Boomer's Story: Buy an Old Jaguar; Save a Marriage

It's summer of 1973, and the euphoria of the early season (it's finally warm outdoors, and you can swim in Lake Michigan, health advisories aside) has given way to the heat and humidity of August in Chicago.  Also, everybody around you seems to think you need to buy a car.  The adventure of a 1970 Saab 99 hasn't worked out too well; the black box that controls the electronic fuel injection has repeatedly decided that the intake mixture is too hot.  When you pulled out recently to pass on a two-lane road at about 70, it shut off the engine altogether. The bicycle work commute to downtown Chicago, except for the pleasant part on the Lake Shore bike path, is fraught with hazards. So you take the train from Evanston, while your practical friends are suggesting something safe, trusty and reliable for general use, like maybe a Volvo (preferably one with carburetors)…

Naturally, you are checking out Jaguars instead.  Your search centers on the E-Type*, in coupe or roadster form.  You avoid the more practical 2+2 model, as it suggests you could be the kind of person who might compromise the romance of the open road for a trip to the hardware store, and those two tiny seats in the rear will remind people like your mom of the urgent need for grandchildren.

You drive a Series 1 roadster, an early one with the 3.8 liter engine and obdurate Moss gearbox, along with the thin-shell bucket seats (comfy if your back is contoured a certain way; yours isn't). It's opalescent blue, so pretty you almost need to look at it sideways, and about $4,000.  That seems to be the price everyone has settled on this summer.  You drive a green Series 2 roadster too, but someone has fiddled with the pedals because they were a bad fit; that owner must have been a very short person.  You prefer the Series 1; if we're going with impracticality we might as well have esthetic purity along with it...

                                     

There's an ad in the paper for a '67 2-passenger coupe and the price is a tempting $2,650, kind of an odd figure.  So you call the guy.  His name is Wally and he works for ABC TV. You go and see Wally; he lives near Lake Shore Drive in the kind of high-rise you imagine an exec at ABC might like.  The car for sale is a late Series 1 coupe in a muted, almost sleepy shade called Willow Green in the catalog, and the interior, which smells like a well-oiled catcher's mitt, is black. There's an English license plate at the back, under the Illinois plate: HKV 362E. The car's state of tidy, shiny good condition surprises you, considering the low price.  There's another E-Type parked next to it in the garage, a recent V12 roadster in yellow, and also a VW Beetle. Wally explains about the price; he's under some pressure to sell the green coupe.

                                      
"My wife drives the Beetle."

"Doesn't she like it?  Easy to park, and so forth…"

"She thinks I have too many Jaguars."

"Too many Jaguars?"  The concept is impenetrable to you; you can't think of anything to say.

"Let's go for a drive," Wally suggests.

You nervously thread your way through traffic onto Lake Shore Drive and gently ask the car for some speed; it plunges forward with a contented booming noise.  You could get fond of that booming noise and the big, wood-rimmed steering wheel. You like the gearbox better than the one in the blue roadster.  Also, it's August and the car is not overheating, even in traffic.  Wally suggests you take the exit for North Avenue Beach, and for some reason he turns on the radio, which surprises you by actually working.  The song is "Gloria", the original version by Van Morrison and Them… 

"Like to tell you about my baby
You know she come around
She's about five feet four
From her head to the ground…"

Wally speaks.  "At ABC News in London, I was the second guy to have this car.  It was kind of the date car for awhile…"

For some reason you think of the beleaguered Jack Lemmon in "The Apartment", with that fateful key.

"G-L-O-R-I-A…"

"The deal is, my wife wants it, or she wants me to sell it, or maybe that's it."

"That's it?" You picture his wife getting on a train to Omaha, or St. Louis, or someplace…Maybe she looks like Shirley MacLaine in "The Apartment."

"G-L-O-R-I-A…"
I'm gonna shout it all night…"

"The two other guys who came to drive it didn't even know how to drive it.  I'd rather you have it."

"I have exactly $2,500 in my account."

"Okay, twenty-five hundred then.  That's it."

