
Willys Knight roadster. There's more to say about Duesenbergs as well, and we'll get there eventually.  And we haven't even started on the Packards, the Stutz Super Bearcat, the Delage and Delahaye, or the Talbot Lagos...

Photo credits:  All photos are by the author. 

Forgotten Classic: Adrian Squire's Namesake Car

Adrian Squire's habit of sketching cars in class was not unique among schoolboys, especially not among English lads.  What was unique was his engineering talent and his skill at devising fetching visual forms.  And unlike the legions of other kids who followed his example of doodling dream cars in study hall (for  example, this writer), young Squire was able to get his dream car into production (well, something approaching production) when a modest inheritance fell into his lap.*

Judging by the expense of the components he specified for his sports roadsters and tourers, and the amount of hand work that went into assembling them, I've always assumed that he spent the entire inheritance.  He was aiming at the kind of clientele who bought Bugattis and Alfa Romeos, and in the matter of the price tag, at least, Squire hit the target.  

Squire's first car appeared in late 1934, when he was 24 years old.  Expensive components included a twin overhead cam inline four cylinder with a single Roots type supercharger, a pre-selector 4 speed gearbox from ENV, giant 15 inch diameter hydraulic drum brakes, and a chassis with deep side members and cross bracing aimed at a level of rigidity uncommon on English roadsters.  Despite this, some cracks appeared upon early chassis, and it was thought they resulted from enthusiastic use of those brakes.  And despite provisions like twin water pumps and a big, finned oil cooler, the 1496 cc (69 x 100 mm cylinders) R1 engine sourced from British Anzani (originally a subsidiary of the Italian aero engine firm) could be troublesome.

The prototype and at least one subsequent car was clothed in an elegant interpretation (shown below) of traditional English lines built by Vanden Plas on the short (102 inch wheelbase) sports chassis. Vanden Plas also built a 4 place open tourer with similar lines on a 125 inch wheelbase, but the logic of Squire's high-strung small displacement engine (110 hp in supercharged form) seemed to argue for the smaller car.  As with 1.5 liter Maseratis, the earliest Ferraris and most OSCAs*, the idea was to get a lot of performance out of small engine displacements, though not without large displacements of cash...

Note the tidy way the hood louvers on this Vanden Plas roadster echo the angle of the radiator and the windshield.  Also note the way the brake drums fill the opening back of the lacy network of wires in those wheels.  

The tapered tail and swoopy fenders wrap up a package that was long considered the quintessential British roadster…that is, by anyone lucky enough to actually see one.  Owing to high prices (over $5,300 in 1935 dollars for this roadster) there were few orders for Squire's brainchild. The firm made an attempt to reduce prices with a "skimpy" model bodied by Markham and aimed at racers, but after producing a total of 7 cars, declared bankruptcy in 1937. Adrian Squire then went off to work for engineer W.O. Bentley at Lagonda, and died during a bombing raid in 1940. He was thirty years old...

After the bankruptcy, enthusiast Val Zethrin bought the remaining parts and manufacturing rights, and produced another three Squire cars before the war started.  One of these 3 cars is featured above and below in the color shots.  The body on this car was built in England by the Corsica Body Works, and during a restoration by a recent owner the body was modified for a sleeker profile.  For historians this raises questions of originality and authenticity*, but there is no doubt in the minds of most observers about the car's beauty. This Squire Corsica roadster lives at the Academy of Art University car collection in San Francisco, and we will soon be featuring some of her garage mates...

*Footnote: For another story about how to spend an inheritance making sports cars, see "Timing is Everything: Reventlow Saga" from 6/2/17, about the Scarab racers. The OSCA adventure is treated in "Almost Famous" from 4/20/16, while the question of "Authenticity vs. Originality" is reviewed in our archives on 6/11/17 in a history of the Bugatti Atlantic.

Photo credits:
All color photos: the author
7th from top:   pinterest.com
8th:  simeonemuseum.org

Lost Roadside Attraction: Before Cars and Coffee, There Was Zumbach's

Ralph Stein's The Great Cars, published in 1967, was almost as much a memoir of a life spent chasing classic cars as it was a depiction of the machines themselves.  Many of the cars he describes were encountered at Zumbach Motor Service in Manhattan. Zumbach's, as it was called by its fans, was more than a service and repair facility.  It was a kind of motoring shrine, and a meeting place where lovers of exotic machinery could meet to exchange technical information and racing lore. Seven decades or so before there was anything like "cars and coffee", there was Zumbach's.  In the decade preceding World War II, if you had an ailing Bugatti or Alfa Romeo or Duesenberg, and you were somewhere on the East Coast, you took it to Zumbach's.  By the early 1950s, Zumbach's fame had spread so far that actor Gary Cooper drove his Lagonda from Hollywood to New York once a year to the garage for tuning, and a collector from Michigan shipped his Talbot Lago there for expert attention.  Zumbach's built a famous racing car too...

