Motoring's Classic Revival

Time was, say just after World War II, when $1500 would buy a Duesenberg double-cowl phaeton in fair shape. Coffin-nosed 810-812 Cords went for half that. Before the War, an example of the rarest of all U. S.-built automobiles, the T-head Mercer Raceabout, was sold for $50. Three hundred times that price might buy it today, and it might not. A good Model J Duesenberg can bring $10,000. An old story, to be sure. A few of the things man makes, even though the creations of craftsmen, not artists, are so happily conceived that they outlive their lifetimes. There are never enough of them to go around: George III thujawood cabinets, Bréguet watches, clocks by Thomas Tompion, silver by Paul Revere. When demand exceeds supply and prices become no matter, someone will take action and the result will be either a counterfeit or a replica. A replica, someone has said, is a forgery made by an honest man, like the replicas of the British sovereign minted a few years ago for sale to European hoarders. They were exact copies, but they weren't counterfeit because the British government no longer made the coin, it wasn't in circulation, and because the man who did make them saw to it that they had a bit more gold content than the British mint itself had used.

As far as I know, no one has ever forged an automobile. But the notion of making replicas of desirable models is no new thing. In the 1930s Frazer-Nash made the Tourist Trophy Replica, a duplicate of a famous race-winning car. Again in the 1930s the Brewster company of New York used to buy Rolls-Royce limousines and town cars, discard the original bodies and mount two-seater roadsters on them, replicas of the standard, but always rare Piccadilly model. An elegant carriage it was, too, transportation (continued on page 132)Classic Revival(continued from page 84) de grande luxe for two people, its tiny cabin atop the long wheelbase giving it something of the air of a Louis Quatorze sedan chair carried on poles long enough for four bearers fore and aft. I owned one, and regret selling it. I owned a T-head Mercer, too, and a Packard double-cowl touring car, and I would like all of them back. It cannot be done. However, though there be small hope for me, there is hope for you, if you pine for a coffin-nosed Cord, or a Duesenberg, or the SSK Mercedes-Benz of the 1930s, for plans to make replicas of these cars, varying in precision from case to case, are afoot.

The Duesenberg project is the most ambitious, which is fitting, since the Duesenberg was among the most notable of American motorcars. The company's life was short, and few Duesenbergs were built, only about 470 of the Model J and SJ cars on which the legend is based. The car was expensive, from $14,750 to $25,000. It was big, and not by present standards an easy car to handle. Driving one now, one notices a "trucky" feeling at low speeds: The steering, the clutch, the brakes are heavier than custom today will tolerate, and the car seems very big indeed. All this fades away on the high side of 50 miles an hour, coming into what is after all the country in which the Duesenberg was meant to live. As a limousine it hadn't quite the degree of hushed mechanical refinement that marked the great Rolls-Royces that were its contemporaries, although the detail and luxury of its coachwork equaled anything on the road, and surpassed most. But the Duesenberg was two things, the Rolls-Royce only one: Both cars made elegant town carriages, but the Duesenberg was a tiger on the open road as well. Its builders proposed to throw it into competition with the best European makes, Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, Hispano-Suiza, Isotta-Fraschini, Minerva, Bentley (nothing American was then its peer) and they succeeded so handsomely that to this day most people believe the Duesenberg was made in Germany.

The name, of course, is German; Fred and August Duesenberg were born in Germany, and comparison of the Duesenberg, particularly the SJ model, with the 540K Mercedes-Benz, another fast, luxurious, eight-cylinder supercharged automobile, is legitimate, but there the matter ends.

