The GT

Time was when the gran turismo car, the grand touring car, was just that: a motor vehicle in which to embark for distant places, adventure sure to be found on the way. In those days, around the turn of the century, one of the first things the tourist was likely to do, safely back home (whether he'd gone 100 miles or halfway around the world), was to leap for pen and paper, to let lesser folk know what life was like Out There. Hear one of them, Claude Anet of Paris, in Through Persia in a Motor Car, published in 1907:

"At last we were ready to start [from the Hotel du Boulevard in Bucharest], the motors commenced their throbbing, the crowd hemming us in sprang back terrified, lifted their arms to heaven, proclaimed a miracle, and we were gone. The order of our going was as follows: first the great 40-hp Mercedes, as skirmisher, for it was already evening; then Leonida's 20-hp Mercedes; and lastly the 16-hp Fiat, carrying the chauffeurs and the luggage. This was to make sure, in case of accidents, that the chauffeurs would come to our assistance. We were traveling along a Russian road. The ground was hard, stony, with unexpected lumps, until suddenly, to my great surprise, about six miles from Ismailia the road abruptly stopped altogether. The rest were less astonished than I was, and without a moment's hesitation turned the cars into some fields, across which ran well-defined tracks. Here the ground was softer, and progress necessarily slow. In a rainy season these tracks would have been impassable. Thus gently we traveled across Bessarabia. The soil was black; peasants were working in the fields, while sharply outlined against the horizon were yokes of oxen, dimly visible in the last rays of the setting sun. Presently we were reduced to finding our way along the cart ruts solely by our powerful headlamps, (text continued on page 70) which threw great streams of light across the deserted country. At last we came upon a small group of poor and scattered houses. It was the little village of Bolgrade, in which we were to pass our first night in Russia."

The intrepid tourists slept, local Gorodovoïs, or fuzz, standing guard all night to club the peasants away from the cars, and woke early, properly awed by the 160 miles they were scheduled to cover before they slept again. "We were no sooner up than we consulted our aneroid. It was unfortunately somewhat low. Sensible people would have gone by train to Odessa, but we had not left Paris in order to be sensible..."

Anet's three cars, all 1904s, were stark and simple. They had folding tops of sorts, but usually ran with them down. No windshields, of course. Only a few years later the grand touring car would be enclosed, sometimes with a leather landaulet rear section held taut by great folding irons. There might be a roof luggage rack of polished brass, and perhaps another astern, and the whole equipage would bowl along at a decorous 40 miles an hour or so. Later still, the touring car was always open, and it was meant more for occasional pleasure than for purposeful travel. Today the gran turismo car is a different animal. There's no room for the governess and the children, not much for luggage, and who needs a chauffeur? The GT car is a two-seater or, with a couple of exceptions, a minimal four-seater, usually a hardtop, and 40 miles an hour is what it does in first gear. It's for touring, fast touring with two people and light luggage for a week; it's for racing, it's for fun.

Purists lay it down that there is only one kind of GT car, and excepting Carroll Shelby's vitamin-packed GT 350/500 and the Corvette Sting Ray, it comes from abroad. The fact is, there are three kinds--imported, Detroit and Detroit-based--but they differ so greatly in design and purpose that it would be pointless to try to treat them all in one article.

So first things first--the European GT car on its home ground. In all major automobile-producing countries of Europe except England, there are no speed limits on the open road. England has a 70-mph regulation, new, still called "experimental" and violently opposed in many quarters. In Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, once you're outside heavily populated areas, you can with a clear conscience stuff your foot as far into the fire wall as your bravery quotient, your skill and your common sense will let you. It's in Italy that fullest advantage is taken of this leniency, and to be passed by a Ferrari or a Maserati or a Lamborghini doing 150 miles an hour is no mad rarity. There's action on the autobahnen in Germany, too, and in France, where you can often see a couple of black-leathered bike cops standing beside the road having a quiet chat while the stuff rolls by at a hundred and better. It's for going like that that the GT car is made. In this country, unless you live in Nevada or have massive influence in high places, a GT car can't often be extended all the way; but that doesn't really matter, because a factor of high top speed is always good low-speed performance. Too, the pleasure of the vehicle isn't in how fast it goes but in its way of going, its handling, its control, its tautness and the way it looks. To ride in a Ferrari, say, any Ferrari, is an excitement and a pleasure even if it's only down the street and around the park and never out of second gear. That, after all, is the essence of the gran turismo motorcar.

