The Playboy Car Stable

The gathering of a gentleman's stable of motorcars--utility and aesthetics the only considerations--calls for an imaginist in good form and an openended bank account. Still, a list of desirable possessions is entertaining to make and may be handy to have, since one never knows when necessity will strike: A New Jersey man was recently obliged to accept two $50,000 lottery prizes in succession and, not having considered the contingency in advance, had to put the stuff into a bank for lack, one must presume, of something better to do with it. One should be on guard against this sort of thing.

Range is the name of the game. Diversity. The ideal, a garageful of vehicles so selected that no situation will find one other than suitably mounted. When there were 500 or 600 automobiles on the world market, the selection might have been easier: One could have had a steamer or an electric, for example. On the other hand, we are probably at this moment in the golden age of the automobile--history is difficult to assay close up--and the creation of a stable may be impossible in the future, because it is clear that society is gathering itself to insist upon mass public transport for most of the population, with small, uniform automobiles taking up what slack there will be left. (Starkly significant in this connection is the cancellation of this year's Frankfurt Motor Show on the ground that the European motorist is now interested in utility, not exotica.) The trifling matter of exhaust pollutants is not the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is proliferation. When the United States census hits 250,000,000, the idea of a three-car family will be plainly insupportable, ludicrous. We already have one mile of road for every square mile of land we own; we can't pave the whole country.

The Playboy stable, then, for 1972: a Wankel, a dune buggy, a gran turismo, a deluxe town carriage, an antique and the biggest--and fastest--limousine ever put upon wheels.

The Wankel-engined car is Toyo Kogyo's Mazda RX-2, its function in the line-up to serve as urban and short-haul country transport without being limited to those uses.

The rotary internal-combustion engine has been called the only all-new power plant of our time; and in its present useful form it is new, although the idea on which it's based is a very old one: James Watt knew the principle and his attempt to build an engine on it was thwarted only by the primitive technology of his day. The concept is simple, its execution complicated. A rotary internal-combustion engine burns spark-ignited gasoline but not in a cylinder, as the reciprocating engine does, and not to give up-and-down motion to its pistons. A rotary engine's pistons--called rotors--spin in combustion chambers of constantly changing form, and its great advantage is that its original motion can be used directly without having to be converted from up and down to round and round through the complication of a crankshaft.

The only moving parts in a rotary are the rotors, a balance weight, a flywheel and a shaft for the little ensemble to turn. Compared with the binful of gimmicks in a reciprocating engine, a stripped rotary is stark. For a given power output, a rotary is usefully smaller and lighter, and it's practically vibration-free: At 100 mph, the Mazda RX-2's engine-presence sensation is comparable with a Cadillac's. It's largely trouble-free: The magazine Road Test ran a Mazda R-100 30,000 miles without changing the plugs or points nor touching the carburetor. The engine maintains its tune, stays on the road and out of the shop. It does, indeed, have a lot going for it.

The German inventor Felix Wankel ran his version of the rotary engine in 1956. He and an associate, Ernst Hutzenlaub, had worked with NSU Motor-enwerke A. G., Neckarsulm, and NSU made the first Wankel-engined automobile, the Prinz Spider, in 1964. I drove one that year, a pleasant little 50-hp 100-mph semisports type. About 3000 of them were put on the road. There were stubborn technical difficulties at first--notably, heavy oil consumption and rotor-seal (piston-ring) wear. Both have yielded to research. Companies around the world built Wankels, with the Japanese most impressed by its potential. They set up a long-term blitz on it; Toyo Kogyo has probably passed even NSU in reaching for development boundaries; Mazda's 110S model, on sale in July 1967, was the first two-rotor Wankel. Everyone has come aboard now, and General Motors recently paid $50,000,000 for rights, floating the rumor that it intends, by 1975, to abandon the comparatively ungainly reciprocating engine altogether for passenger cars. Felix Wankel may be said to be a successful inventor: Having previously conveyed 60 percent of the rights to Audi-NSU, now a Volkswagen subsidiary, Wankel G.m.b.H., the parent company, sold the remainder to a London conglomerate for about $33,000,000.

