Veteran Cars

Veteran cars. Nice in their way but would you buy one? Bonhams’ catalogue the other day had Lord Llangattock’s elegant 1902 Panhard Levassor at an estimated £550,000 to £650,000. You need a lot of cash-in-hand to shell out so much for something to drive on the London to Brighton. Don’t misunderstand me; I like the London-Brighton. I did it in 1992 and fared better than Prince Michael that year - but only just. He failed to finish but the Benz I borrowed from Stuttgart got a finisher's plaque, passing the pylons at Brighton with five minutes to spare. I was cold and wet but the experience helped understand a little why people do it. I had a minder and an entourage of back-up so it was easy enough, yet the driving needed concentration. Doing 12½ mph could be scary. Uphill was painfully slow. Downhill alarmingly fast.

Somewhere near Cuckfield I was unable to shift down to get engine braking. The transmission brake was never very good and it seemed to get in the way of the gearchange lever, so we were suddenly quite out of control. At breakneck (literally) speed we passed a bunch of policemen and cheering bystanders who little realised I was hurtling to disaster in a double-fronted shop. Happily Herr Benz's steering and stability was up to the job, so we teetered across mini roundabouts and went on our way, but it was an anxious moment. Braking was indifferent in the dry, precarious in the wet, and almost non-existent when hot. An accident on a Veteran with no seat belt, no crush zone, no airbag and a long way down if you fall out was not to be countenanced.

The right pedal on the Benz was the brake, the middle one a combination of gearchange lever and transmission brake, the left one did something obscure I never discovered. A handbrake of sorts acted directly on the rear tyres and my minder pointedly told me it was a parking brake only. You changed gear by preselecting 1 2 or 3 (there is also a reverse - this was one of the first cars ever to have one), then engage it by a lever on the vertical control column. Steering was by tiller - logical in an era when only horses or boats were ever steered. A pointer shows which way you are about to proceed and final drive to the back axle is by chain.

The ride turned out surprisingly smooth with two lots of front springs, a small transverse leaf and two fore and aft elliptics. The single cylinder engine could be retarded to teuf-teuf astonishingly slowly and I stalled it only once. It produced great pulling power at idling speed almost from rest, like a steam engine. A tidy flap at the back provided access to engine and lubrication points, which had to be attended regularly. Cooling is by gilled-tube radiator, notably good that boiled a couple of times on long climbs. With no fan and certainly no rush of cooling air, it was a wonder it didn't more often. The fuel is pure refined spirit - pioneer motorists bought it at chemist's shops.
The charm of a Veteran, which so thrilled pioneers of 110 years ago, is that it represents such a triumph over being stationary. It scarcely matters how well it goes - the clever thing is that it goes at all. If I had a spare half million – I just might.

Top: Ruth and Eric at the start, Hyde Park, early morning. 2) Joanna started the Run in the Benz. 3) Charlotte rides towards Brighton. 4) Joanna inside a wolf fur in the backup Benz - it was a cold day. 5) Anne, Charlotte, Jane and Joanna at the start.

Lookalikes

All cars look alike these days. Well, that's not new. The 1948 Ford V8 Pilot (left) picked up styling cues from the 1937 Wanderer W24 (middle), as well as a contemporary postwar Lanchester 10.

Saab 92 aerodynamics

Talking, as I have been, about manufacturers’ publicity pictures, I always liked cutaways. It’s the engineer in me. Nothing ever conveyed a car’s structure like a good graphic. The Motor road tests used to do it well, showing how the mechanical bits of a car fitted in with rather stiff-looking occupants. The Saab 92 (left), produced from 1950-1955, makes the point. You can see where the tiny engine leans forward ahead of the front wheels, which it drives, and where the radiator is mounted to catch the air-flow. The upholstery looks a bit thin and rear people have to tuck their feet below the front seat.

In 1950 they made 1246 Saab 92s, every one the same shade of green. It was more important to get production started, and eliminate bottlenecks in the paintshop, than offer buyers a range of colours. It’s said the aircraft factory had over-stocked on green paint for its aeroplanes. Modest power propelled the little car at barely 100kph (60mph). There were only three gears and reaching 50mph occupied the best part of half-a-minute. It scarcely mattered; there was no shortage of customers in 1950.