There are many of them: Abarth, Autobianchi, Fiat, Glas, Honda, Ferrari, Innocenti, Lancia, Marcos, Matra, Lotus, Morgan, Porsche, De Tomaso, Volvo, Toyota, Alfa Romeo, Bizzarrini, Jensen, Mercedes-Benz, and more. Out of the lot, one can cull a selection, a set of multiples, to inform, to enliven, to rouse the curiosity and make easy, at least reasonably easy, the final choice.

In the beginning was Ferrari. Not literally true, for Lancia is an older firm, so is Daimler-Benz; but Enzo Ferrari, now in the seventh decade of his life, has been racing and building fine motorcars for so long, and so well, that it would seem lèse-majesté to begin with another. The Ferrari has won so many races, grand prix, sports, GT, that they are almost past numbering. The Ferrari is unique. Even the sound of it, starting, running, is unique. It almost makes a noise standing still. There are various models of Ferrari, differing in engine size, in top speed, bodied by various among the Italian coachbuilders, but all alike in one particular: a 12-cylinder overhead-camshaft engine. Ferrari has stayed with this configuration for years. Consider the 330 GTC, a motorcar that meets the new classic GT specifications: fast (165 mph) transport for two people and small encumbrances, good-looking, almost incredibly road-hugging. Expensive, too: $14,400. Like most GT cars in the higher-performance brackets, this Ferrari demands to be driven: Steering, clutch, gearshift, brakes all need a firm touch, and a little care for the accelerator, because you'll be doing 30 mph three seconds after you leave the stop light and 50 mph three seconds after that. The black horse rampant on a golden field that is the Ferrari trademark runs back to World War One. It was the personal insignia of the top Italian fighter pilot, Francesco Baracca, whose parents authorized Ferrari to use it.

A bull marks the newest of the Italian top-rank GT cars, the Lamborghini, a serious rival to Ferrari for four years now. The word in Italian auto circles is that the Lamborghini exists because of Enzo Ferrari's well-known hauteur. Ferrari is not a man easily approachable, and he is said to have declined to see Ferruccio Lamborghini--a millionaire industrialist who had come out of World War Two a penniless army mechanic--when Lamborghini dropped in at the Ferrari factory to complain about his car. Like Packard before him, Lamborghini decided to make his own automobile. It's a formidable device. There are two engine sizes, 3.5 liters and 4 liters, both 12-cylinder Vs. The Lamborghini is priced with Ferrari ($14,250) and will run with it (156 mph, 7.5 seconds to 60), and it has something else: Comparatively, it's quiet, inside and out. As I've previously suggested, this is perhaps debatable as a virtue, since I suspect most Ferrari owners would feel deprived if their cars didn't announce their coming and their going with the whining, metal-on-metal sound so distinctively their own; but the trend of the time is running the other way, it's running Lamborghini's way. Not so many years have gone past since, say, Bugatti's time, when fast cars sounded fast always, rode roughly, taught their owners, through many a boiling over in traffic and many a fouled sparkplug, that high-performance engines were born fussy. But that time has past. The Lamborghini has muscle but speaks softly. An easy way to tell one as it passes, by the way, is to mark the vertically placed heating wires in the rear window--12, if you have time to count. And, if you care, the crankshaft is machined out of a solid billet of steel, nitrided, and runs on seven bearings.

The 350 and 400 GTs are not the only Lamborghinis. There is the Miura, named after the legendary stock of Spanish fighting bulls. The Miura is a two-seater, rather limited in luggage accommodation, since the engine sits crosswise just behind the pilot's post, but it's quick: say, 180. You can tell this one from behind, too. The rear window appears to be one big Venetian blind.