Reasonably diligent research has failed to turn up Toyo Kogyo's reason for naming its cars Mazda, except that it has nothing to do with the old General Electric light bulb. (Owners occasionally report being asked if the thing is battery run.) The RX-2 is beguiling: a good size for city use, dependable, cheap to buy ($3041) and to run (20-23 miles to the gallon of no-lead) and amusing to drive. There is acceleration sufficient to blow off most things its size and a 118-mph top. Handling is not in the sports-car bracket, but it's predictable and adequate for the tasks the car should normally be set. Pleasure in using it derives from its uncanny smoothness and from its satisfying snob value: It's a rarity, after all, and will be for some little time yet. The ordinary amenities are available, including air conditioning--a good idea, since the ventless front windows create an irritating tumult wound down at highway speeds. There's one splendid refinement, a five-function single stalk on the steering column: It commands the directionals, washer, wipers, headlight flasher and dimmer.

The dune buggy is a phenomenon--loathsome or lovely, depending upon one's prejudices--out of California, spawning ground for most innovative wheeled things since World War Two. Specifically, the dune buggy can be laid at the door of Bruce Meyers, whose Meyers Manx established the basic pattern: fat tires, glass body, VW running gear. The Manx was, in the view of James T. Crow--an eminence of the authoritative journal Road & Track--the most imitated design in automotive history, and it was also responsible, when the craze it set off crested, for the theft of Volkswagens in such numbers that the elves of Wolfsburg were hard put to ship replacements fast enough. California teenagers have always been adept with pliers and jack handle; there were some who could spot a black VW parked in Sausalito and have it storming the dunes 36 hours later.

The dune buggy sired a generation of all-terrain and off-road recreational vehicles, including the snowmobile. They have made one thing possible and another practically impossible: They have opened the great outdoors to people who would never have known anything about it had they been restricted to leg power and they have almost guaranteed that one cannot get far enough into the boondocks to escape the howl of the internal-combustion engine.

At the right time and in the right place, a dune buggy is a formidable fun generator, and running one really can be what it seemed to be if you remember watching Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair. There are times when only a dune buggy will do it for you.

There's a drawback, though, and it's range limitation. The dune buggy is great on its own terrain and tolerable as an open town runabout. But if one lives any distance from dune-buggy country, the thing is a bore, because it's geared for power to run up the side of a cliff, fat-tired for flotation on soft ground and open to the crisp fresh air on every side. After 100 miles on a parkway, all but terminal nut cases are ready to trade it for a Pogo stick.

The Meyers Tow'd (the Meyers manufactory has recently been reorganized and Bruce Meyers no longer takes an active part in its operation) is craftily cast to negate this unfortunate inbuilt characteristic with a gimmick as simple and as workable as a paper clip: There's a tow bar telescoped into it. Hooked to a standard trailer hitch on the back of a road car, the bar lifts the Tow'd front end off the ground and away you go. The Tow'd is sold as a kit--about $440 standard, $550 deluxe--and the package has everything but power and accessories. For these, a 1955-1972 VW is required (you can use a Corvair engine if you're eager), plus a few hours with wrench and screwdriver. Well, a few hours if you're good at it. If you're one of those who need 20 minutes to wire up a wall plug, if you're an instruction-sheet lip reader, a few days, maybe. In that case, seek out a knowledgeable teenager and contract him to bolt your Tow'd together for a fee, a bonus for celerity and the privilege of the first ride.

To fill the gran turismo slot in our 1972 garage, we are citing the Ferrari (continued on page 188)Playboy Car Stable(continued from page 90) 365 GTB/4, the Daytona. Calling this vehicle a GT is probably an understatement of some dimension, because it is a motorcar of awesome power, one of the fastest road cars we have yet seen, fast enough to be taken direct from the dealership to the race circuit with perfect confidence. Luigi Chinetti, Jr., and Bob Grossman did just that, running a Daytona in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in 1971 and bringing it in fifth overall.