Fritz Duesenberg, August Duesenberg's son and Fred Duesenberg's nephew, is chairman of the board of the new Duesenberg company, and the first of the new cars will be in its owner's hands, if all goes well, one day in 1965, just short of 30 years after the last of the old ones was sold: November 1936. The two will look nothing like each other. The new body is by Virgil Exner, former Chrysler vice-president, a major figure in automobile styling, and his son Virgil Exner, Jr. Final decisions had not been made when this was written, but the body will be, the Exners intend, massively impressive, elegant and carrying about it a slightly sporting air. Effort has been made to bring to it some design points, particularly in the front end, reminiscent of the classic car, but they are not many. (Exner has done this before; he showed a "modern" Mercer Raceabout at this year's Paris Salon.) A near copy would be difficult and impracticable in many ways. There was really no "standard" Duesenberg—bodies were made by many coachmakers: Rollston, Derham, Murphy, Willoughby, LeBaron, Judkins, Weymann, Walker, Holbrook, Brunn, Castagna, Hibbard & Darrin, Bohman & Schwartz, Dietrich, Locke, Fernandez. About 175 different bodies were built on the J chassis, and probably as many as 100 of them were unique—one of a kind.

Performance of the new Duesenberg must be surmised at the moment, since the essential factor, the power-to-weight ratio, hasn't been established. The car will weigh something around three tons and the engine will produce 400 to 500 horsepower. It will probably be a Lincoln engine, which is to say Ford, and 500 horsepower is well within reach. The old supercharged Duesenbergs, the SJ model—only 38 were made—had 325 horsepower and were guaranteed at 104 miles an hour in second, 130 in third. Performance of the new one should be comparable. If aluminum or fiberglass were used for the body, it would be quicker, but the decision has been taken to do it in steel, and in Italy. Nowhere else in the world today are there coach-makers who could undertake the assignment at anything approaching a feasible cost. As it is the car will cost about $18,000, a startling figure at first glance, but reasonable in the present limited luxury-motorcar market: The standard Phantom V Rolls-Royce V-8 costs $26,000 in London; the bottom of the line, the Silver Cloud model, $15,445. The Ferrari 330 GT brings $17,000-odd in the same market, and the British dealer sold six of them off the floor at the last London show. The new Duesenberg company's hope to sell 300 units the first year thus appears rational. The car is coming in a boom time, as did the old one, regularly priced at $14,750 to $17,500 with a few to individual order at $20,000 and perhaps two at $25,000. In 1935 $17,000 was a great deal more money than $18,000 is today.

Ettore Bugatti, a man who lived and thought on baronial levels, had a hotel near his plant in Molsheim in France for the convenience of customers who preferred to pick up their own cars rather than trust them even to factory delivery drivers. Duesenberg has adopted this notion and improved on it: There will be guesthouses on the factory grounds available to clients at no charge. (Sometimes Bugatti clients were given bills on checking out, sometimes not, depending upon the impression the great man had of them.)

Certainly the Duesenberg will be unique in the American market. Owners need not expect to meet another one in a good many thousands of miles of driving. If the first model, the sedan, has the somewhat sedate air inherent in that kind of body, still it will be luxurious, beautifully finished, extraordinarily satisfying; and the convertible model expected to appear perhaps in 1966 should be as spectacular as any décapotable France or Italy ever knew.

No one has much doubt that an exciting body will come off Exner's drawing board, and the engine poses no problem. There are half a dozen V-8s in Detroit that would do nicely. Knowledgeable engineers do have some reservations about the chassis. The design of a chassis from scratch is not as simple as it sounds; it is not just a matter of riveting up a steel framework and hanging engine bearers and four wheels on it. Inevitably, hundreds of unpredictable little problems arise; the debugging of a new chassis design is a frustrating and time-consuming business. Still, experience and the weight of money counts and Fred McManis, Jr., president of the company, has said that there is $40,000,000 of Texas money in the vaults, and more where that came from. Paul Farago, a Chrysler veteran, is in charge of production, and Dale Cosper, ex-Studebaker, is chief engineer.

Brooks Stevens of Milwaukee, among the best-known and most versatile industrial designers in the country (he has done everything from trains to eggbeaters), has taken an easier road with his Ex-calibur SS: He is using the standard Studebaker Daytona chassis, the Chevrolet 327 engine and the Paxton supercharger, all time-proved components. His plans are less ambitious, too: He hopes to make 16 cars a month to sell for $7000 with no intention of expanding production beyond that. Eight cars had been built, sold and delivered last January, putting Stevens and his son William, whose particular baby the project has been, well ahead of the field. Stevens has a second replica, a Bugatti, on the stocks for 1966.

