1930s French Drooping Beltlines

Once upon a time, say 50 or more years ago, the automobile industry was much less international than now.  Car manufacturing countries often had tariffs to protect domestic firms and each country had its own currency and exchange rates relative to others.  And there might have been cultural factors that led to cars having distinctive national visual tendencies.  American cars looked American, English cars English, and so on.

One distinctive design quirk for many French cars from 1934 to the early 1950s was beltines (that run along the lower edges of side windows) that drooped or fell off downwards towards cars' aft ends.

Most French brands did not have this characteristic.  But the country's "big three" car makers -- Citroën, Renault and Peugeot -- had models with just that touch.  So many French cars' beltlines drooped.

Most of the images below are factory sourced or are of cars for sale.

Gallery

1934 Citroën 7 A
A very early Citroën Traction Avant.  This popular car and its larger 11 CV sibling were the first mass-produced French cars with the lazy beltline, as best I can tell.

1954 Citroën 11 B Familiale, auction photo
Six-window cars were longer and made the effect more noticeable.  One thing I do not know is why it appeared in the first place.

1936 Peugeot 402 Longues
Once Citroën launched the style, it was adopted by its main competitors, as can be seen on this six-window Peugeot.

1937 Renault Viva Grand Sport
And on this Renault.

1937 Delage Berline
A few other brands fell in with the dropping beltline fashion, including some exclusive Delage models such as this one.

1939 Hotchkiss Modane Coupé, Bonhams photo
The French seem to prefer four-door cars.  But this two-door Hotchkiss, low-production that it was, also followed the fashion in a stubby way.

1937 Delage Aérosport in the Studebaker Museum

In September I visited the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Indiana where Studebaker cars and trucks were made for much of the firm's existence.

Not all the cars on display were Studebakers. Most surprising to me was a 1937 Delage D8 Aérosport coupé that was on loan from the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.  I wrote about Aérosports and related models here, so I thought it would be worthwhile to present a set of photos I took of the one in South Bend.  It is an impressive design.

Let's give it as much of a walkaround as its placement allowed.

Gallery

The exhaust pipes are only on the car's right side.

The cars pictured in my linked post all had bumpers, but they are lacking here.  Note the sculpting around the headlights.

After World War 2 Delage abandoned the traditional grille seen here.  That's a Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow in the left background.  For a few years Studebaker owned Pierce-Arrow.

Left side, sans exhaust pipes.

Rear quasi-quarter view showing the decorative, semi-faux tail fin.  I think it wasn't necessary, though a windsplit of some kind would have been.

Although this  Aérosport has a solid roof, the windsplit emerges well towards the rear: no carryover to the front, because the windshield is a flat, one-piece affair and not divided and V'd.  Note the sculpting at the rear.

The Last Judkins Custom Body

The Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar, California contains many prize-winning restorations of noteworthy luxury cars, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s.  One such is a 1938 twelve-cylinder K series Lincoln Touring Coupé built by J.B. Judkins Company of Amesbury, Massachusetts.

According to the link, Judkins built more custom bodies for Lincoln than any other coachbuilder.  The example at Nethercutt was Judkins' final car body, and was made for J.B. himself.

Unless otherwise noted, the color photos below were taken by Yr. Humble Blogger in June, 2019.  Click on images to enlarge.

Gallery

1938 Lincoln K coupé by Judkins.

Plaque describing the car and its history.

Showing more detail of the "pillarless" passenger compartment.  This design was not original to Judkins.  It was borrowed from a series of custom bodies on Delage automobiles.

This c.1934 Delage Conduite Interieur Sport has a body by Letourneur et Marchand.  Because its B-pillar is truncated at the car's beltline, the design can be classed as "pillarless" even though that's only in a visual sense. This early example does not match the Judkins body shown above.

But this 1936 Delage D8-120 Aérosport Coupé by Letourneur et Marchand is an example of the design that inspired the 1938 Judkins Lincoln.  Photo via Hyman, Ltd.