We have here a $24,000 two-passenger fastback coupe by Pininfarina/Scaglietti mounting a 12-cylinder, four-camshaft, 405-hp engine, five-speed transmission and 11 -inch power disk brakes. The speedometer reads to 180 mph, and the needle will go there. Bill Harrah told me he thinks the Daytona the strongest automobile he's ever touched, a statement of some weight when one thinks of the hundreds of cars he's handled down the years. I found driving it a stunning experience, out of range of anything I could recall. The thing doesn't feel like an automobile: It's a locomotive. I took it out on a lamentably rainy Sunday morning in Reno. I'd been driving a good 275 Ferrari daily for two weeks, but I can't say that was any real preparation for the Daytona, which will do 85 in second and get to 100 in the 12 seconds some fast motorcars take to reach 60. The sheer pull of the engine straight up to 7500 rpm is fabulous, and for the first few miles there is a soul-stirring conviction, every time one shifts, that the thing is running away, in someone else's control, like a moon rocket. I never came near the honest 173 mph the same car had done in other hands. At 135 I convinced myself--it didn't take much doing--that the steady rainfall interdicted a higher speed in a $24,000 motorcar lent, and voluntarily at that, by a friend. In any case, this is a car that demands respect--and, for an already well-schooled driver, about 250 miles of familiarization would be a good idea, too.

While the Daytona's shattering capabilities in the maximum ranges obviously qualify it as a race car, it still is a tourer: It idles without argument at 600-700 rpm, and in fifth gear it can be backed off to a neat and steady 40 mph. It doesn't foul plugs, it doesn't overheat in traffic, it's comfortable, there's more than adequate luggage space for a month's travel and its eye-grabbing good looks guarantee first-cabin reception wherever it stops, from filling station to the porte-cochere of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Characteristically, the frill features--air conditioning, electric windows, and so on--perform dimly. I say characteristically because I can recall the same faults in other Ferraris. I remember one with 6000 miles on the odometer, the driver's window stuck half open, the hand brake useless, the fuel gauge registering full at all times. In limited production, it's hard to enforce quality in outbought accessories; and, in any case, many Italians remain to be convinced that anything but sheer go matters. In a car like the Daytona, unique in bloodline and performance, perhaps they're right. They shouldn't be right, but maybe they are.

Cadillac's placement in the chronicle of U. S. luxury town cars is unchallenged. A great many competing makes have come and gone--Packard, Duesen-berg, Pierce-Arrow--since the first Cadillac took the road in 1902. Only the Mark IV Continental, descendant of the Lincoln, remains to challenge it. Oddly, both cars were created by the same man, Henry Leland, a Vermont engineer of passionate devotion to detail perfection. Leland named the Lincoln after Abraham Lincoln, a lifetime idol. The Cadillac was named for Antoine de la Mothe, who in 1701 founded Detroit and who titled himself Cadillac for reasons that remain obscure. There was a Duc de Cadillac in the French nobility, but a connection between him and De la Mothe has not been established, nor does the duke's coat of arms resemble the badge all Cadillacs have carried: Apparently it was someone's original creation.

The Cadillac was a good car from the first single-cylinder Model A onward. In 1907 its excellence was demonstrated in a publicity coup by Fred Bennett, the British distributor. Visiting Detroit, Bennett had been struck by the accuracy Leland was enforcing in parts-machining: tolerances of 1/1000th of an inch. In London, he proposed that the Royal Automobile Club supervise a contest in which three cars of any entering make would be stripped, the parts jumbled and new cars reassembled out of them. As Bennett had suspected would be the case, only Cadillac tried it. Three cars were stripped, the parts thoroughly mixed, some of them removed at random and replaced from the stock bins and the cars reassembled with hand tools only, and under close RAC supervision, to be sure there'd be no surreptitious filing or forcing. Set up, the cars started instantly and ran perfectly. Cadillac won the prestigious Dewar Trophy and the foundation of a great reputation.

Down the years, Cadillac has been remarkably original, first with a good electric starter, hydraulic valve lifters, synchromesh gears, quick-drying enamel, chrome plating, et al. The first highspeed V8 engine was the 1915 Cadillac's, and the great V12s and V16s of 1930 et seq. were bench marks. Another was the front-wheel-drive Eldorado of 1967. Before the Oldsmobile Toronado and the Eldorado, it was held gospel that a really big engine could not be used in the f. w. d. configuration--there simply wouldn't be room, the car would understeer madly, etc. The registered attempts--Bucciali's, for example --had been less than winners. The advantages were tempting: good traction due to engine weight over the driven wheels and the roomy interior deriving from a flat floor; the big drawback, steering the driven wheels, had been negated by technological advances and power steering. The extent of the Eldorado's success with f. w. d. can be judged by its 8.2-liter engine, the biggest in world production today, and by the fact that it's practically impossible to detect on the road which set of wheels is getting the power. The standard test, backing off the throttle in the middle of a fast curve, has no discernible effect on the vehicle. Correctly estimating the interest of its clientele in things mechanical at just under nil, Cadillac makes minimal reference to the drive, and there are Eldorado owners who don't know where the power is going. I met one of them in a garage two winters ago, having chains put on his rear wheels. I presume the officiating mechanic knew but for some reason preferred to keep it to himself--maybe that was how he got his jollies that day.

