Indholdsfortegnelse for April 1952 i MotorTrend

TAZIO NUVOLARI’S name and his flamboyant racing style focused the excitement of the hordes that jammed Roosevelt Speedway on October 12, 1936 to witness the great revival of the Vanderbilt Cup Race. The dark, grimacing, little Italian seemed to violate all the laws of gravity and centrifugal force as he hurled his Alfa-Romeo down the home stretch to win a rare, truly international, American grand prix race. That magnificent stylist, Jean Pierre Wimille, followed in a Bugatti, and Brivio’s Alfa took third. The words. “Alfa-Romeo,” added up to overwhelming superiority in the public’s mind; though the name of Enzo Ferrari was known to just a few alert enthusiasts who had access to the pits. But it was Scuderia Ferrari that had entered the Alfas, hired the best drivers, and ran…

… there at the base of the mountain, where the road swung sharply right to cross the narrow bridge, shone a sudden glassy slickness. The brakes! And then I was upon it. There was the moment of sick surprise when the rear end lurched out and around, the instinctive turn into the skid—too slow, too slow. Sideways on the slippery blackness I went forward to the springboard which would launch me into the drink. And then … a blast of wind smashed against me broadside, checked me almost to a halt … the wheels found traction and the hundred horses galloped terrified across the narrow string to life. “For heaven’s sake,” snorts my favorite critic at this point, “what are you doing … a little number for Awful Confessions?” “Okay,…

• INDIANAPOLIS 500 MILER • PARSONS TO DRIVE IN EUROPE • SPORTS CAR SHOPS THE ENTRY of the new 12-cylinder Ferraris at Indianapolis has stirred up much talk in the back rooms. After the showing that this car’s little brothers made at the rugged “go” in Mexico it is not unusual that the racing fraternity is giving this entry more serious thought than they have given the foreign entries of recent years. Those have usually been former Grand Prix cars that have had their wheels run off for several seasons in Europe, then brought to America by enthusiasts who didn’t quite understand foreign ways. This year, however, the tale may be a bit different. The car has been prepared especially for this race, and Gerry Grant, the car’s owner, has…

THE MASTER PLAN of the used car business is simple—as every barber and shoe-shine boy will quickly tell you. You buy a car for $1150 and sell it for $2000. Quick and profitable … a golden road to the upper income bracket. As a friend of mine advised me, “All you need is a few hundred dollars to start with.” He quite innocently forgot to add the word “thousand.” But bright-eyed, firm of tread, rosy cheeked, you rent a lot on a side street zoned for business, and you’re entitled to be a friend to man Then you go about the formality of buying a license to operate. Sometimes this formality becomes funereal, since some local board meets, say, on the third Thursday of each month and, then and there,…

AREMARKABLY honest piece of merchandise, but high-priced for what it has to offer the buyer,” was the definition of the super-deluxe ’52 Plymouth Cranbrook agreed upon by Woron, Borgeson, and Bodley after three days and 1100 miles of testing the latest version of this popular low-priced car. The Plymouth is inexpensively but not cheaply made. For example, a tiny amount of money is saved by utilization of a very simple but serviceable glove compartment latch.… but a more or less similar amount of money is spent in equipping the engine with long-wearing chrome top piston rings. In other words, the new Plymouth strikes us as a machine in which really good construction has been blended with economical construction in a remarkably well-balanced way. There’s no question about it: Plymouth’s high…

IT’S BEEN A LONG time since anything as good as the “Dual Range” Hydra-Matic transmission happened to drivers who like automatic transmissions. At a time when many manufacturers are concentrating on making things more comfortable for the driver—making them actually “drive” less and less—Pontiac has made their automatic transmission less “automatic.” As paradoxical as that may sound, MOTOR TREND Research is not alone in the opinion that this new transmission has terrific potentialities. For instance, the engineer of another automotive manufacturer paid an unexpected tribute to the Pontiac when, during a conversation, he stated that “The ‘Dual Range’ Hydra-Matic transmission is one of the biggest things to happen to the automotive industry this year.” It’s undoubtedly the best compromise between the stick shift and the fluid coupling; it has the…

CUSTOM BODY WORK, at least as far as restyling of stock cars is concerned, may have originated in California, but the Golden State no longer holds a corner on this market. As proof of this you need look no farther than some of the photos accompanying this column, showing acustom shop in Orlando, Florida. As the months go on, one of the purposes of this column will be to show you that, although the bulk of custom work is still done in California, and particularly in Los Angeles—the Detroit of customizers—other states throughout the country have their share of custom body shops. For much of this information we’ll depend on you, our readers; if you know of a garage, or individual, doing restyling work, put us in touch with them.…

DETROIT. MICHIGAN—A frantic race for horsepower, per se, seems to be the major news emerging from new car introductions this year. Many serious Detroit observers are appalled at the development which makes it possible for any driver in this country—regardless of qualifications—to be turned loose on overcrowded highways with a hurtling, two-ton monster capable of putting out from 150 to 190 bhp. Just what this super-abundance of power means to the average motorist is hard to evaluate, particularly when it is coupled with braking and cornering characteristics which have not kept pace with speed and bhp boosts. One automobile engineer, whose company is featuring a jazzed-up production car this year, proudly points out that the increased power offers more efficiency. In this particular case he states that the car travels…

FOR THE CONNOISSEUR of something-or-other, Kaiser-Frazer has built what must be the maddest interior of this year. Termed “Caballero” in the publicity releases, the car utilizes the pelts from 20 Holstein-Friesian calves, decorated with hammered silver. The rope cord on the back of the front seat has been replaced by a bit cord. Three ranking brains collaborated on this and five other products in the series—Veepee H. V. Lindberg, Senior KF stylist E. H. Daniels, and Carl Spencer, color stylist. If anything, the rest of the line is madder than the illustrated example. There are two more Caballeros—one upholstered in Palomino, the other in Arabian stallion. Worth about $15,000 are the Explorer, Safari, and South Seas. The Explorer, polar type, is finished in polar bear skins and trimmed in mouton.…

MODIFICATIONS … George Cerny’s Four-Door Chey-Olds Basic car—'49 Chevrolet four-door Fleetline sedan. license-plate bracket and guards—'50 Chevy. Grille—Top bars are '50 Oldsmobile 88. Lower bar, '47 Oldsmobile 98, was added to fill space that Oldsmobile 88's bumper formerly occupied. Headlights—Frenched. Hood—Filled. Sheet steel (20-gauge body stock) added to conform to top bar of grille. Windshield—'50 Olsmobile 88. Chevrolet division bar was cut out. Chrome—Fender strip stock. '50 Pontiac reardoor window molding added for decorative effect. Guards under door handles are '50 Cadillac. Hub caps—Cadillac. Rear fenders—Front half, stock. Rear half, '50 Cadillac. Gas-tank filler cap relocated in tail light. Bottom of fender and skirt were lowered by adding three ins. material. Rear bumper—Stock '49 Chevrolet with deluxe tips. Road clearance—Lowered 3 ins. in front by cutting approximately turns from coil…

IF, WHEN YOU LOOK at the modern-day cars, you get the idea they haven’t changed much over the last few years, you’re not far from wrong. Car changes must come gradually—the public, as a whole, just doesn’t want to accept radically new concepts in styling. This doesn’t mean that auto stylists aren’t looking ahead. At Ford Motor Co., for example, advance stylists are peering way into the future. The ideas they sketch on paper are not necessarily practical ones, but are the formulation of a theme or motif. This is what helps to create a better product—the search for something new and different. On these pages are a few of these sketches transformed into the ⅜-scale model stage. Some may get into the detail planning stage, but it is more…