Unlike the Duesenberg people, who have said that they want nothing to do with automobile buffs, that they intend making only a limited appeal to nostalgia, that they are creating a new car on an old name, Stevens is taking dead aim (continued on page 150)Classic Revival(continued from page 132) on the fanatics who count four or five years well spent in the restoration of a classic car. Down to the great slab of leather hood strap, he and his son have tried their hardest to make the Excalibur SS look 35 years old.

"We want to make a reliable classic car," Stevens told me. "Our idea is that here's a classic that will take you where you want to go and bring you back."

He has something there. I've driven thousands of miles in classic motorcars, my own and other people's, and to tell the truth I was uncomfortable much of the time. One listens to the sound of the thing like a symphony conductor terrified that the first-chair oboe will goof in the middle of an eight-bar solo. One develops an absurd ability to distinguish among engine sounds—is that a loose bearing? is that piston slap? the supercharger gears didn't sound like that yesterday—and chassis and body noise. Things happen so suddenly. I was driving an Isotta-Fraschini town car on a dark country road one night when without a second's warning the entire electrical system quit: ignition and all the lights. Driving a Bugatti, a sudden tremendous rhythmic thumping began on the floor boards. I thought it was the drive shaft, running, on that model, at engine speed because the gearbox was on the back axle. I had visions of this big black steel column, about four inches in diameter, coming up through the one-inch wood floor and beating me to death. I shut everything off. It was a generator belt come loose, nothing, it took barely an hour and a half on my back in the gravel to put on the spare that a previous, and bright owner had provided. I've had the chain come off a Morgan Three-Wheeler, wrap itself around the single rear wheel and lock it, at 40 miles an hour, tight as a bank vault, setting up a remarkable skid. And so it goes. Brooks and William Stevens may well be stoned to death some dark night by a posse from The Classic Car Club, but they've produced a car that looks, to all but the most discerning eye (fat tires, disk brakes and so forth), as if it had been hand-assembled in 1930 but owns no screw or bolt that will mystify the smallest Chevrolet or Studebaker dealership in North Dakota. Except that I know that among all right-thinking folk the penalty for the usage is death by drawing and quartering, I would say it was a fun thing, the Excalibur SS.

It's extraordinarily seductive on first sight. Stevens set the engine well back in the frame, not only for better balance, but to give the machine the radiator-behind-axle look that characterized the original. (This design point appeared last on the British-built H.R.G., still available post-War, and I for one was sorry to see it go.) The radiator itself is a massive slab of chromium cut as near as no matter at all to the mold of the original SS and SSK Mercedes-Benz cars. The outside exhaust pipes come from the same German maker who supplied them to Mercedes. And the thing will go. I haven't driven it, since the first one has yet to come to England, but Stevens tells me his son has seen the high side of 150 miles an hour in the supercharged version, and that brings up another point. The temptation is great, in driving a classic car of notable performance, to use the performance, and this is not the course of wisdom. A competent and indisputably courageous race driver once almost indignantly refused to drive my 1912 Mercer. "If you put that thing through a crack-test," he told me, "you wouldn't have the guts to sit in it, much less drive it." He was right.

No such inhibitions will mar the pleasure of driving an Excalibur SS. It can be fully extended in confidence that it is as likely to stay together as any other motorcar; further, it's remarkably road-able, and well endowed with the other two primary safety factors, tremendous acceleration and great braking power. It is meant to serve as a perfectly tractable high-performance road car, a gran turismo motorcar, but it has shown startlingly fast test times over standard sports-car road circuits. The Stevenses, father and son, expect to campaign an SS or two this summer.

The original S cars from which the Excalibur is derived were road cars, too, in basic origin, but they were campaigned in races all over the world. They were heavy, going nearly two tons, and hard to handle, but they would stick, they were quick, and they were built to last the distance. They took a lot of silverware back to Germany.