The 1972 Eldorado is an informal four-place town car of great distinction and refinement, a splendid parkway touring car as well. I inject the caveat because the awesome impression of width from the driver's seat and its suspension are at least partial disqualifiers for country roads and byways. On boulevards and superhighways it's as good as anything in the world, the mammoth engine almost dead silent until the whip is laid on, the ride better--to my taste, at least--than Rolls-Royce's. Hitting obstructions such as big frost heaves, the thump is audible, the driver knows that work is being done down there, but next to nothing at all comes through the upholstery.

This is an unobtrusively fast machine, too. I have a standard 50-mile stretch over which I have run many cars. It includes city driving, parkway, country road, a long straight and a small town. At a light-traffic time of day, I made this run in 55 minutes without doing anything dramatic or conspicuous. The Eldorado is automated to a point requiring the driver to do little more than start it and steer it: temperature control, cruising-speed control, the best automatic transmission extant, electric locks, both-sides interior-controlled mirrors, signal-seeking stereo, electrically adjustable seats, on-off indicators for all (continued on page 226)Playboy Car Stable(continued from page 188) running lights, automatic parking-brake release, and on through a list long enough to boggle a maharaja. There are a few negatives, of course: Showing 5800 miles, the last Eldorado I drove had an unacceptable level of body noise, far more than my 35,000-mile Grand Prix Pontiac, a vehicle I've never thought quiet. If one's much over 5'10" one's out. of rear-seat headroom; hatted, I'd say the limit might be 5'7". The fake wood liberally used up front is the fakiest I've ever seen, so patently fraudulent that in a perverse way it's amusing. However, not to grumble. We live in parlous times, and what do you want for under S8000--gold plating? The Eldorado remains, in the essentials, an admirable device.

There are occasions that can be happily enlarged by a really unusual motorcar: I recall a picnic in England done in an Edwardian mode that was twice as enjoyable as it might otherwise have been because the party traveled in a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost touring car fitted with a mammoth wicker basket, food, wine, china and silver in a service for six. And a summer wedding, the bride and groom carried from the church in a torpedo-bodied Bugatti. For this kind of laudable endeavor, something pre-1940 is indicated; and since, when pure pleasure is the primary purpose, we incline to think of a small car, something in the two-seater configuration. In this overview, the range is tremendous. A Henley Rolls-Royce roadster? A Stutz Bearcat? A 1750 Zagato Alfa Romeo? A chain-gang Frazer Nash? Or go to the top of the pile and take a T-head Mercer Raceabout?

The Mercer Raceabout circa 1910-1915 is probably the most sought-after of U. S.-built automobiles. There are fewer than 30 of them extant and the market price on them, established by a single sale every couple of years or so, is in the area of $35,000-$150,000. The original sticker was $2500.

As is the case with every great motorcar, the Mercer was built by men much less concerned with profit than with quality. The company (in Trenton, Mercer County, New Jersey) was rounded around 1909 by members of the wealthy Roebling and Kuser families, builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, and designed by an engineer of unusual gifts, Finley Robertson Porter. Porter, happily, lived to be a very old man, lived to see the car he had created become a legend object. Naturally, one is tempted to say, thinking of Bentley, Chevrolet, Buick and others, he profited financially very little, but his professional satisfaction must have been immense.

The charm of the Mercer in the T-head models (so called after the arrangement of the engine, one sparkplug on each side of the combustion chamber) is soon stated: It was soundly and strongly made of the best materials; the performance it offered was startling; and its stark simplicity--the thing was all automobile, completely unfrilled--was aesthetically most appealing. Some owners even dispensed with the 18-inch "monocle" windshield as an encumbrance! A T-head would do 75 miles an hour--the factory guaranteed that figure, a high one for the time. And although it was completely unfussy and tractable, it was frequently raced: In August 1912, on a dirt track, the car set records at distances from 75 to 200 miles.

