The Playboy Cars • 1966

Count Giovanni Lurani of Italy is a significant figure in the world of the automobile. He was a notable competitor before the Second World War, he is an eminence of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, author of a biography of Tazio Nuvolari, and a connoisseur. When he appeared in Monte Carlo for the Grand Prix of Monaco this year driving not a Ferrari but a Lamborghini, he created an instant small stir. The word sifted through the Principality, and people who knew him began to think about asking for a ride. In the ordinary way of things, a car would have to be gold-plated and running on six wheels to attract attention in Monte Carlo, but whenever Lurani's Lamborghini was parked on the drive before the annex of the Hotel de Paris, there were five or six people peering into it, and a wealthy Englishman who has owned the best of everything down the years told me he had decided he would have one as soon as he could get it. One was reminded somewhat of the time J. P. Morgan walked across the floor of the Stock Exchange arm in arm with a broker, thus providing the man instantly with unlimited credit and many new friends.

It is doubtful that Enzo Ferrari was moved to much more than annoyance when the first Lamborghini was made, in Cento, only 30 miles from his own shops at Maranello. He has seen this gambit tried before: the disastrous ATS, for example. But the Cavaliere Ferrucio Lamborghini is a tycoon, of the type conventionally described as hardheaded, who has announced that he intends to go on making automobiles for some time to come, and to run production to 300 cars a year, almost half Ferrari's rate. He has other factories busily clanking out tractors, oil burners, air conditioners, so he can afford to take a loss, if he must, in instrumenting his ambition to produce one of the planet's two or three fastest motorcars.

Each Lamborghini is required to show at least 150 miles an hour on the road—it is said to have exceeded that by more than 15 miles an hour—and do a standing kilometer in 24.5 seconds before delivery. The car's handling is to the highest Italian standards. The engine is, like the Ferrari, a V-12, 3.5 liters, 336 horsepower at 6500 rpm and the body, in hardtop configuration, is by Carrozzeria Touring. The package comes to about $14,000. If a combination of good looks, comfort and performance can make a desirable motorcar, the Lamborghini is thoroughly desirable. It lacks only the cachet that attends the names of Ferrari, Maserati and Aston Martin, and, for some, that lack would be balanced by its rarity. In all, one might say, the kind of car we have come to think of in the last few years as reflecting the changed meaning of the word playboy, not the archaic and obsolete slang meaning, but the modern literal meaning that states an attitude, a point of view based on the intelligent, selective enjoyment of the best that goes into urban living today.

Another, of course, is the Ferrari, the world standard against which all high-performance automobiles are gauged. The Ferrari is not a perfect automobile. Some owners complain that the turning circle is too large, or that the vent windows on some models can be opened far enough to rub against the steering wheel, or that the instruments are badly lighted—but you will not hear that the car doesn't go, handle and stop in ways that most drivers haven't even heard about. The Ferrari is unstressed and unhurried in delivering its lively performance: The four-seater 330GT, for example, will do 0–60 mph in 7 seconds and 0–120 in 29 seconds. And it's not being hurt in the doing. A car that finishes the 24-hour race at Le Mans is considered by some authorities to have done the equivalent of 50,000 miles (I've heard estimates as high as 100,000). Ferrari has won Le Mans every year since 1960—six times in succession, eight times in all. An endearing thought, and one that rouses the Walter Mitty in us all. For me, the Ferrari has another endearing characteristic, one that it shares with the 356 Porsches: an absolutely distinctive engine sound. Neither of them can possibly be mistaken for anything else. My advice is: If you have acquired, by stealth, industry or good fortune, a sum ranging from $13,000 to $18,000, plan now to visit your friendly local Ferrari dealer. Incidentally, you will not find him wildly enthusiastic in the matter of trade-ins. As Luigi Chinetti of New York, the man to see if you live in the eastern part of the country, has put it, "Sometimes we take in a Cadillac, and we don't know what to do with it."

An interesting device, and the only thing of its kind currently available, is the Maserati Quattro Porte: a gran turismo four-seater four-door motorcar. Every other GT of comparable performance requires the rear-seat passengers to climb over the back of the front seat; the Quattro Porte alone among high-performance cars allows the rear-seat passengers a civilized entrance.