This is Halley's Comet, a kind of early road racing hot rod based upon a modified Mercedes chassis for car collector McClure Halley.  The car was powered by an engine from the legendary Harry Miller, a high school dropout and intuitive engineer whose power plants ruled American tracks in the 1920s through  40s. Miller designed engines which inspired the Duesenberg brothers and also led to the Offenhauser engines which dominated the Indy 500 for decades.  In Halley's Comet, the engine is a Miller 151, a  twin-cam inline four with four valves per cylinder. The photo above, taken around 1935, shows Zumbach's team lined up behind their handiwork. The photo below shows the completed car as it competed at the Vanderbilt Cup Races in 1936. Today Halley's Comet is restored, and has hit the concours circuit...

Swiss mechanic Werner Maeder had joined Zumbach's in 1925, and took over the business in 1947 after the death of founder Charles Zumbach. Like Harry Miller, he was of the intuitive school of engineering and mechanics. In the photo below, he listens attentively to the idling straight eight of a Bugatti Type 57.

By summer of 1951, when the picture below was taken at Zumbach's for The Saturday Evening Post, phrases like "classic car" and "sports car" had begun to seep into American English.  GIs stationed in Britain had encountered small, nippy roadsters like MG's TC, and that car was credited after the war with making sports cars (and amateur road racing) affordable Stateside. Late in 1949 the Jaguar XK120* appeared, and by the early 50s it transformed American road racing as well as the U.S. market for imported cars, making performance previously attainable only in cars costing $12,000 (a fortune in 1950) available for the price of a Cadillac.  With its advanced twin overhead cam inline six and swoopy mix of modern and traditional lines, it formed a link to prewar classics like the Lagonda parked behind it, and the Bugatti lurking in the garage entry...

…and to cars like the Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 B, shown below with Maeder at the wheel and owner McClure Halley observing a road test in Central Park.  Today these cars would be welcome in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but in 1951 some of them were serving double duty as weekend racers and grocery haulers.

While catering to wealthy collectors and racers, Maeder expanded the business to include maintenance and repair of everyday cars like Buicks, Hudsons and Studebakers, and advocated for careful and meticulous maintenance over the growing postwar trend of trading in cars every three years. When interviewed for the article in the Post, he was still driving the only car he'd ever bought new, a 1936 Buick.  In the photo below, he consults with the owner of a Singer*, another of the popular-priced British roadsters then entering the U.S. market, which would soon see Triumph TRs and Austin Healeys as well.

At the other end of the marketplace from Maeder's mainstream clientele, but just down the street (in fact, right next door), Luigi Chinetti would soon be seeking customers as the first U.S. distributor for something called the Ferrari. In 1951, not too many Americans knew about the car that Chinetti had piloted to victory in the 1949 Le Mans 24 Hours.  But the kind of people who cared about this achievement, and could possibly afford the eye-watering price tags on Chinetti's little red cars, were often the men and women who hung out at Zumbach's garage...

*Footnotes:  For more on the design and impact of the XK120, see "Game Changer" in these posts for 7/16/17. The Singer and its close relative, the HRG Twin Cam, are reviewed in the "Forgotten Classic" post for 3/28/18.

Photo Credits:

Top:  Zumbach Motor Service, photographer unknown

2nd:  vanderbiltcupraces.com

3rd thru 6th from top:  Hans Knopf for The Saturday Evening Post 

7th:  The Henry Ford collection 

Rootes in Foreign Soil: Sunbeam Venezia, Zagato Imp and TVR Tina

The Sunbeam Alpine introduced in 1960, a year before Triumph's TR-4 and nearly 3 years before the MGB, brought civilized touches like roll-up windows and detachable hardtops to the world of mainstream British roadsters. With styling credited to Loewy Associates recalling a pared down 2 passenger T-Bird with sheer flanks and bold tail fins, it was a modest success for awhile in the States.  In Italy, the parent Rootes Group, in an attempt to expand sales in Europe, got the respected coach builders at Superleggera Touring to improve the cars with dual fuel tanks allowing more luggage space, wood dash panels (odd that it took Italians to suggest this to the Brits) and matching steering wheels.  Soon enough Touring reworked the aggressive line of the tail fins, too, trimming the rear fender profiles to something closer to their  Aston DB4 and Lancia Flaminia GT. These ideas were successful enough that the twin tanks were adopted on the Series III Alpine in 1963, and the trimmer fins on the Series IV in 1964.