To drive a Mercer is to enjoy a remarkable experience, nearly always unique in one's recollection. I found one in Canada in 1948--it is still, I believe, the last "new" Mercer to be turned up--and after it had been restored, I put many hundreds of miles on it. The engine always started on one pull of the crank, hot or cold, the four big cylinders booming through the exhaust cutout. The gearshift and handbrake levers were outdoors; so was the accelerator pedal, sticking over a brass foot stirrup. The Mercer was light, it would run like a thief and there was torque to throw away: In top gear and with a trailing throttle, on a rise, one could almost count the explosions--"once to the telephone pole," owners used to say.

There were other models in the Mercer production of about 5000 cars before the company abandoned ship in the Twenties, but the T-head Raceabout was the best and deserves its compulsory inclusion in any list of the dozen greatest sports cars we have known since the beginning.

As far from the Mercer as one could get and still be on four wheels is the Mercedes-Benz 600. This does appear to be, in all sooth, the Ultimate Limousine. History makes liars of us all, but, in the present state of the art, it is hard to think of something better than an almost-dead-silent seven-passenger automobile offering comfort that begins where other luxury vehicles leave off--and still capable of 0-60 acceleration in under ten seconds and a top speed of 125-plus mph. In its combination o£ comfort and performance capability, the 600 is unique. On a winding road, only a really good sports car can stay with a 600. This is not surmise nor estimation: Stirling Moss once loaded a 600 with six passengers and took it around the short and difficult Brands Hatch circuit at a little less than five seconds under the racing-sedan record for the course. Beyond all doubt, any other limousine in the world, trying to stay with him, would have been into the bushes, probably upside down, in the first half mile.

No arcana, nothing of the occult, goes into the 600. It is an automobile made by men using machine tools like any other, except that it was designed to be best and great pains are taken with it. It is made to individual order only, on a separate production line. The engine is a fuel-injected 6.3-liter V8 of 270 hp in a 126- to 153-inch wheelbase chassis, air suspended with driver-adjustable hydraulic shock absorbers. Transmission is automatic and the power steering is unusual in offering the front-wheel "road feel" without which really fast driving is difficult. In brief, the running gear is of the quality its clients expect from the oldest motorcar manufactory in the world, with the longest competitive history. It is in the amenities that the 600 breaks new ground.

Three bodies are available: five- and seven-passenger four-door, seven-passenger six-door. Because electric motors cannot be absolutely silenced, a hydraulic system actuates the window lifts, the six-way front-seat adjustment (vertical, horizontal and back angle), the four-way (horizontal and back rest) rear seat, the sliding roof, doors, trunk lid, and so on, acting through 23 push buttons variously distributed. Electronic temperature control is standard, with inside-and outside-temperature gauges; so is air conditioning, stereo and heated rear window. There are 17 interior lights in the car, those in the passenger compartment set for ten-second time-lag turnoff. Basic design of the passenger seats was done by orthopedic specialists and the seat springs are tuned to the suspension to eliminate sympathetic vibration at any speed.

The rear windows are curtained, an oddly old-fashioned touch that is beguiling and useful in practice.

Because each 600 is built to order, variations in such things as seating arrangements are possible. So are folding tables in various cabinet woods, bars, tape recorder, television, vanity sets, electric razor, and so on. A six-piece set of fitted luggage can be nested in the trunk. These trifles will add the odd penny to the basic $34,500 price for the seven-passenger model, but what of that? You are buying a motorcar that is the current choice of the sheiks of Araby; the cost of traveling like a raj has never been low.

As far as is known to me, Mercedes has refused only one client request: to finish a seven-passenger six-door completely in black, end to end, not a hairline of chromium showing anywhere. But the buyer had his way: He shipped the car to England and had the work done there. Occasionally, one sees it in New York, marvelously funereal and gloomy-looking. A reversal of the specification--to produce 20 feet, six inches of solid chromium--would have made an effect only a little more bizarre.

Thus The Playboy Car Stable, 1972, six motorcars varietal to a degree in purpose and appearance. To help assemble them for photography required only a telephone call to the amiable curators of Harrah's Automobile Collection in Reno. To reassemble them in duplicate? Say $125,000 for openers, much persistence--and good luck.