"Gloria, Gloria…
I'm gonna shout it every day, Gloria
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…"

Your kindly dad lends you three hundred bucks so you don't have to live on PBJ until your next paycheck.  You mostly live on hot dogs and beans anyway.  You adjust your driving habits, and your parking habits, after a short while.  It's a new experience to have a car with real stopping power.  You learn to get rid of that heavy, clunky key fob because it swings so hard in an energetic turn that it switches the engine off.  You panic when you think that you hear the sound of a failed cam chain tensioner until you stop and open the bonnet and hear just the usual peaceful humming noise.  You then realize it was the tambourine track on "Basketball Jones." These are your early memories of a very happy car...

The Boomer turns out to be the one car in your experience that has always started when you turned the key and pressed the button. Years go by, then decades, and nothing dramatic ever happens on the mechanical front. The clock stops working, but then again, nobody ever bought a Jaguar to tell time... 

In over 45 years of ownership you've replaced the tires a couple times, replaced the clutch, repainted the car once, and then repainted the nose after somebody backed into it when you were playing volleyball.  The shot of the suspended form during a tire change confirms the basic correctness of the lines...

In Boomer's 51st year in service the intake manifold springs a leak, however, and in the course of the repairs at Sportscar Craftsmen, it seems appropriate to rebuild the head as well.  All the corrosion issues have surfaced in the aluminum castings because antifreeze loses its anti-corrosion properties without frequent changes, and your changes haven't happened often enough because you haven't driven the car enough. The guys at SCC scold you about that, not for the first time...

You resolve to start driving Boomer enough, and decide that a rebuilt engine will make the experience of driving as close to a new E-Type as you'll get in your life, and so the experts at SCC plunge into that work on the bottom end too.  You hope the work will be finished by August 18, your 46th anniversary of saving a marriage by adopting a pretty good used car...

*Footnote:  The history and design of the E-type Jaguar were reviewed in our post for August 13, 2017 entitled "Racing Improves the Breed: Cunningham's Jaguar E-Types."

Photo Credit:  All photos are by the author.

Song Lyrics:  "Gloria" copyright by Van Morrison, 1965.

Roadside Attraction: National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO

Ieoh Ming Pei began his first large-scale commission as an independent architect in the foothills of the Rockies in 1961.  The project assignment, under the direction of Walter Orr Roberts, the founding director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was to provide over 240,000 square feet of research laboratories on a wild, windswept site shadowed by the tilted, sandstone cliffs of the Flatirons. 

Pei and his wife Eileen drove around Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona to get a feel for the high desert country.  After visiting the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, recently designed by Walter Netsch as chief architect for SOM, Pei decided that the "detached object in landscape" approach had no chance against the scale of the cliffs and mountains over his 565 acre site... 

Instead, he took inspiration from the Anasazi cliff dwellings conceived by the region's earliest inhabitants.  After an early proposal for a single tower was rejected by NCAR director Roberts, Pei proposed a scheme with multiple, faceted towers with rectilinear masses and projections to provide sharp delineation of form in bright sunlight, as well as to provide shade and human scale.

Courtyards linked the towers to each other and to the landscape, providing places for scientists to meet informally when in transit between labs.  Pei avoided long, narrow corridors full of doors, instead widening the internal routes where windows opened to the landscape. Crushed aggregate from local sandstone was employed in the concrete mix to create an impression the buildings were carved out of the cliffs; this impression was enhanced by mechanically 'bush-hammering" the concrete surfaces to provide vertical striations. Beyond the Native American influence, the towers at NCAR showed Pei's awareness of Louis Kahn's design for the Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia (1957-61).  At NCAR, however, the spaces shaped by the architect were judged by the users to better fit their purpose than at Richards...

From the beginning, the work of those scIentists involved recording weather patterns over time to identify climate change, measuring wind patterns so that useful data on wind shear could be provided to airports, and looking at the composition of the atmosphere itself, an important task in the Front Range of the Rockies, where the infamous "brown cloud" of automotive and industrial emissions were a part of daily life by the time the NCAR buildings were completed in 1967.