Bonus image: Featured are Lincoln'e greyhound mascot and the round, blue, Art Deco style badge.

French "Hardtop Convertibles" from 1932

A popular body style in America from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s was the "hardtop convertible." Hardtops (as we called them), like true convertibles, lacked a B-pillar above the body beltline.  This gave them a racy appearance without some of the impracticalities of convertibles such as retraction mechanisms, increased susceptibility to damage, and so forth.

The first mass-produced hardtops were from General Motors, and I wrote about them here.  Chrysler had a few built a year or two earlier, but the style seems to have had its genesis in France 15 years earlier in the form of some carrosserie-sourced bodies.

This post deals with some Delage cars with bodies by Letourneur & Marchand.

Here at CarStyleCritic blog's world headquarters I have a fairly good reference library.  But it's not close to the size found in major car museums.  As for France, I have a nearly complete 1930s-subject set of Automobila Hors-Serie publications wherein René Bellu presented the French brands that appeared at the annual Paris auto show.  Bellu provided names of car models in some photo captions, but not all.  And he didn't always include photos of the models I'm dealing with here.  That's one reason why I can't be certain that model names I give in captions below are precise for any given model year.  My other sources are a book about Delage, an issue of Automobile Quarterly dealing with the marque, and scattered information from the Internet that is not always reliable.

To keep things simple, if not necessarily totally accurate, I will refer to two similar bodies by Letourneur & Marchand on Delage six and eight cylinder cars 1936-1939, whether or not those were the exact names used at the time they appeared.  One body type is the Aérosport.  The other had been called the "coach panoramique" by Bellu (who ought to know), referring to the lack a B-pillar.  This is the type that probably was called other names as well, but so far as I can tell had no distinctive official name.  I should add that the model years mentioned below are also problematical because I cannot fully trust some of the Internet-sourced data.

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This is an example of Letourneur et Marchand's "Yoyo" style on a B-pillorless body for an eight-cylinder Delage.  Internet images of what appears to be the same car have it as either from 1932, 1933 or 1934.  A photo in the Automobile Quarter issue dealing with Delage (Vol. 14, No. 2) has the design date as 1932.  Regardless, aside from the aft side windows being non-retractable, this car can be claimed as an early Hardtop.  (British coachbuilders were making pillarless coupe designs as early as 1933, but that is a subject for another post.)

The first Letourneur et Marchand Aérosport bodies appeared in 1936.  Shown here is a Delage D8-120 auctioned by Hyman, Ltd.  It might be the original one, completed in time for the October 1936 Paris auto show: note its 1937-style fenders.  Its passenger compartment greenhouse has the same side-window spirit as the car in the previous image.  Aérosports are a fastback style that includes a central splitter fin.  The windshield is awkward-looking -- too old-fashioned for the rest of the design.  I don't care for the sweepspear on the side either.

This is a 1936 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique.  Six-Cylinder Delages were shorter than the eights.  The side window profile is quite similar to the Aérosport, but the fastback element drops down more drastically.  This is to allow a separate trunk at the rear: all Coach Panoramiques had such a trunk.

The Delage D8-120 Aérosport in this photo has been identified as either from 1937 or 1938.

The above car was heavily restored a few years ago by Cooper Technia.  This photo shows the ash wood body framing.

1937 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique.

1937 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique auctioned by Artcurial in France.  This shows the rear end arrangement.

Something of an oddity, this 1938 Delage D6-70 has an Aérosport style body.  Note the fastback and the splitter fin.

Another body style twist has this 1937 Delage D8-120 with a Coach Panoramique body.  I saw another one of these auctioned by RM Sotheby's, but called an Aérosport on their web page.  It's possible that Delage and Letourneur et Marchand did call this an Aérosport because it was on a D8-120 chassis rather than the expected D6-70.  Nevertheless, it's a Coach Panoramique.  Note that the aft side window is retracted in the true Hardtop manner.

