Carmel's Concours on the Avenue Part 2: Talbot Lago, Carrera Speedster, and Esoterica from Japan and Italy

On our first day of immersion in the automotive madness that grips the Monterey Peninsula every August, we tried for an overview.  Here we circle back to have a look at some participants we missed or treated only briefly the first time around.

This Talbot Lago T23 from the late Thirties is named for its fiscal horsepower under the French taxation system; the inline overhead-valve six cylinder made over twice the taxable horsepower (and over twice the real hp) as the original Citroen 11 Traction Avant introduced a few years earlier.  A Wilson pre-selector gearbox offered 4 speeds.

The "CH" plate indicates Swiss registration at some point.

This Alfa Romeo 2500SS below was bodied by Pinin Farina in 1951. The SS designation indicates triple carburetors on the twin cam six cylinder engine.  

This Lancia Aurelia B24 below also features a 2.5 liter six cylinder engine, but here the cylinders are arranged in a V-formation and the four-speed transmission is at the rear, a feature pioneered on production cars by Lancia.

While the Lancia design dates from five years after the Alfa, a lighter and more modern approach suffuses the design, also by Pinin Farina.  Note that by this time left hand drive was available on Lancias, while both Lancia and Alfa Romeo had favored right hand drive earlier.

The Porsche Speedster was introduced at the request of New York distributor Max Hoffman in 1954 as a stripped-down, lightweight model for amateur racers.  Paradoxically, what was then the least expensive model in the Porsche line has since become one of the most highly valued by collectors.  

This one, however, represents the Holy Grail for Speedster fanciers because it has the extremely rare option of the Type 547 Carrera 4 cam engine with the roller bearing crankshaft loved by SCCA racers and dreaded by mechanics.  When I attempted to photograph the engine, I realized it was barely visible under the engine fan and carburetors. In that regard, the modern water-cooled Boxster and Cayman are not all that different.

Not officially entered in the show, but docked on a side street and poised to float away on its hydropneumatic suspension, this Citroen DS21 Chapron cabriolet showed signs of the many miles covered on its comfy seats.

The Triumph Italia shown below was made from 1959 to '62 and features a body designed by Michelotti and built by VIgnale on a TR-3A chassis.  Total production of the Italia amount to 329 cars.  

Some curious onlookers initially thought they were looking at a product from Maserati or Lancia…

Many had never seen the Mazda Cosmo rotary either.  Introduced in 1967 as Mazda's first production car employing their version of the Wankel rotary engine, the 2 seat Cosmo was never officially imported into the States.  Long forgotten for that reason, it now has achieved cult status… 

The Toyota 2000GT getting the celebrity treatment below has been a cult item for a bit longer; it was built by Yamaha for Toyota and features a jewel-like twin cam two-liter inline six, which, along with its over $6,500 price tag in the US, placed it in competition with Porsche's 911.  Just over 350 examples were produced between 1967 and 1970.  The graceful body design by Satoru Nozaki may reflect influences of Zagato, the Jaguar E-type, and also allegedly some sketches of a GT car offered to Yamaha by Albrecht Goertz, who earlier had penned the BMW 507 and would propose designs for the Datsun 240Z. 

I missed the svelte elegance of the 1952 Delahaye 235 pillarless fastback coupe shown below, but my eagle-eyed friend George caught it on a side street. Wrapped around a chassis powered by a 3.5 liter overhead valve inline six with Cotal electromagnetic pre-selector transmission, Jacques Saoutchik's body design integrated the sweeping fender lines of French classics with the airy, light roofline of a modern GT.

During the course of a couple restorations since its original sale in 1953, this 235 has lost its original bumpers, but their absence displays the form to better effect.  

This was the last Delahaye body built by Saoutchik, and one of only two 235s completed by Saoutchik before Delahaye stopped car production in 1954 after building 84 of the 235 series.  Saoutchik closed its doors the following year... 

*Footnote:  More of the Delahaye story, including the race cars, can be found in the blog archives in "Golden Days of Delahayes" from June 30, 2018 and in "Dreyfus and the Million-Franc Delahaye vs. the Third Reich" from November 22, 2015.