They were created by that genuinely great designer, Ferdinand Porsche, who has so many legendary motor vehicles to his credit, from the Prince Henry Austro-Daimler to the Tiger Tank of World War II, the Volkswagen before it and the Porsche after it. There were four variants: S, SS, SSK and SSKL—Sports, Super-Sports, Super-Sports-Kurtz (Short) and Super-Sports-Kurtz-Leicht (Light). First time out, in June 1927, with Rudolph Caracciola driving, an S won the race inaugurating the opening of the Niirburgring circuit in Germany. From then into the early 1930s the S cars did well, sometimes attracting more attention by their near misses than by their outright wins. For example, Caracciola came very near winning the 1929 Grand Prix de Monaco in an SSK. One would think the car ill-suited to the circuit, a true city-street course, with straights so short that even today's GP cars can't get over 120 miles an hour on the longest of them, and well studded with right-angle corners. Still, in a car with 110 mph top speed and an acceleration time of 45 seconds from 0 to 90, Caracciola led the race for a time, and probably would have won except for a two-minute-plus pit stop for tires and gasoline. He came third to two Bugattis. Again, in the 1930 Le Mans, a race held to be the private property of the Bentleys, which had won it in 1927, 1928 and 1929, a single SSK, Caracciola again up, with Christian Werner codriving, led the field until the failure of a component—the generator—put its lights out around midnight. But Caracciola won the 1930 Irish Grand Prix in an SSK, and set a new course record doing it.

It was just at this time that one could see the watershed of design begin to move awayfrom the heavy brute cars of racing's beginnings toward the tiny, feather-light grand prix cars of today, and Hans Nibel, who had succeeded Porsche in Daimler-Benz, attempted to lighten the SSK without basic change. Holes, big ones, were drilled all over the chassis, until the side members looked like Zeppelin framings; the camshaft profiles were changed and the valves enlarged and a bigger blower, stuffing the air in at 12 pounds per square inch instead of 8 1/2, was fitted. The horsepower of the resulting SSKL was rated 300 and it won the 1931 Mille Miglia. But the Daimler-Benz engineers knew that Porsche's basic design had been taken as far as it would go. They tried one last thing: streamlining the stark, wind-grabbing chassis for the 1933 Eifelrennen on the Nürburgring, but Caracciola couldn't drive the car (brake failure had broken his thigh in practice at Monte Carlo; he had hit one of the stone walls that line the circuit almost from end to end). Otto Merz ran in his stead, lost the car on a rain-washed circuit and was killed.

Stevens' Excalibur SS should be faster than Daimler-Benz' SSK, and more comfortable, but it will lack one characteristic that endeared the old car to many. It was a characteristic of Mercedes supercharging that the pump blew air through the carburetors rather than sucking from them as is the usual practice. A hurricane of pressure air blasting through a three-inch carburetor throat past valves and venturis and what not set up a great racket, and the supercharger scream of the S cars, as well as the 540Ks that followed them, was a notable feature of the design, indeed one hard to miss noting, particularly since it was intermittent: Use of the blower for longer than 10 seconds at a time was not recommended, since it would raise the horse power from, say, 120 to 180, imposing considerable stress. The total effect was as if, in a modern car, one dropped from fourth gear to third and simultaneously turned on a siren. No one sets up a supercharger to blow through the carburetor anymore; the Paxton that Stevens uses is almost silent. It might be suggested that he set up a little siren to fake it, but he would doubtless hear from the police if he did.

The new Cord will be supercharged, too, if the client pleases. It is using a proprietary engine, the Chevrolet Corvair, which comes with a supercharger option. The Cord departs even further than Brooks Stevens from the Duesenberg base idea of making no attempt at simulation of the original: It's a precise copy, to 8/10ths scale, of the Model 810-812 Cord of the 1930s, coffin nose, front-wheel drive and all. Only the body material will be wholly different: a thermoplastic laminate called Expanded Royalite, made by U. S. Rubber. This is so remarkable a substance that one's inclined to the German word Wunder-stuff: It's cheap, light, easily formed in heated dies; very rigid, resistant to weather, acid, salts and so on, integrally colored, has high insulation properties, and is stronger than 18-gauge steel. One more: When someone puts a fist-size dent into it you pick up a commercial air gun, blow 500 degrees of heat on it, and the dent rises to the original surface.