The Aston Martin, the makers of which claim, with justice, that it is as nearly hand-built as a motorcar can be these days, has had a number of useful detail improvements in the past year. The 4-liter all-aluminum engine, for example, alternative to the ordinary unit in the DB5, turns out 375 horsepower at 5750 rpm and will make the car go rather faster than the 150 mph that is standard. It is hard to think of an individual motorcar that has had more and more useful publicity this year than the Aston Martin, Ian Fleming having cited it as James Bond's favorite mount. The ex-Bond Goldfinger DB5, encrusted with lethal devices, is today famous in communities so isolated that they had previously thought of the rubber-tired oxcart as the last word in road transport. Indeed, an Aston Martin executive was quoted as saying that the publicity value of the Bond DB5 had been greater than the massed value of all the racing the company had done from the beginning. When one considers that Aston Martin's racing career is usually reckoned as having begun in 1921, this becomes a statement of some significance. It is amusing, too, to remember that Ian Fleming, who did the deed, preferred for his own use two American motorcars generally less esteemed by the "enthusiast": the Thunderbird and the Avanti. "The important thing about a motorcar," Fleming used to say, "is that it shall start instantly on a cold morning after having been left in the street all night, and shortly thereafter do 100 miles an hour without difficulty." I suspect that this definition will retain its validity for some time to come.

The Avanti, as things turn out, was not really dead, but only sleeping; a new one, the Avanti II, is promised out of South Bend, Indiana, moribund as far as motorcar production goes since December 1963, when Studebaker moved to Canada. The body has been restyled, the forward-sloping, ski-slide look eliminated, an almost infinite variety of interior trim offered to client's choice, and the 327-cu.-in. (and 100 more horsepower) Chevrolet Corvette engine substituted for the old one. European fine-car practice will be followed: a stationary instead of a moving production line, with workers allowed any reasonable amount of time for adjustment and fitting; break-in by factory testers; delete options, with air conditioning, limited-slip differential, adjustable steering wheel, and so on, standard at $7200. Body will be fiberglass. It should be very fast.

Everything is fast today. The day before yesterday, 100 miles an hour was thought to be quick indeed. But today almost anything on the road will do 100. In 1955—after all, not a lifetime ago—a 0–60 time of 15 seconds was entirely respectable, and a fast car was one that would do a genuine 90. In 1966, you'll be able to buy 6 seconds, or even 5.5, and 120 miles an hour, in six-passenger sedans. This means that in most jurisdictions you will be strictly illegal 6 seconds after you've put your foot down. Six seconds seems a short time in which to get one's kicks. Of course, there are alternatives: Your uncle may be governor, or even lieutenant governor: you may be in Nevada, in which case you have nothing to worry about except keeping it on the road; or you can take the chance, your eyeballs locked in on your rearview watching for The Man to come roaring out of his hole in the ground. (A friend of mine who liked to hurry from New York to Miami and back a couple of times a winter used to station his wife, 8x30 day-and-night binoculars in hand, on the rear-facing seat of his ridiculously fast station wagon.)

With tens of thousands of miles of parkway, most of it fairly level and very little bent, and thousands of 300- and 400-horsepower cars being ground out every week (in 1962 the new car/new baby ratio was 7,000,000 to 4,000,000, which suggests that the automobile is gaining on us), the law still says that 55–70 mph is all you can have. In Europe, with parkways still comparatively rare, you can do 125 without rousing the animal in anyone but the fellow flashing his lights behind you, trying to get by, and demonstrators for the genuine gran turismo producers work in traffic at 175. In Italy and France, no competent driver thinks 100 miles an hour at night in the rain a particularly venturesome proposition. The other day a girl I know drove from western France through Switzerland to Italy, 942 miles, in less than 24 hours nonstop. She was under no more stringent emergency than a wish to rejoin a gentleman friend in Rome, and didn't feel that she had earned a hero badge. (She was driving a Mustang, standard except for Borrani wheels and Koni shocks.) High speed is not the villain, obviously, since both Italy and France have lower road-deaths-per-thousand rates than the United States, and in both countries about 30 percent of the fatalities are registered among the swarms of motorcycle, scooter and bicycle riders. During the summer months only, British police impose a 50-mph limit on a few hundred miles of selected heavy-traffic highway, but during the rest of the year, and all the time on the rest of the roads, anything goes. Despite generations of propaganda to the contrary, most studies (the recent one by the Bureau of Public Roads, for example) show that speed does not cause most accidents, and that low-powered cars get into trouble more often than high-powered ones. Still, one insurance company has a list of 21 high-horsepower models it will not cover at any premium, and another won't touch a small car rated at over 300 horsepower or a standard one at over 400—advertised, not actual. This is the wrong end of the stick: Presumably the company would insure a Porsche 911 at 148 horsepower, although the thing will do 130 mph. I would not doubt, however, that if European speed-limit practice were applied to U. S. roads, a bloodletting of epic dimension would immediately ensue. The safest speed is the speed of the traffic stream; high passing rates would panic nonspeeders; speeders would have a tendency to lock up all four wheels and put themselves sidewise the first time they tried a hard stop from 120, and so on. Incidentally, the much-loved 356 Porsche is being phased out, as the jargon has it, and will be replaced by the 912: the new 911 body powered by the 356 4-cylinder engine.