Photo Credits:  All photos are by the author, except for the photos of the Delahaye 235, which were provided by George Havelka, and the front view of the Toyota, from newatlas.com.

Overview on Ocean Avenue: Carmel Throws a Party for Old Cars

Today the town of Carmel by the Sea threw a party for old cars and their admirers.  Unlike may of the car shows and events which now clutter the schedule of what is lately called Monterey Car Week, the show was free. Overall turnout was supposed to be something approaching 175 cars. These ranged from vintage machinery from the interwar years of the 20th century, like this Alfa 6C and Talbot Lago T23…

…to well-loved used cars from the postwar era.  Though the shine had long worn off this Porsche Speedster, it received a lot of attention from the crowd.

There were sports racers from SCCA's golden age, like these burly Ferraris, one bodied by Scaglietti and one (#69) re-bodied by Sutton in Hollywood, California.  No, that doesn't make it a Ferrari California, but it does make it a unique car.

There were immaculate, polished show cars as well, the kind that get their tire treads cleaned with toothbrushes.

There were prime examples of the coach builder's art, like this Alfa Romeo 1900 Zagato from the mid 1950s…

And this Ferrari 250 GT Lusso…

And there were unique examples of art from metal workers and hot rod builders, like this amazing replica of a Tucker Model 48, with an immaculate clone of the original Alex Tremulis-penned body, right down to the triple-headlight prow and all the related trim…  

But under the engine hood at the rear was a twin-turbocharged Cadillac Northstar V8. 

Some cars were driven to the show, while others came from too far away.  This delicately beautiful OSCA MT4 from the mid-1950s came from the Aloha State…

As car shows go, Carmel Ocean Avenue Concours was the bargain of the year.  And this is just a brief overview.  There will be a Part 2…

Photo credit:  All photos are by the author.

Forgotten Classic —- Fiat Type 55: History Is Bigger Than Memory

Automezzi Colorado is an annual show of Italian machinery (cars and motorcycles) and this was its first year at a new location, the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in the town of Golden. When I arrived late in the morning, there were already crowds around most of the vehicles, and while I waited to photograph this car or that, there was time to notice which cars and motorcycles were attracting the most attention, and from whom...

What struck me first was that despite the presence of lots of new and almost-new cars, visitors clustered around cars that, guessing by their apparent ages, they might have remembered when they were growing up. Or in the case of Ferraris and Maseratis, cars they at least remembered seeing in movies or in the pages of Road & Track from that time in their lives.  Now this is not an original thought; it's widely known that car collectors, for example, often seek out examples of cars they wanted (but couldn't afford) when they were in high school. 

The one exception to the clustering rule was this astonishing 1913 Fiat Type 55, still capable of exceeding 70 mph in the hands of any soul brave enough to try.  Obviously, none of those present would remember this cantankerous old charmer from its reckless youth, or their own, and it attracted old and young in equal measure.  Most of the crowd likely associated the Fiat name with the current 500 runabout or the long-running 124 spider which was available here from the the late 1960s through the early 1980s… in other words, with cute little (usually red) cars.  And when viewed from a vantage point across the field, the Type 55 seemed to fit into that mold.  It was only when you moved in for a closer look that the size of the thing shocked you.  With its 9 liter (over 540 cubic inches), four-cylinder long-stroke engine developing all of 60 horsepower, mechanical brakes on rear wheels only, the steering wheel aimed like a lance at the chest of the driver (in this case, the legendary Felice Nazzaro) perched out in the breeze, the Fiat Type 55 gives a new perspective on the phrase "risk-taking" for a generation accustomed to anti-lock disc brakes, air bags and at the very least (from way back, for nearly everybody) seat belts. It's a reminder of a lost generation that would test its courage in other ways the year after this car was built, in the trenches of the Western Front…

It's also a reminder that Fiat built expensive cars long before the mass market ones, and that Fiat had an American assembly plant around a century before Fiat Chrysler, and before any other European firm.  Fiat had gained a kind of fame by winning twice and setting speed records at New York's Vanderbilt Cup Race in 1905 and '06, so the company decided to establish a U.S. plant. They'd be followed soon enough by Rolls Royce, and decades later by BMW and Mercedes. Fiat built hundreds of cars, including the Type 55, at a factory in Poughkeepsie, New York, starting in 1910 and ending production in 1918, when the Duesenberg brothers, Fred and August, bought the tooling. They needed it  to manufacture Bugatti aero engines under license, as these were still needed for the Great War.  And so our impressions of this car circle back to images of flimsy looking, fabric-bodied airplanes, and steam locomotives carrying troops off to that war… 