A body variation of a minor kind is on this 1938 Delage D6-70 Coach Panoramique: a sun-roof.

Mecum auction photo of a 1938 Delage D8-120 Aérosport showing the rear design.

The same car, but identified as a 1939 model on a different Internet site.  Very few such cars were ever built, so that detail probably doesn't matter much.

What Were They Thinking?: Spatted Front Wheels

Applying aerodynamic streamlining to automobiles, either symbolically or in reality, didn't seriously begin until the early 1930s and intensified over the decade.

In streamlining theory, a car's shape should be as smooth and integrated as possible.  Therefore, should not wheel wells be covered either with removable spats or seamlessly?  Nowadays, most cars and SUVs have exposed wheels even though their body designs were tested in wind tunnels.  Why is that?  Perhaps the trade-off between accessibility and aerodynamics favors the former.

In the 1930s and 1940s rear wheels often were either spatted or had shorter wheel well openings. The practical problem here has to do with gaining access to the tire for repairing a flat or chaining up for snow driving.  A small wheel well opening offers less room to work, and if spats are installed, then they might have to be removed to allow any work to be done.

Few cars had covered or spatted front wheel openings.  The most common examples of covered (but not spatted) front wheels were 1949-1956 Nashes and 1950-54 Nash Ramblers.  Spatted front fenders were mostly found on French custom car bodies such as shown below.  Beside accessibility difficulty, covered front wheels have the further problem of restricting a car's turning radius.  The Nashes just cited were typical American cars of their era in that wheels were mounted several inches inbound from the sides of the car body.  In recent decades, American (and essentially all other) cars have wheels at almost body-width, one reason why they are fully exposed.  The European cars shown below also were narrow-track, and turning radius was helped a little further by bulging out the front fenders and their spats sometimes even more so.

Gallery

1929 Travel Air "Mystery Ship"
Teardrop-shaped spatted wheels on fixed (non-retracting) airplane landing gear began to appear on racing planes such as this at the end of the 1920s.  I suspect these forms inspired car stylists a few years later.

1932 Delage D8S Roadster by Letourneur et Marchand, ex-Reneé Friederich racer - via Coachbuild
An early example of teardrop-shaped front fenders.  Spatting will come later.

1935 Mercedes-Benz 500K Roadster by Erdmann & Rossi for the King of Iraq
Unlike the Figoni & Falaschi designs shown below, this car's front fender sides are not bulged outwards.  So in order to achieve a reasonable turning radius, it's possible the the entire body was widened so as to keep the axle width relatively narrow.  (I cannot locate the source of this photo.)

1936 Delahaye 135 M Roadster by Figoni & Falaschi for the Aga Kahn
Figoni & Falachi was the coachbuilder that seems to have made the most cars with spatted front wheels.  This is an early example, as best as I can tell from a serious web search.

1937 Talbot-Lago 150-C SS by Figoni & Falaschi - RM Sotheby's via Car and Driver
Their next step was to connect the fenders.

1937 Delahaye 135 MS Roadster by Figoni & Falaschi - DB Pittenger photo at Revs Institute
Here the connection uses a small running board.  Note how the front fender is ballooned out.

1939 Delage D6-70 by Figoni & Falaschi, Tito Rossi at the wheel
A Delage D8 version of this design (with more elaborate chromed trim) was famously displayed at the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, but without a complete motor.

1948 Delahaye 135 M "Narval" Cabriolet by Figoni & Falaschi
The first of the seven or so Narvals appeared in 1946.  They sell for outrageous prices at auctions.

1946 Fiat 1500? by Ghia?
I can't confirm the information in the title, but it seems okay.

1948 Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 Sport Cabriolet by Ghia
The spats make this design seem more ponderous and Buick-like than one would expect from Ghia.

1950 Nash Rambler Convertible
Nash-Kelvinator president George Mason had covered front wheels on 1949 Nash cars, and the new Rambler line got them the following year.