Like the Duesenberg and the S Mercedes-Benz cars, the Cord is a venerated image, and with reason. The first one, the lanky-looking L-29 model, appeared in 1929, an interesting automobile, but no great success. It was too long, at very nearly 138 inches of wheelbase, and there was a serious design flaw buried in it: The engine had been set so far back in the chassis that insufficient weight bore on the front wheels. Running at a steep slippery hill, weight transfer on the L-29 would put so much on the rear wheels, which were slave, and so little on the front, which drove, that the car might refuse the slope. This annoyed the owner, particularly if mass-produced Detroit tin stampings at 25 percent of the Cord's cost were running on past it. The L-29s were very good-looking indeed, though, particularly the roadsters, and they were the first front-wheel-drive cars to go into series production in the United States.

The front-wheel-drive idea, at the moment in the ascendancy in the United States, is an old idea in Europe, where it originated. There's a choice of historical precedent: Nicholas Cugnot's steam tricycle of 1769 drove through the single front wheel. Latil of France built a proper front-wheel-drive vehicle in 1899, driving the steered wheels through universal joints. The American Walter Christie built a front-wheel-drive race car in 1904, and six more after it, and some New York City taxicabs after them. The race cars were fast, but brutes to handle and difficult to start. Christie mounted his engines sidewise in front, a notion held to be one of the pre-eminent signs of brilliance in the famous Mini-Minor by British designer Alec Issigonis. A million Mini-Minors have been turned out in the last few years and the design will certainly be imbedded in the history of the automobile. The French Citroën is probably the best-known front-wheel-drive car in the world, and is another classic design.

Advantages of the system are compactness, extra interior room due to the absence of the tunnel carrying the drive shaft to the rear wheels and the front-compartment hump housing the clutch—these and a positive superiority in traction on slippery surfaces. The number of times the world's most exacting rallies have been won in recent years by Minis and SAABs (a Swedish front-wheel-drive) clearly demonstrates that. This year's Monte Carlo rally was so brutal that of 237 cars starting, only 35 reached Monte Carlo at all, never mind reached it with a chance of winning. A Mini won it, a Porsche was second, a SAAB third. Granted the driver was the Finnish champion Timo Makinen, one of the finest snow-and-ice specialists of all time (second, Eugen Bohringer, the German champion; third, Pat Moss-Carlsson for the highest placement a woman has ever made in the Monte), and granted that he was well supported by the British Motor Company factory with such niceties as 86 sets of tires for the 2600 miles, including five kinds of steel-studded covers, still it was another demonstration of the virtues of front-wheel drive on dicey surfaces. The heart of the matter is that when you turn the front wheels into a hard corner, and apply power to them, you get a better response, directionally, than you do if you apply power to the rear wheels, which are still a little way out of the corner, and tending to push the car straight on, and thus out of the corner. There are many funny little tricks an expert can do to demonstrate the agility peculiar to front-wheel drive; for example, he can run the car fast down a narrow road, put the wheel all the way over, accelerator hard on, lock the rear wheels for an instant with the hand brake, and whap! the thing has spun in its own length and is motoring rapidly back where it came from. An expert, I said. If you must try it, I suggest a supermarket parking lot on a Sunday. Incidentally, Makinen never takes his right foot off the accelerator, does all braking with his left.