Although slow, the Saab had clear-cut qualities. Encouraged by the success 2-stroke DKWs had in Sweden before the war it went for an engine cheap to make and simple. A parallel twin-cylinder 3-port 2-stroke of 764cc (80 x 76mm) with Schnürle scavenging, producing 24bhp at 3,800rpm, it was narrow enough to be set across the front with an aluminium head and flat-topped pistons. It had three main roller bearings, a built-up crankshaft with a pair of 180-degree-spaced crankpins, and three main bearing journals pressed into disc crankwebs. Only the small-end bearings were plain, not ball or roller. An extension from the crankshaft carried the cam for the dual-coil ignition, and lubrication was by 4 per cent oil added to the petrol.

A single-plate clutch and 3-speed gearbox, with synchromesh on third and top and a steering column gearshift, formed a unit with the engine. Engine mountings were unusual, a single transverse leaf spring supporting the forward part on rubber torque-resisting buffers, and a rubber cushion at the rear. The result was virtually vibrationless, especially at low revs.

Laurence Pomeroy, who had conducted experiments on aerodynamic cars at Brooklands in 1939, tested a 92 in 1950: “… a most interesting example of the type of car which emanates from an aircraft factory, and shows the benefits of clean lines by giving nearly 65mph (105kph) on less than 25bhp. Excellent roadholding and direct steering were also characteristic of this model, but, as is often the case with 2-strokes, the fuel consumption was not the best feature, failing to reach 40mpg (7.06l/100kms).”

Pomeroy’s advocacy of the slippery shape was only partly justified, for far from being worthy of an aircraft manufacturer, the Saab fell short of ideals laid down by German aerodynamics pioneer, Paul Jaray. Despite the classic teardrop shape, it had a thoroughly average air drag coefficient of 0.35. The bulbous front wings gave an unnecessarily large frontal area so the puny power had a lot of air to displace at 60mph (97kph). Had it been slimmer below the waistline, fuel consumption might have been better.

On the steering, however, Pomeroy was characteristically correct. The Saab’s rack and pinion took only 1.75 turns from lock to lock so it was high-geared, light, accurate and by comparison with nearly all its contemporaries (with worm and nut, cam and roller, recirculating balls, and other nightmares) sheer delight. Tactile, direct, strongly self-centring, drivers could feel road shocks but they could also feel what the wheels were doing, adding amply to the control that compensated for the car’s relative sloth.

In 1950 The Motor commented: “The Saab's layout is ingenious both in conception and in detail. Its unorthodoxy sets a reviewer a task which is difficult yet exceptionally interesting: difficult because of lack of standards for comparison, and interesting for revealing the gains and losses resulting from new layouts and construction methods.” The Motor wanted to be convinced. Its authors liked the principles Saab employed, but they were not finding the results entirely bore out their expectations.

It says something for the speed expected of a 1940s small car that they observed: “The surprise comes in experiencing the power. The car is fast, but what distinguishes it is acceleration in top gear in the vital 15-45mph speed range, which would not disgrace a car of twice the engine size.” There were doubts about refinement: “The Saab lacks the smoothness and silence which the average baby car has acquired between 1940 and 1950.”

The problem of stiffness around a boot lid aperture was solved by not having one on the 92. Access to luggage was through the rear seat. The smooth underside had stiffening ribs and box-section sills, its flat profile a great boon on loose, gritty Swedish roads while the designers concentrated the strength of the body in the middle. The burden of suspension loads were fed into the strong central structure by mounting the front torsion bars in the forward scuttle with tubular bolsters. Torsion bars for the trailing arm independent rear suspension were well forward of the rear hubs, so that the length of the frame subject to suspension-induced loads was less than 85 per cent of the wheelbase.