Presumably some free-enterprisers will decline the privilege of writing a policy on the Chevrolet Corvette powered by the new optional 425-horsepower engine. This is a 5.7-second 0–60 car with a 135-mph top speed, a genuine handful of go, a handling car, too; and when one thinks of the cost of comparably quick imported two-seaters, it becomes, at around $5000, astonishing value for money. The doubledyed "enthusiasts" will be heard—"Ah, yes, old boy, but the thing hardly has the race breeding of the Ferrari, the Maser, the Aston, right?" The riposte of choice is that Louis Chevrolet was racing as a professional in 1905, and if Louis' connection with the Corvette of 60 years later is a bit tenuous, still, the name's the same. Now that a California court has decreed that the Corvair is not inherently dangerous due to the dreaded oversteer, one can think of this interesting rear-engined vehicle, particularly in the Corvair Sprint form from the Connecticut atelier of John Fitch & Company, as an elegant and fast-moving compact. The Buick Skylark Gran Sport, incidentally, has a new recessed rear-window treatment reminiscent of Fitch's modification of the Corvair.

No compact, but a compact two-seater. the Triumph Spitfire is in the best British tradition—a fast sports car at a modest (around $2200) price. Disk brakes, of course, rack and pinion steering, and all that.

The biggest flurry out of Detroit this year is the Oldsmobile Toronado, the first front-wheel-drive American production car since the Cord left the scene in the late 1930s. To go to f.w.d. is held to be a very brave move by Oldsmobile, almost as if the company had decided to plump for three wheels instead of four, or steering by tiller. In fact, there's nothing radical about it. Front-wheel drive is as old as the hills. Joseph Nicholas Cugnot's steam tractor of 1763, generally considered the first self-powered man-carrying vehicle. was front-wheel driven, and the American inventor Walter Christie built front-wheel-drive race cars and New York City taxicabs before 1914. F.w.d. small cars—the Mini-Minor for one—are common as dirt in Europe, and the French Citroen, a fairly big car, is in its fourth decade of front-wheel-drive production. The Swedish SAAB, one of the great rally-winning cars, has shown the pronounced advantages of the layout in coping with snow and ice. There used to be mechanical difficulties involving universal joints and the business of steering driven wheels, but they were long ago overcome. Experienced drivers once held as gospel that a front-wheel-drive car was not for the non-expert (continued on page 170)Playboy Cars • 1966(continued from page 128) because if one went into a corner fast and lifted the accelerator, the thing would switch from understeer to oversteer before you could say Monsieur André Citroen. This phenomenon is no longer apparent in well-engineered f.w.d. cars, and in any case, it is an excessively silly thing to do. Since the Toronado has power steering, which kills off the front-wheel-drive "feel" to a great extent, few owners will be able to notice any difference at all in the car's handling.

(Fitch, by the way, was so impressed with the handling of the Olds Toronado that he intends, with the cooperation of the Division, to market a model similar to the Sprint Corvair. Among the items he expects to add: Koni shocks and radial tires.)

Oldsmobile was not concerned with the handling advantages of the layout, but with its consumer appeal, which can be considerable: Like rear-engine placement, f.w.d. gives a flat floor. The transmission does not loom in a hump on the front floor, and there is no drive shaft running to the rear wheels and hence no drive-shaft tunnel. This is pleasant and increases the air of livability in the car quite out of proportion to the cubic inches involved. There is so little essential variety among U. S. automobiles today that one must hope the Toronado is a big success, and an encouragement to Ford and Buick to come along with the f.w.d. designs they have in the cupboard. The car might have a better chance if it were not for the industry's iron-hard insistence on treating every new development as a stunning invention by the Detroit wizards. Nine in ten Toronado prospects, on approaching the car for the first time, are going to feel they're being asked to play guinea pig for something that was first dreamed up about 18 months ago. They might feel better if they knew the gimmick first hit the road 100 years before the Civil War.