Also from the beginning, NCAR provided public space with educational exhibits showing the formation of phenomena like clouds and tornadoes.  Over the decades, its atmospheric research involving high altitude balloons and satellites provided essential evidence of a phenomenon that was universally recognized by the world's scientists at the time of my first NCAR tour 25 years ago: man-made climate change, otherwise known as global warming.

The mountains are easily reached by hiking trails which link the complex to the foothills. Rattlesnake warnings are posted in the hot season, but you are just as likely to see deer, coyote, and the occasional black bear.

While the mission of of NCAR has moved the organization into the spotlight and onto the front lines of the fight to mitigate climate change, their headquarters and sole laboratory complex has maintained its quiet presence in the landscape, with no external changes beyond the provision of a small, low-lying building for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research across the access road, underground additions to the main building for supercomputer studies, and one above-ground annex in 1980.

Naturalists and architectural preservationists want to keep it that way.  Pei's NCAR complex was granted the American Institute of Architects Colorado Chapter's 25 Year Award in 1997. It's for buildings that are still serving their original function 25 to 45 years after they were completed...

                            

I.M. Pei died on May 16, 2019 at the age of 102.  There may exist, somewhere, a building complex more attuned to its natural surroundings than his work at NCAR, but that would be, in the words of James Taylor, in "another land, beneath another sky"... 

*Footnote:  The final line is from the song and album entitled "Never Die Young", copyright 1988 by James Taylor.

Photo Credit:  All photos are by the author.

On a Lazy Afternoon in 1987: Inside Bob Sutherland's Garage

I received a call about a fund-raiser for a young artists' orchestra in Denver one day in 1987. The idea was that you'd make a contribution supporting a promising group of young musicians, be served a nice lunch and get a chance to look at some old cars owned by Bob Sutherland, the proprietor of a local chain of lumber yards.  This sounded like a good way to while away a lazy afternoon. The specific cars were not mentioned, but I'd heard that Mr. Sutherland liked old Miller and Bugatti single seaters, and had an interest in Indy cars as well as early Maseratis and Ferraris. The vehicle parked outside the Sutherland garage on the afternoon of the event, however, stopped me in my tracks.  I'd seen a couple of early Ferraris before, but none this early...

This is a very early Ferrari.  It's a 166 (2 liter V12) bodied by Superleggera Touring in a style echoing their competition barchettas which appeared in 1949. It appears to share the 2250mm wheelbase (about 88.6 inches) with those cars, but is outfitted with a notchback coupe body with roll-up windows and the delicate teardrop tail lights that also appeared  on a barchetta Touring buiilt for the Fiat mogul, Giovanni Agnelli.

The photo above shows off the smoothly-tapered tail, with the hand-hammered alloy curves unprotected by bumpers.  The photo below emphasizes what a narrow little car it was...

Like the Touring-bodied barchettas and fastback competition berlinettas, this 166 features  a sharp crease formed into the flanks an connecting the wheel arches.  It may have helped stiffen the body panels, but it had the added effect of visually lowering the car.  Unlike its more competition-oriented sister cars, this Ferrrari has disc wheels rather than center-lock wire wheels, and these are finished with simple (and probably irreplaceable) hubcaps with the Ferrari logo.

Inside the garage, music students milled around the cars with their parents and other car lovers. There were a lot of cars to love here.  Below is a Ferrari Type 625 Squalo (shark) Formula 1 car which first appeared for the 2.5 liter Formula 1 in 1954. The engine is Lampredi's twin-cam inline 4 with integral head and block, not unlike that in the 4 cylinder 625 Testa Rossa.  In the background is a Pinin Farina Ferrari competition berlinetta from the same period.

Below is one of a handful of 290MM spyders Ferrari built for endurance racing in 1956.  The 3.5 liter V12 differed from the production engines by having two spark plugs per cylinder; the 1957 version would feature twin cams per cylinder bank. The 290 shared the Type 520 tubular chassis, 4 speed transaxle and De Dion rear suspension with its sister car, the 3.5 liter, four-cylinder 860 Monza.  In the hands of Eugenio Castellotti, this car was the victor in the rainy, accident-plagued 1956 Mille Miglia.