No newcomer, but one of the Olympian names, is Maserati, a great accomplisher in sports cars, in grand prix, in gran turismo, for decades. Like Ferrari, like Lamborghini, the Maserati is made slowly, carefully, a few a day, say 600 a year, perhaps 30 of which come into the United States in that time. There's a six-cylinder Maserati, a 4.7-liter V-8 and a four-door 2+2 at $14,300--in price and performance, competitive with its Italian rivals. A Maserati is quick. A few months ago, in London, running down Constitution Hill past Buckingham Palace in a 4.7-liter Maserati, Stirling Moss at the wheel, we drew the attention of a pair of motorcycle policemen, who contended that the car had been doing 85 miles an hour practically coming out of Hyde Park Corner. We (continued on page 138) The GT (continued from page 70) denied it, at length, feeling that anything else would result in our being chained to a wall in the Tower of London. Further, Moss succeeded in persuading the policemen that they were terribly mistaken, we hadn't been doing anything like 85 miles an hour. I can say, however, that the car is quite capable of that speed in that distance. The Maserati Ghibli does 170 mph, a reasonable rate for the $16,900 on the price tag.

The tendency in recent years has been away from the smallish hand-assembled engine (a Maserati engine takes one man 16 hours to put together) and toward the big, hairy V-8 American. It is this notion that has produced the Shelby cars, first the Cobra, then the Mustang-based 350/500s, the Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray--a genuine GT car in any league, over any piece of road--and the superb Ford GT 40. An Italian variant is the Iso Grifo, splendid coachwork, lushly upholstered, beautifully instrumented, running a Corvette 327 engine that puts it well into the 160-mph category in which the super-GT motorcars live. The Iso Grifo will run with anything, and the comparative cheapness of its engine drops the price to around $13,000.

Another Italian user of the Corvette engine is the Bizzarrini GT, its wind-tunnel-formed body so low that the rear window is almost flat. Giotto Bizzarrini, the car's builder, is impressively qualified. He designed for Ferrari until 1961, then did the V-12 Lamborghini engine. The Iso-Rivolta and the Iso Grifo were his designs. The Bizzarrini model coming to this country is called the GT America and sells for a remarkable $10,500. The handling qualities of the car are superb, among the best in the world, and it will tolerate imperturbably maneuvers that would upend lesser machines: braking in the middle of a fast bumpy bend, for example.

Where the Italian bodybuilders tend toward light and slender-looking structures, American "pure" GTs let more muscle show. Carroll Shelby's GT 500 is a very gutty-looking motorcar. The big air scoop on the bonnet and the two aft of the door don't look to be there on a stylist's whim; there's a roll bar in full view and double over-the-shoulder safety harness. The Ford V-8 engine is big enough by Ferrari standards (7 liters) to drive two and a half GTs; it's not at all fussy or highly tuned, but it will see 100 mph in 17 seconds and a bit, and the top of 132 not long afterward. All in all, quite a lot for about $4500.

Another bulger in this class is the Corvette Sting Ray, an all-Detroit package included here because it's a gran turismo in the European rather than the new domestic sense. If anything, the Sting Ray looks beefier and more potent than the GT 500, but it isn't quite as fast: 11 miles an hour slower at the top end, hardly a crushing deficiency, particularly when the car can be bought, topline options excluded, for about $500 less. The 300-horsepower engine is quiet, the ride comfortable, and the four-wheel disk brakes will stop it. It's a startlingly potent-looking vehicle, and I have seen one very quickly build a small mob scene on a European street, with bystanders estimating its cost at anything up to three times reality.

The tamed version of the Ford GT 40, called the Mark III, doesn't look so muscular as simply terrifying. Only 41 inches high, the Mark III is not a thing of over-whelming aesthetic appeal inside or out, but there is beauty of a kind in its functionalism and, of course, much appeal in the knowledge that this is, practically, the same car that won the Manufacturers' Championship for Sports Cars last year. The Mark III is the GT 40 modified enough to be legal and sensible for over-the-road use. There's even a luggage compartment, but forget about packing your extra parka or your wading boots. It has a five-speed gearbox and about as much performance as you are likely to need in the ordinary way of things. Bring $18,500. A friend of mine told me recently how much his mother, who's in her 70s, had enjoyed 175 mph over Upstate New York roads in his GT 40. It reminded her, she said, of the Packards she had driven when she was younger--in smoothness, that is, not velocity.