    Sunbeam Alpine Series I, 1959-60

The success of Touring's Alpine tweaks encouraged the head of Rootes' Italian operations, George Carless, to ask for a Superleggera design for a 4-seater along Alpine lines. This was in 1961, around the time production contracts for the Alfa Romeo 2600 spider (at left below) and Lancia Flaminia GT (at right) prompted the firm to plan a larger production facility aimed at the kind of assembly-line production which had appeared at Pininfarina. The new Sunbeam 2 + 2, christened the Venezia, appeared in 1963, and is the center car below.

      Alfa Romeo 2600, Sunbeam Venezia and Lancia Flaminia at Superleggera Touring

The Venezia shares its peaked front fenders with the Flaminia GT, along with then-fashionable quad headlights.  As on the Lancia, this detail is perhaps the least well-resolved on the car, with odd air intakes occupying the leftover space between the Sunbeam's headlight units and the fender peak. The effect is that someone has tried to graft tail fins onto the front of the car. The Venezia was literally launched in September 1963, riding down the Grand Canal on a gondola, and nearly plunged into the drink when attendants forgot to apply the emergency brake...

                                Sunbeam Venezia on Grand Canal, 1963

This near-disaster foreshadowed a real one, when Chrysler acquired a 30 percent stake in the makers of Hillman, Singer*, Sunbeam and Humber in 1964.  With 3 members now on the Rootes board of directors, they cancelled the Venezia project.

    Sunbeam Venezia, 1964-65

While the Venezia was a tidy little car, it is unlikely that it would have found the desired market in Europe, where customers had the choice of Alfa Romeos, Lancias and Fiat OSCAs with more power, and of course, similar Italian styling for the same money or less. Cancellation of the Venezia rendered much of the Touring's production facility redundant, and was one of the factors which led to the fine old coach builder's closing in 1966. Approximately 200 Venezias were built in 1964 and '65. 

   Sunbeam Venezia, 1964-65

Meanwhile, in 1963, Rootes Motors would introduce the Hillman Imp, the first mass-produced British car with a rear engine, in this case an aluminum 875 cc water-cooled inline four.  Like the Venezia saga, the Imp story involved a new factory, this one in Scotland. And like the Venezia, the Imp contributed to the ultimate fate of its maker.  Developed in the last years of a forgotten rear-engined vogue that included Simcas, Fiats and the Corvair, the Imp suffered initial teething problems with its Coventry Climax-based engine.  And though it was eventually offered in sporty coupe versions by Sunbeam and Singer*, and had some rally success, it took 13 years to sell just over 440,000 cars.  For perspective, Ford sold roughly that many Mustangs in its first year.  Still, with its modern, Corvair-inspired lines and a 998 cc engine option, the Imp was a tempting package for tuners and specialists.

    Hillman Imp (1967 model shown)

One of those specialists was Zagato in Italy.  Like Touring had been, they were keen to expand their customer base by building a car with more mass appeal.  Soon after the Imp's 1963 introduction, Zagato produced 3 alloy-bodied prototypes.  Ercole Spada's glassy coupe design simplified the Imp's belt line crease (which dipped between the headlights as on the Corvair) into a sharp, encircling break line encircling the entire car... 

                             Zagato Imp, 1963

As with the Venezia, the Rootes Group's cost studies led to the conclusion that production costs would have led to a price too high to permit the desired production market penetration. So those 3 Hillman "Zimp" prototypes would remain the sole examples of the species.

    Zagato Imp

Designer Trevor Fiore and specialist maker TVR made a final attempt to get Rootes interested in a mass-market sports car aimed at the Spitfire, Sprite and Fiat 850 spider and coupe.  This was the TVR Tina, using the Imp's engine and transaxle, with the prototype roadster and coupe bodies built in Italy by Fissore.  The prototypes were in metal, while the plans were to produce the customer cars in fiberglass as on TVR's other efforts.  Two different headlight schemes were tried on the roadster design; the top one shown below is oddly predictive of the small, projector beam headlights that would appear decades later...

