When you see the solar cars race across
Australia each year they just about all have one thing in common: a
sleek tail designed to reduce drag. The tails go by various names,
but are basically a teardrop shape. The tapered rear end allows the
car the slip through the air without creating a vacuum, which tends
to hold the car back.
There's nothing new about this type of
design, although it now goes under a different name and the
technology is more advanced and the shape more defined. Our featured
cars, a 1931 MG and a Vauxhall show the beginnings of cars designed
to slipstream. Both are `boat-tail' cars which were highly
fashionable in the late 1920s right through to the mid to late 1930s.
The boat-tail car was probably invented
by Frenchman Jean Henri-Labourdette, a coachbuilder, who in 1912 was
designing race cars. They were torpedo-like at the front and the
smooth, round body style continued past the cockpit and came to a
pointy end. He finished his boat-tails in mahogany to save weight,
and secondly, for appearance. They looked nautical and when polished
the timber added class. Our featured Vauxhall uses this type of
finish.
While the style started on the race
track, by the late 1920s it was becoming mainstream and car
manufacturers had production model boat-tail cars. No just any old
makes either. Names like Auburn, Dusenberg, Rolls-Royce and Packard.
As our pictures testify Vauxhall and MG flew the flag for the
working-man's car in Britain. Generally, these cars were called
speedsters. What that means of course is they were the forefathers of
what we now know as sports cars.
In Australia one of the first cars to
use this streamlining technology was a 1916 Studebaker Six which
raced against the clock on Surfers Paradise beach on Christmas Day
and Boxing Day, 1916. The car had a cowling with an opening fitted to
the nose to reduce resistance against the upright radiator and a
tapered teardrop cowling fitted to the rear of the car. It is likely
the design for these two additions was simply copied from newspaper
photographs of similar cars trying to set speed records on US beaches
at that time. (Murray Hubbard is writing a book on this speed record
attempt)
Anyone could fit a boat-tail to many a
car, so there were plenty of automobiles streamlined in this way in
the late 1920s and early 1930s. No doubt the manufacturers saw an
opportunity with the design and thus went into production models,
cars that are today some of the most sought-after collector cars
around ... and undoubtedly some of the most beautiful cars ever
produced.
The boat-tail in this format did not
survive past the late 1930s and was briefly revived by GM with the
Corvette Sting Ray in the early 1960s and later in the early 1970s in
the Buick Riviera. (See articles and images on these cars under
Chevrolet and Buick in our classic cars section). But, these were not
true boat-tails, designed for low drag, but merely styling cues for
aesthetic purposes.
Like all great ideas, the boat-tail
design will not go away. As mentioned it is used extensively in solar
concept cars and even modern hybrid cars have the beginnings of a
boat-tail in their rear-end design. Both the Toyota Prius and Honda
Insight have the tapering rear end for aerodynamic purposes.
Boat-tail designs are also being investigated by the trucking
industry, where it is believed a better design could reduce drag and
therefore improve fuel consumption by as much as 10 per cent. While
that might not sound much, remember it can cost $700-$800 to fill one
of these monoliths, so 10 per cent becomes a significant saving.
The 1931 MG M Type Midget featured here
is a factory production model boat-tail. MG launched the MG Midget at
the 1928 Olympia Motor Show. This car has an all-metal body, unlike
earlier timber models. It is powered by a 847cc engine sourced from
Wolseley, a company taken over by William Morris in 1927. Cecil
Kimber founded MG (Morris Garage) in 1923. The MG featured a Morris
Minor chassis.
The body was built by Carbodies, a
Coventry-based coachbuilder, and the engine plate reads `The 8/33 MG
Midget Engine' and was built as Abingdon on Thames. The car's
overwhelming feature though is the boat-tail, but it has a number of
other interesting features including the V-Shape windscreen,
cycle-type mudguards and a significant radiator. Spoke-wire wheels
were standard.
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