Bob Sutherland scratched the paint when opening the engine lid on the red 250LM In the background of the photo below; he'd traded a 250 GTO64 for it, and I had seen that car race at Steamboat Springs*.  In the center of the picture is a Type 51 Bugatti with unique bodywork, while to the left is a Type 37A.

The Type 51 Bugatti of the early 1930s was a twin-cam development of the 2.3 liter inline 8 of the Type 35. Supercharged, it could make up to 180 horsepower.  Most T51s were outfitted with typical boat-tailed, racer bodywork with detachable (or optional) fenders, and this car had started that way...

But in the late 1930s its owner had been captivated by the riveted alloy coupé bodies of the Type 57 Atlantics*, and he commissioned Carrosserie Dubos to build a similar body to make his racer into a unique road car.  Dubos started the work in spring 1937 and finished in summer of that year.

Like the T57 Atlantic, the Dubos T51 had a central dorsal fin running between the rear windows and down the center of the gently rounded deck surface.  The wood interior trim, engine-turned dash, and scalloped, bright metal fender trim also appeared on one or more of the Atlantics.  Bob Sutherland stayed active as a vintage racer and supporter of musical education until his unexpectedly early departure from the world in November 1999 at the age of 56.  All the cars in these photos were auctioned sometime after...

*Footnote:  The first Ferrari imported into the United States, a cycle-fendered 166 Spyder Corsa sold by Luigi Chinetti to Briggs Cunningham, is on display at the Revs Institute, and pictured in our post from May 6, 2018 entitled "Lost Roadside Attraction: Luigi Chinetti Motors." Racing on the roads around Steamboat Springs, Colorado is pictured in our post for January 31, 2019 entitled "Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Racing in Steamboat Springs."  And for a look at the Bugatti Type 57 Atlantics, search our Archives for June 11, 2017, when we posted "Authenticity vs. Originality: A Tale of Four (or Five) Bugattis".

Photo Credit:  All photos were taken by the author.

Paranormal Porsches Part 2 (or 3): The Forgotten 907

We missed photographing the Porsche 907 on our 2017 visit to the Revs Institute Collier Collection because it was in their impressive restoration shop for some work.  The 907's absence might not have been noticed in a normal museum display of historic cars, but the Collier collection might be called Paranormal, as it contains at least one of every type of road racing Porsche, from the first Type 550 from 1953 through the 917 twelve-cylinder cars that achieved peak fame and power (as in 1,000 hp) in the 1970s.  In a way, the empty space for the 907 was a bit like its place in history, overshadowed by the 908 and 917 that came after it...  

This neglected status may have been due at first to the 907's brief racing career; it was first raced at Le Mans in  the summer of 1967, and was only campaigned by the Porsche factory team into 1968, when it overlapped the introduction of its successor, the three-liter 908. Then there was the business of the numerical sequence; the 907 appeared, confusingly, the year after the 910 racer, and three years after the 911 production car.  The likely reason for the out-of-order number sequence is the French car maker Peugeot.  They objected when Porsche introduced its new six-cylinder road car, the 901, at the Paris Auto Show in October 1964.  It seems Peugeot claimed to have copyrighted three-digit number sequences with centered zeroes flanked by non-zeroes (203, 403, 404). Porsche directors obligingly changed the designation to 911, and when they followed their successful 904 racer with the long-planned 906 showcasing the new 901 engine in 1966, they introduced it as the Carrera 6 to avoid making Peugeot unhappy.  The next development of the flat six sports racer, called the 906-10 internally, was called 910 for public consumption.  By the time the next iteration of Porsche's endurance racer was ready in 1967, Porsche had perhaps noticed that BMW had gotten away with the 503 and 507 for years, and that Bristol had followed its long-running 405 with models 406 through 409 without incurring lawsuits.  So Porsche called its new car the 907, with no apologies.