    TVR Tina, 1966-67

The coupe appeared at the Paris Show in 1967, and Jensen, which assembled the V8-powered Sunbeam Tigers, was approached about production plans.  Again, Rootes and Chrysler were unconvinced that potential sales in America would justify tooling up for this appealing little car, and it turned out that the Sunbeam Alpine Series V which finished its run the next year would be the last 2-seater from Chrysler Rootes.  

                                TVR Tina, 1966-67

*Footnote:  For a brief history of another independent British make which had a brief fling with European design before being absorbed by Rootes and then Chrylser, see our post on the Singer Le Mans, 1500 and HRG Twin-Cam from March 28, 2018.

Photo credits:

Top:  wikimedia

2nd + 3nd from top:  sunbeamvenezia.com

4rd thru 8th from top:  wikimedia

9th thru bottom:  imps4ever.info

Forgotten Classics: Singer Le Mans and 1500, and the HRG Twin Cam

England's Singer Motors began when George Singer began making bicycles in 1874.  As the turn of the century approached, he got interested in motorcycles and three wheelers, and finally moved into car manufacturing in 1905.  Most Americans see that name and think "sewing machine", but those came from the unrelated American Charles Singer, though for awhile in the early 1920s he made cars too, just to confuse things.  By 1926 the English Singer Motors had done something that would've endeared them to car enthusiasts everywhere, if only Singer had let them know...they introduced a small four-cylinder engine with valve actuation by a single overhead cam.  This was pretty advanced stuff in 1927; BMW, to name one example, didn't get around to introducing this feature until 1962.  Soon Singer was Britain's third largest car producer, after Austin and Morris. By 1934, the 972cc ohc 4 (with only 2 main bearings) used to power the mass-market economy cars also powered the Nine Le Mans model. There was also a 6-cylinder 1.5 liter car called simply the Le Mans, and one of these won the rally run in conjunction with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, piloted by Betty Haig.  By 1937 a limited number of 1.5 liter 4 cylinder cars were also built*.   The Le Mans was about as rakish as Singers ever got...

Singer Le Mans 1.5 liter, 1934

As the Depression took hold, however, rakishness didn't help much, and neither did Singer's relative lack of skill at promotion, something that was more in evidence over at Morris Garages, maker of rival MG, and at the new upstart Jaguar works.  Singer went bankrupt in 1936 and was reorganized.  Postwar, they continued to offer their overhead cam engine in the 9 Roadster with around 1,100 cc, and in 1952 this was uprated to the 1,500 cc unit from their sedan, which itself resembled a 3/4 size version of the first postwar Kaiser and Frazer cars.  The sedan failed to make an impression Stateside, but the Roadster showed up at races and rallies, and Singer engines were used in the HRG, which was to Singer as ERA was to Riley.  Or to use a more familiar example, as Abarth was to Fiat.

                                              Singer 9 Roadster, produced 1939-55

The Roadster didn't sell nearly as well as the MG TD in America, even though it was a bit more practical, having 2 more seats.  Performance and price were competitive, so the sales people put the anemic sales down to the Roadster's somewhat chubbier proportions; it was merely cute where the MG was rakish.  American dealers made at least two attempts to rebody the car in fiberglass. Around the same time, Ghia-Aigle, the Swiss branch of Italy's Carrozzeria Ghia, began to build a small series of Michelotti-styled coupes and convertibles on Singer chassis. This arrangement helped sell a few Singers in Switzerland, because if a car was bodied by a Swiss coach builder, the buyer paid no import tax on the chassis. The first of these appeared at the Paris Auto Show in 1952, a fastback festooned with embryonic fins, a two tone color scheme, and a beaky, de-chromed version of the traditional radiator grille.

                               1952 Singer coupe by Ghia-Aigle

Monochrome versions of the fastback coupe followed, and by 1954 Ghia-Aigle produced a lower, sleeker convertible with roll-up windows and exterior decoration pared down to essentials...

1954 Singer 1500 cabriolet by Ghia-Aigle

The glassy notchback coupe below appeared the same year, and provides more evidence that a truly modern product could be built around the Singer chassis.  Their total production figures are elusive, but unlikely to have broken into double digits.