There are two top-line British GTs and they are both classics: the E-type Jaguar and the Aston Martin DB6. Both come out of old-line firms running well back of the Second War; both have long racing histories with successes in the most trying events--Le Mans, for example. The Jaguar is still running what is basically the same six-cylinder in-line engine that made the reputation of the XK-120 series. The bugs are long out of this engine, and it is as trouble-free as a comparatively small 150-mph power plant can be. The standard E type is the coupe, but the company does a 2+2 as well. Both are prodigious value for the money at $5580 and $5870.

The Aston Martin is another six-cylinder car, and it is, like the best of the Italians, hand assembled. (There's no such thing as a hand made car.) Quoted by the factory at 152-mph top speed--verified by reputable testers--it's full of luxurious touches unusual in British high-performance motorcars: electric windows, for example. And of course there are the usual masses of wool carpet and leather. The British market will not tolerate an expensive automobile that doesn't seem to have been derived, in its interior, from the library of a manor house. The hardtop Aston coupe is $12,995; the convertible, $13,995. Incidentally, speed limit or no speed limit, Aston Martin designers are still planning a 200-mph road automobile. Unquestionably, they can make it if they choose to. It's curious to contemplate the fact that outcries against high road speeds are never stilled, and that as traffic densities increase, even the Continent will certainly impose limits, as England has done; but there are a dozen firms capable of making 200-mph cars, and if one does, the others will. Perhaps the future will see small electrics for the city, automated hands-off vehicles for commuters and 200-250-mph GT cars on restricted parkways in the hands of specially licensed drivers.

Technically one of the most interesting high-performance cars to appear in recent years is the Jensen, product of a small British house. This is another Italian-bodied (Vignale), American-engined (Chrysler) hybrid, unusual in the U.K. market in that automatic transmission is standard and manual optional. There are two models, the Interceptor and the FF (for Ferguson Formula). They are identically bodied, the difference being in the works. The FF has a most ingenious four-wheel drive system that spreads the power evenly fore and aft and side to side, prevents wheelspin under any amount of power application and, via the Maxaret braking system developed for aircraft, prevents any wheel from locking. The Jensen FF is therefore practically skidproof and can reasonably claim to have the most advanced running gear in production today. It is priced around $15,000.

A few years ago a British house put on the market a strange vehicular device, the Marcos, a small high-performance car built partly of wood. It inspired many amusing flights of fancy as to what would happen to it in a crash. (Not much: Plywood is very strong.) The Marcos has a fiberglass body now, and there are two models, the 1500 and the 1600 GTs, powered by British Ford engines of 1.5 and 1.6 liters, respectively. The Marcos stands waist-high to a shortish man, the interior arrangements enforce the full-arm-length steering position favored by grand prix drivers, and the effect is altogether exciting. The 1600 is an 8.4-second 0-to-60 machine and costs about $4500 in this country. Because the structure of the car allows no seat adjustment, the whole pedal assembly--clutch, brake and accelerator--can be moved four inches front or rear as a unit.

Currently, the sensation in England is a car that will be assembled but not sold there: the Lotus Europa. This is a hybrid (Renault engine) from the atelier of Colin Chapman, on whose Lotus grand prix cars Jimmy Clark came to the championship of the world. The Europa's engine is in the new mid-point, or east-to-west, position, just behind the seats. It's a two-place coupe. This is a stark and intriguing little GT car, getting over 110 mph out of 82 horsepower. It is not luxuriously fitted out--the windows are fixed, the seats are semireclining in the grand prix fashion, with pedal adjustment as in the Marcos; and the fairly tight luggage compartment, behind the engine, gets a bit warm. But the Europa handles impeccably, as does Chapman's standard road car, the Elan, and the $4000 it costs brings you the intangible satisfaction of driving a most advanced motorcar. Incidentally, some of the new cars, and the Europa is one, will not meet the recently laid down U. S. safety standards and so can't be imported in their present form.

A conventional small GT from England is the Triumph GT-6, successor to the TR-4A. This is a pleasant-looking hardtop, with access to the luggage space behind the seats through a lift-up rear-window frame. Because it runs a six-cylinder engine instead of the four so usual in this kind of car, it has sufficient go--60 in 10 seconds--and the brakes, disks in front, drums behind, are superior. The GT-6 does have a couple of reminders of ancient British prejudice--one, that the way to ventilate an automobile is to open up everything wide, never mind fancy ductings and blowers; and two, that a "firm" ride on rough surface is one of the marks of the sporting vehicle. But for a shade less than $3000, the GT-6 is an attractive buy.