The 907 didn't need any apologies on the technical front either.  Porsche's 2 liter 6-cylinder 910s had finished 1-2-3 at the Nurburgring 1000 km in 1967, beating larger-engined cars from Ferrari and Ford, but Porsche felt they needed a bit more power to take the elusive podium at Le Mans, so their engineering department based the 907's mid-mounted Type 771 engine on their horizontally-opposed 8 cylinder, 1.5 liter Formula 1 engine, stretching it to 2.2 liters. It featured 4 shaft-driven camshafts, a roller-bearing crankshaft, and consumed 200 hours of labor to assemble. Technical refinement was not spared on other fronts, with aerodynamic smoothing of the 910 body design, a NASA-style driving suit with internal cooling system for driver comfort, and a switch to right-hand drive for the largely clockwise road courses.  The narrow, wind-cheating cabin with steeply curved greenhouse allows barely enough width for the driver and FIA-required passenger seat...

The 907s first raced at Le Mans in summer 1967, but with the 2 liter six because the eight was not ready; the best result was a 5th place finish. The eight-cylinder 907 was ready for the Sebring 12 Hours in March 1968, where Porsche entered four long-tailed cars, and Hans Herrmann and Jo Siffert took the pole position and the race, with another 907 in 2nd place. This is the winning Herrmann / Siffert car, chassis 907-024.  Apparently not all chassis numbers were used, as the Revs Institute estimates Porsche built only 21 Type 907s.  In keeping with Ferdinand Piech's policy of building superlight racers needing early and frequent rebuilds, many 907s were converted to 908s when the new 3 liter flat 8 engine was ready, further obscuring the 907's place in history. Ironically, Peugeot won Le Mans in 2009 with a car called the 908. There is no evidence that Porsche ever objected to Peugeot's borrowing their famous number sequence... 

*Footnotes:  For a survey of the other Porsche road racers at the Collier Collection, visit our Archives for "The Revs Institute Part 2: Pantheon of Paranormal Porsches", posted March 19, 2017.  

Photo Credits:  Our photos were kindly supplied by amateur racer and photographer Paul Anderson, who revisited the Revs Institute earlier this spring.

Roadside Attraction----Sarasota Classic Car Museum: Lots of Iso Rivoltas, and a Little of Everything Else

Florida's Sarasota Classic Car Museum offers a collection which is less focused on pre-war classics and post WWII racers than the Revs Institute in Naples, but it has an eclectic collection of significant cars starting with the dawn of the horseless carriage era.  This 1905 Schacht, built in Cincinnati, produced all of 10 hp from 100 cubic inch displacement of a water-cooled flat twin.

The Schacht gives a new meaning to the term "half-restored", as one half of the car, as seen in the photo above, has indeed been restored.  The other half looks like this...

Unlike other "half-restored" cars, the Schacht doesn't appear to have been the victim of a budget cut, but instead appears to have been restored only from its right side to its centerline, as a sort of 3D "before and after" snapshot.  This approach will provide insight to museum visitors, but is unlikely to enhance driving enjoyment.

The museum has a couple of Rolls Silver Ghosts, both formerly belonging to John and Mable Ringling  of the circus dynasty.  The one above was assembled in the Springfield, Massachusetts, factory that Rolls Royce operated in the Roaring Twenties, and dates from 1922.  The interior shot is from the Ringling's 1924 model. 

Delahaye is represented by a seldom-seen Type 134, the four cylinder kid sister to the famous Type 135 six.  This charmer from 1934 is a reminder that Delahaye produced trucks and middle class road cars in the years before WWII.  They might've turned into the Volvo of France, if not for Peugeot's bigger production capacity and better postwar luck, which involved the French government assigning them to middle-class, mainstream cars, while Delahaye was restricted to the heavily-taxed stratosphere.

A similar Type 134 is shown in rear view below.  Bodies were by Autobineau, the series production arm of custom coachbuilder Letrouneur & Marchand.  Facel would provide a similar service after WWII, providing bodies for a variety of Panhards, French Fords and Simcas as well as making their own cars.

The one make of car represented out of all proportion to its frequency on the world's highways, though, is Iso Rivolta*.  The Sarasota museum displays one of nearly every kind of vehicle Iso built from the beginning in the 1950s until the end in 1974, including the handsome, Giugiaro-designed, 327 Chevy-powered 1967 Grifo shown below.