Pontiac, for 1966, has turned its attentions to one of Detroit's poor relations, the Six, and has put into production the Motor City's first belt-driven overhead-cam six—a 230-cu.-in. engine.

The 1965 Buick Riviera was probably the best-looking of all American motorcars, and one of the dozen best-looking in the world. The '66 will be two inches longer and four inches wider, which doesn't sound like enough to spoil it. The 340-hp engine can be optioned to 360. Chrysler Corporation, it should be noted, is introducing a 426-cu.-in. "street" version of its hemispherical-domed engine that was the scourge of stock-car racing until ruled off the tracks in a disagreement with racing officials over the criteria for "production" engines.

Mercury has come up with a compromise which it feels will satisfy devotees of both the stick shift and the automatic transmission; it's offering as an option an automatic that permits manual shifting into second and first gears.

European car critics complain that in a world full of exciting new materials, only stylists wishing to crawl back to Queen Victoria would insist that a quality car is not a quality car unless it's full of tree wood and cowhide, and they point for example to the hundreds of exotic fabrics used in American cars. They will be confounded that Cadillac is now using leather in herd-size quantities, and that '66 models will have upper door panels and sills trimmed in walnut—and not veneer-bonded-to-steel, either, but the genuine forest product, three eighths of an inch thick; plus another of the caste marks that have been for 40 years absolutely required on any British car with pretensions to quality: folding tables on the backs of the front seats. Cadillac has raised the bidding on them: They're individually lighted. The 1966 Cadillacs will genuinely break new ground, I think, with the electrically heated seat option: carbon-cloth heating pads built into the chairs and offering a temperature range from 85° to 105° F. This device fills a long-felt need: Why should one walk out of a warm house and plotz down on an ice-cold automobile seat, particularly an ice-cold leather automobile seat? Although it need not be leather: There are 171 upholstery options. And a four-speaker AM/FM stereo setup.

There is no question about it: American automobiles are the most comfortable and luxurious in the world for the money. They will not, as they come out of the store, stay with the best Europeans on a bent road, and most of them won't take four really hard down-the-mountain brake applications, simply because they're not built for that kind of going. The combination of top-line luxury and handling is a rarity of rarities. The vast Mercedes-Benz 600 limousine, loaded with such niceties as single-key locking of all doors, trunk lid and fuel-filler cap, und so weiter, will do 128 miles an hour and handles like this: Stirling Moss took one around the tightly curved, hilly 1.25 Brands Hatch circuit, seven people aboard, in two seconds and a bit more than the racing-sedan record for the course! Mercedes is doing four new models for 1966. All have disk brakes on bigger (14- instead of 13-inch) wheels, a fan that idles until it's needed, a hydropneumatic rear-axle compensating spring that automatically adjusts to increased load. Every car in the line, except the 200D (diesel) will do 100 mph. The furnace-oil model will make 80.

The Volkswagen factory, which prides itself on infrequent model changes, is making a couple of new ones in 1966. The old standard beetle is getting a bigger engine, to bring it to 50 horsepower, and detail improvements such as a third defroster vent in the middle of the windshield. The new model, the 1600 TL, is a bigger-engined version of the 1500 introduced four years ago. It has 65 horsepower, disk brakes in front, and so on. The interior has been worked up—shrouded instruments, reclining front seats. The body style is fastback, the engine-cooling louvers running along the sides. The rear window has no hinges, but opens two inches anyway: It's made of the new thin flexible glass, and it bends that much.

Rolls-Royce, which hasn't brought out a new model since the V-8 engine appeared in 1959, has announced a new line for '66, and not a moment too soon, either. The car has been mechanically behind the times for years, and even its basic claims, to an impeccably smooth ride and great silence, have not been valid. Cadillac, Lincoln and Chrysler have all offered better rides for a long time, and as Ford demonstrated, a Galaxie off the production line is quieter than a Royce. The new model continues the "Silver" designation that began with the Silver Ghost of sainted memory, replaces the Silver Cloud and is called the Silver Shadow. It has independent suspension all around, the four-wheel disk brakes that are de rigueur in Europe nowadays, operating on a rather remarkable system of dual engine-driven pumps, and a monocoque body. The Bentley will, as before, be identical except for radiator shell, and between them they will no doubt go a long way toward restoring the two names to their past eminence.

