MG SA Saloon - Response to Jaguar

Nowadays, when most folks think of the MG brand, sports cars usually come to mind, though some might also recall smaller sedans of the 1953-1958 Magnette variety.

But in the late 1930s MG built the SA (originally 2-Litre) series on a large, 123-inch (3100 mm) wheelbase.  Some backgound is here.

According to the link, Morris Garages' intention was to combat the increasingly popular SS (soon to be renamed Jaguar) sports sedans.  Around that time, MG was absorbed into Morris Motors and originally planned engineering was abandoned and the SA received many Morris parts including a Wollseley motor that was hopped-up by MG engineers.  Saloons appeared for the 1935 model year, and for 1936 drophead coupe and tourer bodies were added.  Total 1936-1939 production was 2,739.

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1936c. publicity photo

1938 MG SA Saloon - car-for-sale photo
Like the Jaguar saloons, the hood (bonnet) is long, the roofline low.

1937 MG SA Saloon - photos via RM Sotheby's and Hemmings
Now for an abbreviated walkaround.  Note the traditional MG grille as found on its TA though TF sports cars.

The slant of the windshield is echoed by the front door's forward cutline, the hood cutline and the hood's louvers.

The backlight window came in two segments due to the need to use flat glass panels.  The fabric top section suggests that the body is not all-steel, probably built using current coach builder technology.

The trunk (boot) is integral, the spare tire being attached to the trunk lid.

From this angle (not normally seen under normal conditions), the front end seems light, delicate, and the passenger compartment and rear end looks comparatively heavy.  Since around 1950, most cars have fatter, more blunt front ends, so there's not the contrast we see here.

A handsome car of its time and English place.

Ghia Designs with Covered Front Wheel Openings

A while ago I wrote about designs featuring covered front wheel openings.  This practice was not common, in that most of my examples had bodies designed and built by coachbuilding firms rather than being mass-produced.

Such covered wheel openings had to do with 1930s concepts of automobile aerodynamics, the idea being to create as smooth a body shape as possible so as to allow air to flow over it with minimal disruption when the vehicle was at speed.  Nowadays, most production car bodies are wind tunnel tested, and wheel opening covers are seldom seen.  Apparently, air flow disruption from those openings is not a serious problem when compared for the need to access tires and the desirability of shorter turn radiuses.

Today's post presents more images of early postwar designs by Carrozzeria Ghia, a major Italian coachbuilder in those days.   It seems that Ghia built few cars with spatted wheels, and by 1949, it was designing cars with openings exposing entire tires, front and rear.

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1946 Fiat 1500 Cabriolet Gran Sport by Ghia.  The flowing fender line is somewhat similar to that of 1950 C-body Buicks, though I wonder if Buick stylists were aware of this car .

Even the grille is suggestive of Buick (production Fiat 1500s had horizontal grille bars).

Note how low the ground clearance is.

1948 Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 Sport Cabriolet by Ghia.  Two years later, Ghia was still pursuing the design theme. 

Publicity photo.

View from right front quarter.  I found no views of the car's rear.

Wheel spats were hinged to provide access to tires.  However, turning radius remained restricted.

1930s Riley Four-Window Kestrel

The British Riley was a mid-range brand in the 1930s with a performance image.  During that decade, the firm marketed a too-broad range of sedans and sporty cars based on several engines.  One result was that the company was placed in receivership early in 1938, and then purchased by William Morris who gradually integrated Riley into his automotive empire.

One of Riley's interesting designs from a styling standpoint was the Kestrel.  Information on some of the various Riley platforms with Kestrel bodies is here.

Kestrel saloon (sedan) designs came in two flavors -- four-window and six-window.  Except that British usage was "Four-Light" and "Six-Light" -- terms that suggest to naïve Yanks such as me that they were referring to small-bodied four and six cylinder cars.  Oh, well.

Four-Light Kestrels appeared first, as early as 1932.  That was very early in automobile streamlining days.  By 1934 and 1935 there were several other British cars with visual streamlining in the form of rounded rear profiles.   I wrote about one example, the Triumph Gloria with its "Airline" body from 1934 here.

Those "Airline" cars were minimally aerodynamic at best, because their front ends were hardly streamlined at all, frontal streamlining being far more important than rear end streamlining in most cases.

Below are images of three Riley Kestrel Four-Light cars.

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1933 Riley 9 Kestrel Four-Light - car-for-sale photo
The nearly-vertical radiator, scooped-open fenders, and large, separately mounted lights all were anti-streamlining.

However, the windshield was slightly raked back.  And the rear profile was rounded, rather than squared-off vertically.  Those side window irregular shapes remind me of cockpit windows on Boeing 787 jetliners.

The backlight window is large for its time.