This phenomenon is due to the happy fact that Piero Rivolta, the son of Iso founder Renzo Rivolta, happens to live in Sarasota. The Rivolta family has lent part of their comprehensive collection to the display, including the Iso motorcycle that nestles next to the sleek, shiny flanks of the Grifo.

There's even a rare example of the Iso S4 (also called Fidia) 4-door sedan, which is parked next to an Isetta, the egg-shaped microcar that was Iso's first car design.  Iso later licensed the Isetta design to BMW, and it contributed to BMW's survival at a time when the German firm was losing money on its big, slow-selling V8s.

Iso Rivolta, on the other hand, did pretty well with V8s until the OPEC oil embargo that followed the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.  The impact on fuel costs suddenly made the American V8s in Isos (sourced from GM until 1972, and Ford afterward) unfashionable even for those who could afford them.  The last completely new model Iso Rivolta proposed was the mid-engined Varedo shown below, powered by a 351 Cleveland mounted in the 8th chassis Giotto Bizzarrini had produced for his stillborn AMX3* project for American Motors. That chassis, in turn, had its roots in Bizzarrini's P538* sports racer…

The fiberglass body on the lone Varedo prototype was designed by Ercole Spada at Zagato. Unlike many prototype cars, the final product looks a lot like the concept sketch.  In the case of the Varedo, that's not an advantage.  The finished body preserves the abrupt transitions and lack of detail resolution shown in the sketch.  The side window glazing, which is present both above and below the car's belt line, echoes a theme stated more convincingly by Giorgetto Giugiaro in his design for the Maserati Boomerang*. 

Mazda's long-playing adventure with the Wankel rotary engine is commemorated by the Series I Cosmo.  The two-seater was produced from 1967 to 1972, and this early version featured a couple of inches less wheelbase than the Series II.  Both versions are smaller than their somewhat American-influenced bodywork would indicate, with careful proportions and low roof height concealing the size of the 1,700 pound coupe.

Engines were twin-rotor designs produced in 1.1 liter (racing), 1.2 liter and 1.3 liter displacements from designs licensed from NSU in Germany. The cars were fixed roof coupes, with under 400 Series I models produced, and over 800 of the Series II.  The rear-end styling has hints of Chrysler Turbine Car, while the frontal treatment seems derived from Pininfarina's Ferrari Superfast coupes, with glass-covered headlights and the formed steel "speed lines" framing the slanted vents behind the front wheels.

Sarasota's Cosmo is right-hand drive, as were most of the production Cosmo two-seaters.

The Ford Prodigy concept car from 2000 is a largely-forgotten artifact of a program called Partnership for a New Era of Vehicles which involved the US Government and the Big Three. The idea was to foster US leadership in high-efficiency, low-emissions vehicles. Ford took the diesel-electric hybrid approach with the Prodigy, and their test car yielded 72 mpg. Styling reflected Ford's cautiousness after their experience with pubic resistance to their ovoid, "no-straight lines" 3rd generation 1996 Taurus*.

By the time Ford got around to producing a hybrid car, it was a gasoline / electric hybrid more closely related to Toyota Prius technology.  The Prodigy in Sarasota is a non-running "roller" built for display at auto shows.

*Footnote:  For a more complete commentary on Iso Rivolta history, you might search our archives for "Born from Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta", posted on Sept. 20, 2018.  The AMX3 saga is recounted in "Italian Jobs from the Heartland Part 2: AMX Vignale and AMX3 Bizzarrini" from Nov. 29, 2016.  The Bizzarrini P538 which preceded led to the AMX3 and finally to the Iso Varedo is reviewed in "The Etceterini Files Part 18: Bizzarrini P538" from Feb. 27, 2019.  The Maserati Boomerang is pictured in "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars", in these posts for Sept. 7, 2015.  And the 3rd generation Ford Taurus design is given some context in "Nineties Concept Cars Part 2: Lost in Translation" from Dec. 31, 2018.

Photo Credits:  All photos are by frequent contributor Paul Anderson, except for the rear view of a Delahaye 134 from Wikimedia Commons, and the last photo showing the Ford Prodigy, which is from RM Sotheby's, which auctioned the non-running display car.  The design sketch of the Iso Varedo is from the Zagato Design Studio.