And finally, to a kind of paradox.  Perhaps we can only see things truly when they are too far behind us to be subject to our memories, with their clouds of sentiment, romance and plain old inaccuracy.  Because we have no recollections of this machine, we can marvel at it and eventually see it, in the way we see those antique biplanes, hydrogen-filled dirigibles, and vast ocean liners trusting their brittle iron hulls in contests with icebergs.  We look at the ideas we tried, and the risks we took, in the early days of the Machine Age, and we wonder at the craziness of it all.  Perhaps in the same way, future generations will look back at us in a hundred years and see the crazy risks we are taking now.

Photo credit:  All photos by the author.

After the Flying Saucers: Alfa Romeo Superflow

Flying saucers were what Frank Zappa called a real scene in the early 1950s; it seemed everyone was thinking about them, and not just in science fiction stories and films.  When Alfa Romeo commissioned the designers at Touring Superleggera to create a prototype for a new line of sports cars, they came up with the form pictured below, and they called it the Disco Volante, "flying saucer."

This was heady stuff in 1952. The design team working under Felice Bianchi Anderloni contrived to organize the form around  a horizontal break in the surface accented by bright metal and linking the air intakes at the front to the lights at the sharply tapered tail. The shallow, convex teardrop shape (after all, nobody said all saucers had to be round) of the upper body flowed into four smaller teardrops housing the wheels and two streamlined headrests for driver and passenger.  

The lenticular body section was intended to reduce sensitivity to crosswinds and allowed largely enclosed wheels. These ideas were tested in a wind tunnel and on the track at Monza.  When the Disco Volante first appeared at the Turin Show, it was demonstrated by a model who tried to look cheerful despite her Flash Gordon space suit; unfortunately I've lost the photo link.  Perhaps one of the Alfisti who occasionally comments here can send it…

In 1953 one of the three original spiders was made into a coupe with a teardrop roof and small doors that grudgingly permitted entry.  The engine in the first three cars was a 2 liter inline four based on the 1900 engine, but with an aluminum block. Twin overhead cams were featured in an alloy head on this engine and the larger 3.5 liter six, but that engine had a cast iron block. Derived from the 6C 3000CM racers, it would power the last two Disco Volantes built; four of the five cars survive. Chassis design was advanced, with a tubular space frame and De Dion rear suspension… 

                                   

When it appeared that the wide bodies of the prototypes would reduce the car's effectiveness in races on narrow public roads, Anderloni's crew at Touring then re-bodied one of the cars as a Disco Volante a fianchi stretti, or narrow-sided Flying Saucer. Carrozzeria Colli, known mostly for making Alfa limousines and station wagons, built a coupe with similar narrow flanks for the 6C 3000 CM chassis, and Alfa entered 3 of these cars in the  1953 Mille Miglia.  Around the halfway mark in this thousand mile race on public roads, Juan Manuel Fangio's Alfa coupe, #602 shown above, was leading the race after accidents claimed another Alfa, a Ferrari and a Mercedes. Then, with nearly 500 miles to go, a steering link broke, and Fangio had only one steerable wheel. Somehow he managed an epic drive to finish in 2nd place behind a Ferrari. Soon the public attached the Disco Volante name to all these racing Alfas, and their fame spread...

But not enough to get them into production; instead the company put most of its efforts into getting the new, smaller Giulietta* into production. When their racing careers were over, a couple of Alfa's 6C racers were re-bodied as road cars.  Fangio's famous Mille Miglia coupe was re-bodied in 1956 by Pinin Farina as Superflow I, a show car and mobile test bed for new ideas. These ideas included the plexiglass roof with panels that pivoted upward above the doors, and an ovoid body section with canted tail fins and deep side indents painted dark blue. The most unusual feature was provision of clear plexiglass fender tops which allowed a view of the front wheels and the separate, polished headlight units. The likely reason for this innovation was to allow the driver the same view of the front wheel position as on an open-wheel race car. It may also have been prompted by an attempt to re-introduce the elegant separation of elements (fenders, lights, radiators) from classic cars of the 1930s.  