   1954 Singer 1500 Ghia-Aigle coupe

Meanwhile, back in the Mother Country, HRG had plans of its own.  Their upright, rigid-axle roadsters had been a favorite of club racers since 1935, using largely unmodified Singer fours, but now they'd developed a prototype with their own twin-cam head mounted on the SM 1500 block, along with 4-wheel hydraulic caliper disc brakes made by HRG, 4-wheel independent suspension and a choice of 4 or 5 speeds... 

    Singer-HRG 1500 Twin Cam Engine

Even the alloy wheels were a break with tradition, and in place of the tall, spindly look of the HRG and Singer Le Mans, the alloy shell of the new car wrapped the contents so closely that twin bonnet blisters were needed to clear the cam covers...an altogether tasty and enlightened piece of design. But Singer management has having none of it. Cash was running low, and in 1955 Singer merged with Rootes Motors, makers of Hillman, Sunbeam and Humber.  The supply of Singer engine blocks dried up, and HRG was able to make only 3 "production" versions of the new Twin Cam by the end of 1956.  Along with the prototype, they are the last true sports cars with Singer engines.  By 1957, Singer had become nothing more than a "badge-engineered" sedan with a pushrod Hillman engine.  And after a brief moment of thinking otherwise, Americans went back to linking the name to sewing machines and nothing else.

    1955-56 HRG Twin Cam

*Footnote 6-20-19:  A reader kindly wrote to comment that the 1.5 liter Le Mans that won the Olympic rally was the six-cylinder car; my source of specs. on Singer engines (William Boddy, in the Sportscar Pocket Book from 1961) points out that by 1937 there were also some 1.5 liter four-cylinder cars, but these were made in only a limited run.

Photo credits:

Top:  wikimedia

2nd:  classiccarcatalogue.com

3rd:  coachbuild.com/forum

4th:  ghia-aigle.info/cars.htm

5th:  coachbuild.com/forum

6th:  bonhams.com

7th:  motors.all-free-photos.com

Unsung Genius: Rocco Motto, the Closer

As Italy climbed out of the debris of the human and industrial catastrophe of World War II, the cottage industry of machine shops and carrozzeria that had built racers and specialized  road cars prior to the war came back to life.  One of these was the small shop run by Rocco Motto in Torino.  Motto, born 10 years before World War I and orphaned in that war, had started his coach building company in 1932, and subcontracted to bigger coach builders to build bodywork.  After the war, one of his most predictive efforts was for Giaur, a firm founded by the Giannini brothers and Berardo Taraschi, who had previously worked for Urania.  The name was a contraction of the first letters of Giannini and Urania, and engines came from Giannini, while cars exported to America featured Crosley engines. This tidy, tiny 750cc coupe from 1950 managed to predict the form of later efforts by Vignale as well as Frua and others.  Around 4 dozen Giaurs were built, in a wide variety of body styles, but most were more focused on road racing than this San Remo coupe...

Motto welcomed working on foreign chassis, and the one below is a Renault 4CV from 1953 clothed in a spare, deftly detailed shell recalling the earlier Giaur. Attention to detail is shown in the dummy grille housing the fog lights, the air intake forward of the rear wheels for the rear-mounted, water-cooled engine, and the stylish, polished disc wheels, which seem to take the deeply recessed wheels of the stock Renault as a starting point.  

Despite the presence of more-than-competent designers at his own shop, Motto would often be called upon to build bodies styled by others, stepping in when a winning performance had already been given a head start by somebody else, a bit like a good closing pitcher. Sadly, he often got little public credit for these efforts. The 1953 Road & Track test of a Siata 208S spider like the one below mentions neither its designer, Giovanni Michelotti, nor its builder, Rocco Motto.

In the same year, Motto designed and built his second effort on a Talbot Lago T26 Grand Sport chassis.  The tightly controlled, sparsely decorated compound curves kept pace with the Ferrari spiders built by Vignale, Touring and Pinin Farina…something the Talbot chassis, with its heavy Wilson preselector transmission, was finding harder to do on the track. The covered headlights show a concern for air flow, and the forward-leaning oval of the grille is an aggressive take on contemporary Ferrari themes.

1953 was a busy year for the Motto crew. They also built the body for the MG TD shown below, and two others like it.  Two cars were built on tubular frames supplied by Gilco (who also supplied Ferrari and Maserati), and one on a specially-modified chassis supplied by the MG factory.  The alloy body forms reflected the lines of the OSCAs bodied by Morelli, and the cars were competitive in road racing. 