1934 Riley 9 Kestrel Four-Light - car-for-sale photo
Another early Kestrel, this with two-tone paint.

Doors are hinged on the B-pillar in order to allow their irregular shapes to open.

1935 Riley Kestrel 1.5 Litre Four-Light - Bonhams Auctions photo
1935 Kestrel Four-Lights were lightly facelifted.  For example, fender skirts are larger.

The radiator grille is sloped at a greater angle.

The rear roofline now merges smoothly with the lower rear end, altering the two-toning pattern.  And the spare tire now has a cover.  Interesting that none of the cars shown here have bumpers of any kind.

1955 Chrysler Falcon Concept Car

After Virgil Exner became head of Chrysler Corporation styling, there soon appeared a stream of what we now call "concept cars" built in Italy by Corrozzeria Ghia.

One such design that Exner very much hoped to see in production was the 1955 Chrysler Falcon, the subject of this post.  The idea was that it would be Chrysler's answer to General Motors' Chevrolet Corvette and Ford's Thunderbird.  As it happened, only two or three were ever built.

Its wheelbase was 105 inches (2667 mm), compared to the Corvette's and Thunderbird's 102.0 inches (2591 mm).  According to the Wikipedia link above, much of the design has been credited to Exner's assistant Maury Baldwin, for whom I can find no biography on the Internet.   Sources say Exner's contribution was the car's front end.  He did use a Falcon as a personal vehicle for a while.

Some of the images below were taken by Chrysler or its agents, a few others are from sources I cannot identify.

Gallery

Color photo of one of the Falcons.  Note the slant of the A-pillar part of the panoramic windshield frame.  It slants backward, in the mode used on production Chrysler Corporation cars in 1955.

On the other hand, the car pictured here has a windshield A-pillar leaning forwards such as was found on 1954 GM B-body Oldsmobiles and Buicks.  This strongly suggests that at least two Falcons were built by Ghia.

Rear quarter view revealing rather sketchy protection.  Those vertical bars look strong, but I wonder if they were solidly backed.

The side exhaust pipes along the lower body covered by perforated heat-protection plates provide a serious sporting appearance.  I assume they're functional here, but doubt that would have been the case had Falcons actually entered production.  The louvre on the side of the front fender also seem to be functional.

The grille leans forward, creating an aggressive appearance.  But bumper protection is scanty.  The general feeling is similar to some other Exner concept cars of that time.

Note the hint of a tail fin atop the rear fender.  Exner was planning tail fins for Chrysler's 1956 models.

Early V-Windshields on Closed-Body Cars

The 1930s was the decade when automobile design changed most profoundly.  Bodies became more integral, where formerly discrete elements such as headlights and fenders were merged, step-by-step, into the main car body shape.  Related was the fashion of streamlining, whereby car bodies became more aerodynamically efficient than before.

In many respects, the "streamlining" was more notional than actual, though some details changes did make for a modest improvement.

Today's subject is the V-shape, two-glass-pane windshield.  These had appeared by 1930 on some roadsters and other models with retractable/removable fabric tops.  But it wasn't until the 1934 model year that V'd windshields were on volume-production cars with closed (fixed-top) bodies.

It took several years before such windshields became the dominant type in the USA; brands such as Dodge and Plymouth didn't have them until they were given a major facelift for 1939.  Europe was even less receptive.  As best I can tell without digging very deeply, no factory-body Italian cars had them in the 1930s.  The only French brands mass-producing V'd windshields were Peugeot and Matford.  I found only one English example so far.  Germany had several brands with them on some models by the late '30s: Adler, BMW, Horch, Opel and Wanderer.

I am no expert regarding aerodynamics, so what follows is conjectural.

Windshields with slight V-ing and little slant are not much more efficient than flat, vertical windshields.  Even sharper V-angles do comparatively little if the slope is slight.  So slope matters more than V-ing.  Windshields that combine strong slope and some V might be more aerodynamically efficient than slope without the V, though I suspect the difference is small, and dependent on the overall shaping of the front of the passenger compartment greenhouse.

All that said, let's take a look.  Below are examples of the earliest adapters in the USA, France, UK and Germany.

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1934 Chrysler Airflow CU Coupe - Barrett-Jackson Auctions photo
The famous Chrysler Airflow design was wind-tunnel tested.  Windshield slope appears to be around 45 degrees.  The amount of V is not large, but the result, back in those flat window glass days, was a quasi-rounded forward plan-view shape of the greenhouse.

1935 Oldsmobile Eight 2-door sedan - for-sale-car photo
General Motors redesigned a body used on Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and some Chevrolet models.  Windshield slope was slight, and so was V-ing, so what we find has more to do with styling fashions than actual streamlining.  LaSalle's also got V'd windshields.