For the race-bent young in heart (and long in pocketbook), Carroll Shelby will have this year 50 Ford GTs, the stormers that were seen doing 220 miles an hour clown the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans. These carry the cross-mounted 385-horsepower Fairlane V-8s, are 40 inches high, road to rooftop, possibly the sexiest vehicles since the Buccialli Brothers showed their first 16-cylinder car at the Paris Salon. The price seems reasonable enough: $16,250.

If this is more than one finds in the right-hand pocket, there is the new Cobra, the 427-cu.-in. type. For the street, as the saying goes, the tag is $6995; if you wish to go racing with it, the quick one will cost you $9950. The Cobra is the instrument with which Shelby won the gran turismo World Manufacturers' Championship, beating the dreaded Ferraris on their own chosen ground, an extraordinary accomplishment and one which Shelby says has given him more satisfaction than anything in his own remarkable racing career.

Perhaps more to the point, as far as useful over-the-road operation is concerned, is Shelby's Mustang G.T. 350. This is an amalgam of the standard Mustang, the 271-hp Fairlane engine, boosted to 306 hp, and the Cobra close-ratio gearbox. There are other oddments on the vehicle: limited-slip differential, Koni shock absorbers, quicker steering, widerim wheels, and so on. It will get to 60 in about six seconds. The street version runs close to $4500, the competition model is $5950.

The V-8 engine is an American specialty that has been slow in coming to appreciation in the rest of the world, but there are signs that the dam is breaking: the Ford-engineered Sunbeam Tiger, for example, looking like a typical British sports car in the MGB class, and turning into something of a secret weapon at a stop light. Another V-8 item, very prestigious in the United States because so rare, is the Jensen Mark III, a new model running the Chrysler 383 330-horsepower engine. This is a luxurious, fast (130 mph) hardtop coupe, unusually fully equipped: Driver-controlled shock absorbers, an electrically heated rear window and—are you ready?—a first-aid kit are all standard. Another rarity is the Krim-Ghia, replacing the Dual-Ghia. This is a piece of beautiful Italian coachbuilding based on tubular chassis work, powered by the Chrysler 273 engine. It has four-wheel disks, and of the 200 scheduled to be made this year, 50 will be allocated to the American market at $9000. Krim is marketing two other specialty cars, the Vallelunga and the Ghia 1500GT. The Ghia 1500 is based on an extensively modified FIAT 1500 chassis, will sell at $4000. The Vallelunga (Long Valley) GT is a new design by Alessandro De Tomaso, a 42-inch-high coupe on a backbone chassis, the engine a worked-up English Ford Cortina, mounted in the rear. It, too, has four-wheel disks, and comes in two engine options: a 105-horsepower, which will provide 120 miles an hour in top, and a 135, which will get it close to 150. The Vallelunga is priced at $7500.

Another backbone-chassis sports car is the Lotus Elan, by Colin Chapman, the number-one race-car designer working today. The backbone chassis, best thought of as a big girder with engine and wheels mounted on it, gives notable stiffness, freedom from chassis flexing, and thus superior handling, other things being equal. Most testers agree that the Elan is one of the best-handling cars ever built, some say the best available today. A sedan that is often praised as the best in its class for roadability is the German BMW 1800 TI. Product of a famous old house (Bayerische Motoren Werke), the IT runs around $3500 and is worth it. BMW has a 2-liter hardtop coupe in the market powered by a bigger version of the four-cylinder single-overhead-camshaft engine used in the 1800 TI. The body is unusually good-looking, and unusual, too, in that it's not of Italian origin, but out of BMW's own styling department. The honor of offering the premier one-upmanship device in the automotive world remains, I suppose, with NSU of Germany, in the NSU Spider with the Wankel engine, the only rotary–internal-combustion engine running a production car today. Performance of the NSU-Wankel is adequate if not stunning, but if you can lay hands on one, you can be fairly certain it will be the only one on the block, at least until someone comes along with a Japanese Mazda Cosmo two-seater running the Toyo Kogyo version of the device; in effect, two Wankels linked together.

Exclusivity isn't everything in the pleasant task of selecting a gentleman's personal transport, but it counts, with grace, speed and built-in quality. In the 1966 market, the choice of any one car is going to be difficult, and the ideal would be a trio: a lively but elegant ultrasmall sedan for everyday urban use; a limousine for formal wear and the occasions when a party of six or so would be happiest conveyed as a unit; a two-seater gran turismo for the weekend run into the country. Happy choosing.