Forgotten Classic: Chrysler Airflow Imperial CV-8 Coupe

If you grew up in America in the 50s and 60s, the Chrysler Airflow was still a car people remembered.  Sometimes you'd see one, dusty and neglected in some forlorn used car lot in automobile row, and your dad or your uncle would just shake his head and say, "Too bad, when it came out it was too far ahead of its time."  You'd wonder, though, how any machine that performed its assigned function well could be ahead of its time...                                  

The AIrflow was a project that had its roots in a Chrysler program in the early 1930s to adapt modern ideas to a production car.  The ideas included moving the engine forward so all passengers could sit between the axles, widening the cabin for more seating room, and structuring the body as a semi-monocoque assembly with welded external body panels contributing to the strength of the steel truss-like elements underneath.  

And streamlining; the radiused curves of the Airflow that eventually emerged from chief engineer Carl Breer's workshops reflected wind tunnel testing done in consultation with Orville Wright (yep, that Orville). By the early 1930s, aerodynamic thinking, some of it sound, was beginning to appear in prototype cars, including front and rear-engined efforts from Budd Body Company, and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion.*. In Central Europe, Hans Ledwinka was preparing to release the first of his rear-engine Tatra streamliners* in 1934, the Airflow year.

The body design by Oliver Clark began with the waterfall grille that fronted all Airflows (DeSoto, Chrysler and Imperial) that year, and was echoed in the radiused prow which enveloped the lights, the helmet-like fenders, and the V-shaped windshield (a one-piece curve on the Imperial limo) which angled back into the arc of the fastback roof profile.  

That first year, only the Chrysler Imperial models like this rare coupe had an external trunk lid; other Airflows allowed trunk access via a folding rear seat...  

The seats were raised above the floor on tubular chrome supports that seemed straight out of a Bauhaus living room, and the look was completed by the sober, purposeful, well-trimmed splendor of the cockpit.  Note that the two windshield panels can be cranked open at the bottom.




In addition to the semi-unitized body construction short-hood, long-cabin, wide-seat proportions, all Airflows, the straight six-cylinder DeSotos and Chrysler inline eights, featured hydraulic brakes, with vacuum assists on the big Imperial CW limousines, at a time when Ford (and Europeans like Bugatti) stubbornly stayed with mechanical brakes. One odd anachronism was the retention of solid axles even at the front, when a sophisticated double wishbone independent front suspension was already on the senior Plymouth line.  This was because engineer Breer was aiming at smooth ride, not sharp handling, and by lowering the spring rates he got the advertised "floating ride." The new body structure was strong enough that Chrysler advertised with an authentic newsreel of an Airflow being pitched off a tall cliff and then driving away under its own power.  It was expensive and time-consuming to assemble, though, and delays in tooling meant that Chrysler wasn't able to meet the initial demand...

There were other troubles, too.  Engine mount failures on as many as two thousand of the early cars hurt the Airflow's reputation, even though Chrysler fixed the mounts.  Chrysler had kept its more conventional-looking CA line of cars in production, calling it Airstream (they may have meant Mainstream) in 1935, and this helped keep them afloat when Airflow sales slowed during what was already a selling environment flattened by the Great Depression.  DeSoto, however, had only Airflows to sell in 1934. Perhaps the real trouble was not that the Airflow was "too far advanced" for its time, but that it was introduced at a time when people were more concerned about keeping or finding jobs, and feeding their families, than spending money on shiny new cars, even ones with pretty good reputations.  

*Footnote:  Tatra automobiles are featured in "Cars and Ethics" in our Archives for November 27, 2015, and also for Dec. 31, 2016 in "Roadside Attraction: Rolling Sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art", and in "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile" for Jul7 30,  2017.  The Fuller Dymaxion saga is reviewed in "Architect-Designed Cars Part 1", from May 7, 2017.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by Paul Anderson, who kindly shared a bounty of shots from a recent trip to the Collier Collection at the Revs Institute in Naples, Florida.