The 810-812 Cords, the coffin-nosed cars, were born out of the Duesenberg. Fred Duesenberg had died, as a result of an accident in one of his own cars in the Pennsylvania mountains in July 1932, and the Duesenberg company, 12 months later, was beginning seriously to feel the loss. Harold Ames, the new president, asked Gordon Buehrig, then with General Motors, to come to Indianapolis and design a small, low-priced Duesenberg to be built on the Auburn chassis. The design was made and set aside and Buehrig was transferred to Auburn, where he did the boattail Auburn Speedster. In 1934 the Auburn company decided to revive the small Duesenberg program, with two changes: abandon the Auburn chassis for a new front-wheel-drive design, and call it not a Duesenberg but a Cord, after E. L. Cord, who controlled the company—he had originally backed the Duesenberg brothers. The new design was finished in the summer of 1934, and summarily dropped in December of that year. In July 1935, with the company in bad shape, the panic button down and locked, Buehrig, in Indianapolis, was given 24 hours in which to prepare, and deliver in Chicago for a board meeting, photographs of the quarter-scale design model of the Cord that had been on ice for six months. The pictures were made by an assistant of Buehrig's, Dale Cosper, whose name now appears on the new Duesenberg board of directors. They were done by two A.M. and the decision next day was to go, to make a new car, although there was less than a million dollars in the bank.

Gordon Buehrig, who's now with Ford, has always had full credit for the Cord design, and he has spent years trying to point out that he did only the body shape and the interior. Ted Allen, Herbert Snow, George Kublin, Louis Schwitzer, George Ritts, Bart Cotter, Stanley Thomas, Stan Menton and many other people worked on engine and chassis and production. Buehrig had three assistants besides Cosper—Vince Gardner, Paul Peter Renter von Lorenzen and Richard Robinson. But while the Lycoming engine in the Cord was a good one, the chassis design sound, and the production of the car—on a bargain-basement, cut-rate system that would make a modern Detroit engineer whimper with fright—a miracle of enterprise, the primary factor in its success was the styling. A compliment Buehrig has treasured was, "The car looks as if it had been born on the road and grew up there."

The 810 Cord had a lot of things first: It was the first true four-passenger convertible, it had a true disappearing top, it was first to demonstrate the no-running-board thesis successfully, it had a step-down floor and such novelties as disappearing headlights, this minute being made much of by, for one, the Buick Riviera.

The Cord failed for two reasons: The six-month lag between design and decision to build gave insufficient time to produce cars for the arbitrary deadline, the New York Automobile Show of November 1935. Cars were produced, but they were largely mock-ups. There was not enough time for testing, and the first models delivered to customers had two bad faults: They overheated and they jumped out of gear. These were bugs easy to eradicate, but they hurt, and they furnished ammunition for rival companies' counterselling. ("Counterselling" is unselling, or propaganda, as when a salesman tells a prospect, "Of course, you know that the Blank V-10 has a tendency to put itself into first gear if you leave the engine running? Yeah, they lose a lot of people that way. Crushed to death against the garage doors.") For another thing, the Cord was expensive. It was a $2000-$3000 car, at a time when a Buick cost $885, a Studebaker President under $1000, and even a Lincoln-Zephyr only $1320. Those were the only things wrong with it, though. When the engineers had worked the bugs out, it was a fine, fast, roadable motorcar, and almost universally thought to be a beautiful one. It has stood the test: An as-new Cord is worth more today than it was in 1937, when production stopped. That is true of few automobiles.

The veneration in which the Cord is held was the primary thing that brought the new company into being. Glenn Pray, a former Tulsa high school teacher, and Wayne McKinley, a Belleville, Illinois, auto dealer, thought of it, as others had, but they took action. They formed a company and bought what was left of the original Auburn-Cord-Duesen-berg company. They got patterns, dies, blueprints, 600,000 pounds of spare parts and had it all shipped to an abandoned cannery in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The production factory will be in Tulsa, and it's hoped that the first year will see 2000 cars made and sold at around $4000.

At least one group of overseas businessmen must be watching the new Cord operation with interest: the ones who own the original Cord body dies. Just before World War II, these dies, with the New York City Sixth Avenue Elevated and a lot of other scrap, were shipped to Japan. Most of the stuff was fired back at us, but someone in Yokohama thought the Cord dies were too nice to break up for bombs, so they're still there. I'm sure the Tulsa people intend theirs to be the first and last of the Cord replicas. Perhaps not.

But one thing we do know. If sales of the Cord, Duesenberg and Excalibur SS equal or surpass expectations, we can look forward to all manner of rejuvenated makes and models, from exotic foreign vintage machinery down to—but maybe not including—the Edsel.