A hundred dollars more brings in the MGB-GT. The MG is the sports car for many, and it has the longest contemporary tradition in this country. The TC model MG was the first sports car to come here in any quantity after World War Two, and it was the rock on which the revival of road racing was based in 1948. A TC cost $1995 or so then, and its successor, the B, is about $1000 more now, a reasonable acceleration, indeed, in the light of the increase in cost of many other things much less desirable. The MGB-GT is a hardtop coupe with a couple of midget seats behind. It's quiet for the type; it will do an honest 100 and get to 60 in around 13 seconds. There are worse ways to go.

The Italian industry may be best known for its dominance of the $15,000 150-mph category down the years, but its small-engine high-performance machines have an eminence as well deserved. Alfa Romeo is one of the foundation names in Italian motor making, producer of every kind of automobile, well remembered for fabulous racing achievements and for such classics as the 1750 Zagato-bodied two-seater of the 1930s. A good current example of Alfa is the 1600 Duetto, a $4000 motorcar. The body is odd-looking to some tastes, and trouble has been gone to in order to incorporate a vestigial rendering of the traditional Alfa Romeo grille. But the engine is in the expensive double-over-head-camshaft configuration, there are five speeds, four-wheel disks, and it performs zestfully: 113 mph.

Fiat is another old-line house offering a whole range of fast machines. The Fiat Dino coupe was a world sensation on introduction because the engine is a Ferrari design, named after Enzo Ferrari's son Dino, a promising talent who died in early manhood. It's a V-6 with four overhead camshafts, and turns out 166 horsepower, enough for 131 mph. There are disk brakes all around, magnesium-aluminum-alloy wheels; the coachwork, by Bertone, is as beautiful as anything on the road and the interior is luxurious to a degree rarely found in sports-GT cars.

Fiat has always had on the production lines a small car--the Fiat Topolino is a classic--and the current example is the 850. Some authorities think this the best small car going, and in the Spider version by Bertone, it is the lowest-priced performance car on the market, at a startling $1998. The car is a delight: strong, sturdy, rattle-free, quiet, excellent handling. The engine runs merrily to 6000 revolutions a minute and beyond, it will go past 90 mph. A bargain, to be sure.

Lancia, another legendary house, has a thoroughly exciting car in the model Fulvia, a V-4 double-overhead-camshaft engine, 1.3 liters, driving the front wheels. The Fulvia is undoubtedly one of the most important small-car breakthrough designs of recent years. Everything about the chassis, engine, running gear is beautifully built in the best tradition of Italian things mechanical, and the performance is extraordinary. For one thing, it offers all the advantages of front-wheel drive with none of the drawbacks. There is no stiffness in the steering, no vibration, and most people, not having been told, would never know they were steering the driven wheels. The engine is smooth and quiet and the brakes, of course, disk. The GT Sports Coupe by Zagato is a striking piece of coachbuilding, full of luxurious little gimmicks unusual for the price range: red warning lights on the door edges, for instance, and a flip switch on the dash that lifts the rear window-luggage door electrically by a couple of inches for ventilation. All this for $4150.

Two giants in the GT field are German--Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. Daimler-Benz, the oldest motorcar manufactory in the world, is probably best known at the moment for the huge, $26,000 Pullman 600 M-B limousine, no doubt the most luxurious vehicle in the market place today; but the two-seater 250 SL is equally notable and may be the most advanced sports-GT car available. It is extraordinary in handling, in controllability, in silence, in longevity, in finish. And it can be had with a flawless automatic transmission.

Porsche, young and small by Daimler-Benz standards, has made a prodigious reputation since the end of the last War. Porsches have won races everywhere races are run, nearly always against bigger iron, and they are so reliable that it has become axiomatic that if four Porsches start a 24-hour race, say, three will certainly finish and probably the fourth as well. The Model 356 Porsche became a classic in its own time, and the new 911 and 911S models will do the same. The Porsche combines luxury and performance in a unique fashion. I remember being struck, on a visit to the factory, by the comparative quiet of the place. After a bit, I realized why it was quiet: The car was being put together carefully and slowly by fitting and filing and trying, with no bashing and none of the haste that brings brutality. I've owned three Porsches and nothing basic has ever gone wrong with any of them. At the top of the line just now is the 911S, running 180 horsepower, a rear-mounted six-cylinder air-cooled engine, 140 mph. In addition to the standard coupe, Porsche has a solution, unique with the firm, for the safe-convertible problem. This is the Targa model, which carries a wide roll-bar structure behind the seats, giving four variations on top-up, top-down positions. The Targa is $7390 on the 911S chassis. The four-cylinder 912, with performance in the 115-mph area, is $4790.