The overall effect of these features on the frontal aspect seemed contrived, however, especially when combined with the apparently added-on grille nacelle.  Also, critics pointed out that the clear fender tops would not stay clear of road grime and stone chips for long...

So, later in 1956, Pinin Farina remodeled the same car into Superflow II shown below, replacing the transparent fender tops with metal ones, and the separate headlamp pods gave way to headlights under plexiglass bubbles.  Even the traditional Alfa grille was replaced by a simple hood scoop and a low air intake.

Superflow II got a new paint scheme, with the concave side coves painted white against the red bodywork.  

Pinin Farina's fascination with transparency continued in another form on this version, with taller tail fins incorporating plexiglass upper sections to allow better rearward vision. Apparently heat gain inside the transparent cabin proved problematic, as a rooftop vent, visible in the photo below, was installed after the color photo above was taken.  In going to all-metal front fenders, PF introduced air extractor vents into their tops just forward of the windshield, most visible in the photo below.

By 1959, Pinin Farina  decided to simplify the car once again, and Superflow III was born. This version was an open spider rendered in white, still with the concave coves along the car's flanks. The headlights were now uncovered, and the frameless top of the windshield, along with the large faired-in headrests, would seem to argue against provision of a practical convertible top. Those headrests may be a reference to the same feature on the original Disco Volante from 1952. Liberated from the need for soon-to-be-outmoded tail fins, the designers emphasized the rounded tail with neat wraparound tail lights...

Not yet satisfied with the overall form or details, the PF team kept their panel-beaters busy by remodeling the entire car one last time in 1960.  A close examination shows that the restless search for perfection has led to revising nearly all the body panels as well as the transparent roof. In the view below, the covered headlights and smoother fender profiles are visible, along with a new windshield frame.  The form of the front fender vent is repeated on the rear fender...

Also, the concave cove along the car's flanks has been removed and replaced by a shallow, simple indent.  The roof now features a structural rib running down the center.

This detail shows the side windows are curved in section and are removable rather than the wind-down type.  Like the most Alfa race cars from the early 1950s, the 6C 3000CM chassis has right-hand drive.  

This car has recently been repainted in racing red, but its forms and surfaces may have been served best by the muted metallic red it wore when it appeared in Road & Track.  The year after Superflow IV appeared, Pininfarina (now all one name) showed a smaller prototype incorporating many of the ideas from the Superflow series.

This was the 1961 Giulietta SS Spider Aerodinamica, based upon the popular 1300cc  Alfa Giulietta series.  In the two photos above, the rounded tail, indented side coves, and smoothly contoured front end with faired-in headlights (in this case, retractable units) all echo the Superflows.  They demonstrate the persistent, slow search for workable ideas that Pininfarina conducted in order to arrive at a form for Alfa's new 1600 Duetto spider, which would finally arrive in 1966.  At the introduction of the new model, some automotive writers commented that the form was not especially striking or innovative.  This may have been because they'd been seeing variations on this form at auto shows for a full ten years.  But this original "round-tail" Duetto's details, from the covered headlights from Superflow IV, to the deftly integrated front bumper and grille from the 1961 Spider Aerodinamica, worked well together.  The two cars shown below were photographed at a show this summer, and are in regular use.  Aside from the aftermarket wheels and mirrors, they are testimony to a patient, careful process of trial and error leading to a car that still looks as modern as its original, fresh-faced self, half a century later.

*Footnotes:  

The Alfa Romeo Giulietta sports models are featured in posts entitled "Max Hoffman: An Eye for Cars" for 5-1-16 and in "Unsung Genius: Franco Scaglione" for 12-20-17.  These can be found in the Archives.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  pinterest.com

2nd & 3rd:  wikimedia

4th:  jmfangio.org

All photos of Superflow I, II & III:  Pininfarina S.p.A.

Black & white photos of Superflow IV:  Pininfarina S.p.A.

Color shot of Superflow IV:  wikimedia

1961 Spider Aerodinamica:  Pininfarina S.p.A.

Production Duettos in color:  the author