It was a strategy adopted more than a decade later by cars as diverse as the D-Type Jaguar and the Rover 2000, both of which had stiff centre sections carrying the strain of the suspension, so that the outermost extremities of the car could be thin-skinned and light weight. Above: prototype Saab 92s. Below, later Saab 96 with in-line engine.

Publicity pictures

Scanning images for a new edition of Dove Publishing’s Audi book, which goes back to the early years of the 20th century, shows the heritage of NSU, Horch, DKW Wanderer and Audi. What pictures. Take “The greatest motorcycle factory in the world” (above) in 1930. The enterprising Dane Jörgen Skafte Rasmussen came to Saxony as a student and aged only 25 in 1903 set up Rasmussen & Ernst GmbH, boilermakers. The firm bought an empty textile works at Zschopau, and profits between 1914-1918 led to making motorcycles in this vast factory with chimneys and grandiose offices.

The 1922 Audi Type K was a 4-cylinder 3.5 litre 14/50 with an aluminium block, pressed-in liners, a ball-action gearshift and four wheel brakes. A dignified car Sebastian Vettel would approve its radiator motif, a figure 1 indicating Audi’s place in the world.

Horch went for the premium market in 1922 with its 10/35 4-cylinder engine designed by Arnold Zoller (1882-1934). Probably better remembered for his supercharger, Zoller also designed an astonishing 1464cc 12-cylinder 2-stroke racing car. The block was cast in one, the cylinders in two rows, each pair with a common combustion chamber. All the inlet ports were on the left of the engine, exhausts on the right, superchargers on top. Unfortunately it all proved too much for their inventor who died before the cars were properly developed.

Paul Daimler (1869-1945) designed this twin overhead camshaft for Horch, shown in Berlin in 1927. Gear-driven camshafts, 8-cylinders, the 3.3litre was the first in a series to secure Horch’s prestige.


Wanderer (below) was more middle-class with the 1926 W10 6/30, a modest 1551cc 4-cylinder. Its appeal was helped by a new electro-plating facility for bumpers and radiator. Side-mounted spare wheel wrapped in tidy cover.

Publicity caption for the 1971 Audi 80L (below) says “…rear part of Audi models redesigned so that it appears broader and appeals more to public. It can radiate charm and grace.” Car manufacturers’ publicity pictures. Phds have been compiled on less.

Cosworth engine technology

“To go faster you just have to keep making the bore bigger, the stroke shorter and sort out your valves...” Cosworth technical director Bruce Wood’s turn of phrase is worthy of Keith Duckworth. Race Engine Technology reports on the first Formula One engine to reach 20,000rpm, the Cosworth CA of 2006 and it seems unlikely anybody went faster before rev-limiting. The naturally-aspirated 2.4-litre V8 CA is now in the Marussia, disputing the back of the grid with Renault-engined Caterham. RET editor Ian Bamsey recalls that since 1906 grand prix engine speeds rose from less than 2000rpm to 20,000rpm until progress was halted with a 19,000rpm rev limit for 2007. This was reduced to a (relatively) stifling 18,000rpm, together with a moratorium on development but evolution is back for 2014. In deference to greenies its goal will be fuel efficiency, rather than outright power.

Speed and horsepower climbed with the 3.0-litre V10s, before the switch to V8s for 2006. BMW probably reached 19,000rpm first in 2002 but engines had to do bigger mileages in 2004 and 2005. The top 2005 V10 was the Toyota, which ran to 19,200rpm and produced 930bhp. All the 2005 V10s exceeded 900bhp, probably not more than 950bhp except possibly the Honda.

Bamsey describes the astonishing performance of a Formula 1 engine. At 20,000rpm, the CA's piston acceleration was 10,616 g, while the load on each crankpin by piston and conrod reached 5937kg. Ballistic missiles can only manage 100g, while 5937kg is about two and a half times the weight of a Rolls Royce Wraith.

Race Engine Technology's full report of the Cosworth CA, in issue 73, spans 27 pages and can be bought from www.highpowermedia.com, or by calling Chris Perry on +44 (0)1934 713957.
Cosworth CA (top) and its great predecessor the Ford-Cosworth DFV (right)