There is one superb full four-passenger GT car: the 2000CS by BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke). Again, this is a car for which sophisticated people (grand prix drivers using it as personal transportation, for example) claim the title The Best. It is faultlessly built, with the fanatic all-screw-slots-straight attention to detail that only Germans seem still able to command. It has luxury--electric windows, electric roof--and goes at the command of a notoriously unbreakable engine. The handling qualities are excellent and predictable in all circumstances and the suspension is from another place altogether: You feel you could run over a log and not know it. I drove a CS for a month, every day, hard, and it wasn't long enough to turn up anything to argue about except trifles like the placement of the choke, craftily hidden away by someone who hates parking-lot attendants. The sum of $4985 brings it home to you.

The Glas 1700 GT is sometimes called in Germany "the poor man's Porsche," as the Rover 3-liter is called in England "the poor man's Rolls-Royce," and that's a high compliment. The Glas 1700 is a $3295 automobile, four cylinders, single overhead camshaft, Italian bodied, smart and practical. It's quick, 0-60 in under 10 seconds, and will run unfussily all day at 85, with more than 115 available as a top speed. The Glas is a bargain at the figure, new in this country and thus offering the virtue of considerable exclusivity.

Sweden makes two GT automobiles that have wide followings all over the world, the Volvo and the SAAB. The Volvo 1800S is not new, it has been on the market for about five years, and that is no doubt the root of its reputation as a nothing-goes-wrong machine. The Volvo coupe is not wildly fast--it will get to 60 in 13 seconds and do a top of 109--but it's sturdy to a remarkable degree while retaining the grace and good looks that a gran turismo car must have. The body's high waistline and the absence of green-houselike sheets of glass give a tucked-in, secure and private feeling. Volvo builds for rough Swedish roads and cold Swedish winters, so the 1800S is one GT car that cannot be faulted for ride or instant heat and good ventilation. The factory says the car's average life is 11 years, and I know no reason to doubt it.

SAAB, basically an aircraft firm and one of the world's leaders in the field of fighter planes, made a world reputation with a three-cylinder front-wheel-drive small sedan. For years the popping, frying-pan exhaust sound of this little two-stroke was a dominant note in European rallies, where the car's indestructibility and weirdly adhesive road holding in the hands of such master drivers as Erik Carlsson made it almost unbeatable. There's a brand-new sports version of the three-cylinder called the Sonett, at $3450. Again we have performance, comfort, rarity, speed (105 mph) and the satisfaction of driving something you know has been proven.

When it became evident a few years ago that the Japanese intended moving in on the world's automobile producers, there was a tendency toward polite amusement in some quarters--but notably not among motorcycle makers, who had been blitzed, trampled and wiped out by Honda. American skeptics were convinced when Toyota suddenly showed up just behind Volkswagen in foreign-car sales in the bellwether Los Angeles market. Toyota is the biggest of the Japanese makers, which is to say the biggest in the East, and having broken in on standard sedan and station-wagon types, has now offered an absolutely stunning gran turismo, the 2000 GT. This is a tour-de-force automobile and it is going to have a formidable impact. It's made to go: six-cylinder double-over-head-camshaft engine riding on seven bearings, 150 horsepower out of two liters. A 2000 GT ran 72 hours at 128.76 mph and took three world and 13 international records doing it. The Japanese do not overprice their merchandise, and the 2000 GT Toyota goes for about $6800.

The choice is wide. All you need is the money and a place to go, and someone to go with. The reason for doing it all? A man wise enough, Dr. Samuel Johnson, said that if he could, he would spend his life traveling fast in a post chaise, the GT of his day, in the company of a pretty woman, and never mind such nonessential nuisances as work and taxes and weather.