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Showing posts with label concours. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 June 2012

1957 Fiat Eden Rock (or Marina) built on a Multipla chassis by PininFarina because the Fiat founding family wanted a go-fer car for their French resort villa

The car was commissioned by the family that founded Fiat, the Agnelli family. They also had the largest holdings on the Italian stock exchange. They owned a remarkable French villa, one famous for once having been owned by kings, and entered the car in the 1957 Paris auto show... and I guess that is where the Cord and Doheny family saw it and bought it, because they had it at their vacation resort, Lake Arrowhead California by 1959.

The special 600 was called the "Eden Roc" as the promontory overlooking Cap d'Antibes along the coastline of Cote d'Azur where the Villa Leopolda is, in the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. The little Fiat was used to shuttle guests around the 20-acre villa and town.

In the late '60s, this car was taken to the Lingotto in Turin and replaced the Fiat 1900 Cabriolet Boano used by Prof. Valletta to lead guests to visit the factory. http://www.alfabb.com/bb/forums/other-italian-cars/160958-funny-fiat.html

The French resort was Villa Leopolda, owned by King Leopold of Belgium, and King Albert after him. It was used in the Hitchcock movie "To Catch A aThief" that starred grace Kelly, later Princess of Monaco.

Most recently, according to Wikipedia, it's owned by the Russian billionaire, and he bought it for the world record price of 370 Euro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Leopolda

The Doheny family connection is interesting, as their former mansion, Graystone, is the site of the Beverly Hills concours I went a couple weeks ago. Doheny was an oil magnate, and married the daughter of the Cord Automobile company founder. Cord company holding included American Airways, Checker Cabs, Cord and Auburn automobile companies

Monday, 28 May 2012

1926 Rickenbacker Super Sport Boat tail, Eddie's show car

In June 1923 all Rickenbackers built from then on had four-wheel brakes. Packard had made the same statement 16 days earlier, but only offered it on their eight-cylinder models.

The Rickenbacker was the first medium priced American car with four-wheel brakes. Duesenberg had been the first to offer the option, but Duesenbergs were far from meduim-priced.
Buick, Oakland, Cadillac, Marmon, Chalmers, Elgin, Paige and Locomobile were next to jump on four-wheel brake bandwagon.

Few people seemed to remember that Rickenbacker had been making cars with four-wheel brakes since 1922, although few models came with the option in 1922. Four wheel inside brakes were introduced in 1923.

At the 1926 New York Auto Show the Rickenbacker Motor Company deputed it’s new Super Sport Boattail Coupe for $5000. They claimed it was the fastest production car to carry 4 people at just under 100 mph.

Duesenberg, Stutz, Packard could go faster, but they could only haul 2 people!! It’s believed less than 20 of these Super Sport Boat Tails were ever produced.

The super 8 was his sportscar and he only made 7 of these chassis, but because of the economy he could only made 1 car to take to the auto show

currently owned by the Pond Collection, this car was at the Desert Concours in Palm Springs in 2009, photos from Rex Grays Flikr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/rexgray/page357/

info from the Pond Collection website

Car makers who did not offer a four-wheel brake model claimed that four-wheel brakes were dangerous. This campaign hurt Rickenbacker sales slightly, even though there was nothing unsafe about the design. Two companies leading these negative ads were the Ford Motor Company & Studebaker. The main reason for these ads really had nothing to do with the safety of the brakes. Ford & Studebaker had thousands of chassis in stock with two wheel brakes and nothing on the engineering table to start building a car with four wheel brakes. The negative campaign was to slow down the selling of four wheel braking auto’s until their stock piles to two wheel chassis were used up. And you thought Tucker was the only company that got a raw deal from the big 3?

Thursday, 24 May 2012

Jaguars at the Muckenthaler concours, from the 1950's to the XJ220

the above silver e type is the car that the following interior and engine photos are of. Extensive work like moving the firewall, etc etc have happened