Motto's design for a coupe version of the staid Renault Fregate sedan also appeared in 1953. The front-engined, 2 liter 4 cylinder GTs were built in a small series for French race driver Louis Rosier, who had operated car dealerships during this period.

The Crosley-engined 750cc Nardi spider shown below left Motto's workshops, apparently destined for export to the U.S., in 1954.  The deeply-recessed wheels echo Motto's Renault 4CV.

Race and rally driver Jean Trevoux had won the 1951 Monte Carlo Rallye with a Delahaye 175 bodied in aluminum by Motto, and after admiring the reliability of the Packard 200 he'd driven to 9th place in the 1952 Carrera Panamericana, commissioned Motto to design and build a sleeker alloy body for the Packard he would drive in the '53 and '54 races. Despite the car's familiar, Packard-derived lines, only a few trim pieces would be interchangeable with a stock Packard. 

Trevoux's best performance with the Motto Packard was in 1954, when he finished a respectable 13th in the wild, dangerous road race across Mexico. In the photo below, the Motto Packard is flanked by a Ferrari 340 Mexico and a cheerful mutt of a backyard special. To my knowledge this 300 hp straight 8 was the last Packard road racer ever...

By 1955 the French Salmson firm, trying to revive its fortunes with a line of GT cars based on its fairly advanced twin overhead cam inline four, had asked Motto to design a spider, coupe and sedan.  Though, like its coupe sister, the spider raced at Le Mans, its design was based upon the long wheelbase version of the 2300S* chassis, not the shorter wheelbase Grand Sport. Motto's design cleverly dealt with the long wheelbase by deploying devices like the wraparound windshield, relatively wide door opening (compared with Talbot above), and repetition of the vent details ahead of the door and behind it, just ahead of the curve that announces the rear wheel and relieves the sheer sides...

Back in the 1990s I corresponded with the owner of this 2300S, wondering how many of the cars had been built, as photos showed cars in different colors, and with different bumpers and windshields. It turns out there was only one, and the bumpers, stock windshield and convertible top had been removed for racing.  This car still shows up at club meets...

In the late 50s Porsche approached an old friend and racing rival, Carlo Abarth, who had worked on the Cisitalia Porsche GP car* in the late 40s, with the idea of a lightweight version of the aging 356 Carrera coupe.  Abarth agreed, but failed to tell Porsche he had severed his business relationship with Zagato. That meant that the bodies for the Porsche Abarth Carrera GTL would be subcontracted to Motto and a relatively unknown firm called Viarengo & Filipponi.  The Revs Institutes Collier Collection owns the first car shown below, and they claim it was built by Viarengo & Filipponi.  Porsche was unhappy with the early cars, according to the museum, prompting a change in coach builder. 

.

Other Porschephiles claim the reverse is true, and that the first 3 cars were built by Motto, and 18 by the mostly unknown V & F.  I present pictures of the first car as well as a later one, in the hope that at least one of these is a Motto body, and that maybe someone from the museum or the Porsche Club will clarify.  One thing is certain, and that is the body was designed by Franco Scaglione.*

One of Motto's last performances as a closer was to build Raymond Loewy's dauntingly complex design for the bronze coupe below, a GT car also finished in 1960.  Built on a Lancia Flaminia chassis, the roof, rear and flanks of the Loraymo* predicted forms and details adapted 3 years later to the Studebaker Avanti, while the front explored (or strayed into) new territory with a large, impact absorbing bumper grille and hood assembly that must have been hard for Motto to form. Motto moved away from automobile design and production in 1965, and into commercial vehicle bodies.  He died at 92 in 1996, perhaps demonstrating that only hardy, resourceful souls can thrive in an unpredictable industry.

*Footnotes: For more on the Salmson 2300S, see our post for 6/18/2016. There's a fuller description of the Porsche-Cisitalia collaboration in the archives for 4/22/2017. The Loraymo is explored in "Avanti Antecedents" from 2/18/2016. Finally, we have a look at another unsung genius, Franco Scaglione, in the post for 12/20/2017.

Photo Credits:

Top:  ruoteclassiche.quattroroute.it

2nd:  oldtimer.400.pl

3rd:   wikimedia

4th & 5th:    oldtimer.400.pl

6th:   voitures.renault.free.fr

7th:  oldtimer.400.pl

8th:  ruoteclassiche.quattroroute.it

9th:  hooniverse.com

10th & 11th:  liberallifestyles.com

12th:  amicalesalmson.com

13th:  the author

14th:  wikimedia

15th:  flickr.com