1935 Renault Vivastella Grand Sport - photo by Robert Doisneau for Renault
This Renault has similar windshield characteristics to those of the Airflow.  There also was a Nervastella version.  Interestingly, the V'd windshield was abandoned for 1936 and beyond.

Peugeot 402 - factory photo
The 402 line was introduced in the October 1935 Paris automobile show and remained in production until 1942.  Above is a '38 "Légere" model.  Windshield slope is perhaps 30 degrees from the vertical.

1937 BMW-Frazer-Nash 4-door saloon - for-sale-car
This design first appeared for the 1936 model year.  Frazer-Nash imported right-hand drive BMWs to the UK.  Not much V, and the slope is about 30 degrees, as best I can tell.

1937 Humber Snipe Imperial Limousine - Brightwells Auctions photo
This design also first appeared for the 1936 model year.  Very slight V, and the slope seems less than 30 degrees.

Alfa Romeo Disco Volante Concept

The title of this post calls it a "concept," but "prototype" might also do.  Plus, there wasn't just a single example: five, with three variations, were built and four survive.

The subject is the 1952 Alfa Romeo 1900 C52 Disco Volante, spider version (Wikipedia entry here).  Disco Volante is transated literally from the Italian as "flying disk," but sources in English use "flying saucer."  That was what the Italians meant, because flying saucers were a new, interesting, popular Thing starting in 1947 when one was claimed to have been spotted near Mt. Rainier in Washington state.

All that said, the Disco Volante was a distinctive design that is still remebered by car fans and perhaps even some of the general public.

According to the link above, the project was the development of a racing car with advanced aerodynamic shaping.  For example, the underside of the car was cladded apart for areas cleared for functional reasons.  The most unusual feature was that the sides of the car were curved so as to reduce the stability impact of cross-winds.  This resulted in the car being unusually wide, proportionally.

Although Alfa Romeo had the design wind tunnel tested, some styling details and the construction of the cars were by the well-known Touring carrozzeria.  The lead stylist likely being Carlo Felice Bianchi Anderloni (1916-2003), son of Felice Bianchi Anderloni, the firm's founder who died in June of 1948.

The 1952 spiders were small, with a wheelbase of 87.4 inches (2220 mm).  But when photographed alone, they appeared to be larger.  Images in the Gallery below probably are mostly via Alfa Romeo, though the final three were taken by me at the Alfa Romeo museum near Milano in 2019.

Gallery

The hoodline tapers towards the front, but front fenders are bulged to accommodate front wheel vertical movement.  Rear fender bulges are not functional in that respect.

This frontal view illustrates the side overhang.

Rear view of a Disco being tested.  The strakes behind the seats are more decorative than functional.

This side view shows that even the front fenders are taller than needed for dealing with wheel jounce.  This probably degraded aerodynamic efficiency to some degree, but improved the aesthetics.

The driver provides scale, helping show that Discos were not large cars.

The tail end of the car has a space for a license plate.  Surrounding details are more styling by Touring than wind tunnel shaping.  Any attempt to add front and rear bumpers and other street-legal features would have degraded the design considerably.

1972 Maserati Boomerang Concept

The 1972 Maserati Boomerang concept car (Wikipedia entry here) was one of several wedge-shaped designs that appeared in those days.  Styling was by Giurgetto Giugiaro, and the car was built by his Italdesign firm.

The Boomerang -- I have no idea why that name was selected, because it doesn't look like a boomerang -- was more practical than some of the other concept cars with wedge shaped front ends.  That's because it was 42 inches (1070 mm) high, compared for instance to the 1970 Ferrari Modulo whose height was 36.8 inches (935 mm).

The Boomerang still exists, and was auctioned for $3.7 million in 2015 by Bonhams, the source of the Boomerang images below.

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The Boomerang's design seems fussy in this side view, though Giugiaro's use of repeated angles helps maintain its angular theme.  That lower side window is problematic, though the upper one seems too narrow and, especially, highly placed to afford the driver adequate vision.  Lowering the beltline a trifle and eliminating the lower window might have fixed that problem and cleaned up the design as well.

The 1970 Porsche Tapiro concept by Giugiaro that pioneered features of the Boomerang.  It's a more attractive design.

Overhead side view revealing the amount of glass surrounding the passenger compartment.

The shape of the lower windows emphasizes the reverse angular tension created by the engine air intakes behind the doors -- a nice touch that adds clutter yet reduces potential blandness.

Like the Porsche 914 based Tapiro, the Boomerang is a mid-engine car.  It's hard to tell if that dark painted area on the sail panel is helpful or simply visual clutter.

Angularity is found on this frontal view as well as from side views.

The rear is nicely composed.