1905 race florida

[gilletman]

Hello,

Does anyone has more info about this event (pictures, story's, results)

 

thanks.

[Leif Holmberg]

https://www.google.se/search?q=1905+race+florida&oq=1905+race+florida&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.7483j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8     Google searching!

Leif in Sweden

[1937hd45]

Just picked up a February 4, 1905 edition of Scientific American with a full page feature on the event. Bob 

[Steve Moskowitz]

Awesome Bob!

[gilletman]

thanks,

 

I was specialy interested in the 'Pipe' car above right.   rgds.

[gilletman]

[Modeleh]

Great pictures!  Emilio Sartori pictured in the Fiat was one of the drivers of the Zust in the 1908 Great Race.

[DavidMc]

The 90 HP English Napier in one of the above photos has been very accurately re-created here in Australia.  These photos were taken around 2014 at a brass era rally in Kalgoorlie WA.

[1937hd45]

Thank you David! I don't know if there are any original Napier parts in that recreation but it looks fantastic! It is such a joy to see cars like this, but the builders /caretakers run the risk of having them passed off as real if notes aren't taken. I'd much rather see and hear a recreation, clone, tribute than see an engine sitting on a skid in a shop corner. Bob 

[Ivan Saxton]

It is about as accurate as it is possible to be,  Bob.   During that era, when Napier wanted that car to be faster, they built a bigger engine for it, and the original gathered dust , out of the way, in the Factory.   After some time, one of the Cornwall family,  whose wealth was from manufacture of the very large drainage pipes for the sewage system of Melbourne, was in England, and searching for a suitable engine for a racing boat they were building, heard of the discarded original engine from Samson, and bought it.   Alan Hawker Chamberlain, and old Racing driver Jack Day, both described the process of starting the big 6 cylinder engine in the boat.  The crankshaft was turned by hand with a suitable bar which fitted holes bored in the circumference of the flywheel, till one cylinder had been taken through intake and compression strokes, and stopped a few degrees past top dead centre.  That charge was fired,  probably by trembler coil spark, to start the engine.  Bob Chamberlain bought the Napier engine from Cornwalls, some time after it had been replaced, first by a Sturtevant V 8 aero engine.  That was later replaced by a WW1  12 litre Hispano Suiza V8 aero engine.  After Chamberlain brothers sold their various engineering businesses in about 1960s/-70s,  Bob spend a lot of time copying design data from A,J, Rowledge' design notebook(s) on the creation of the original car, which are preserved in the Science Museum in UK.  Bob re-drew all the engineering drawings; and Alan Morgan, who started as an apprentice with Chamberlains in the 1940s, did all the manufacturing of the re-created car.     Certainly some of the wheel centers are Napier Rudge Whitworth, because I was persuaded by a friend to let Bob have spare wheels that I had.  ( I was disappointed later to discover that he wanted the extra wheel centres to build a set of high speed wheels with straight sided rims. I try to be particular that spare parts I have only go to people with genuine need.  Those wheels could have gone later to a friend with more legitimate need).            The engine cylinders now are not correct and original.  The originals were cast and machined with open water jackets.  Wax was moulded around them, impregnated on the surface with graphite, ( which is electrically conducting), and the thin copper water jackets were electroplated to sufficient wall thickness.  These were beautiful, but fragile and easily damaged.   The patterns for the cast iron replacement cylinders  were Bob's design work, but with the necessary coreboxes,  were the craftsmanship of Bob's long-time patternmaker, Vic Gray.  We suspect that other wheel centres, and the wheel hubs front and rear, may have belonged to the crashed remains of an S76 Fiat racing car which was found, crashed and stripped near the Queensland border town called Texas.  ( That was taken from John Ryder's property at Coonabarabran NSW, without permission or purchase.   The source and identity, and the provenance of notable re-creations of significant historic racing cars, can often be contentious.     The frame and a few other parts,( including one damaged engine cylinder) , were retrieved from a steep gully on a road near Kempsey in NSW by my friend Stuart Middlehurst.   We could never identify it, but only speculate what it might have been.   John Medley found a name of the ownership of a property close to where that car ran off the road and overturned.  The owner suggested that he should speak to his mother, then a very elderly lady,  who had walked to the spot the day after the accident with her mother. Her mother had photographed the wreck, as it lay,  upside down.  Would he like to have the photograph?    It was chain drive.

With the date,  John searched the newspaper records.  The names of the people involved, and the make of vehicle were revealed. many people will be familiar with another example, well known from its display in that wonderful museum in Cleveland.  It was an example of possibly one of Ferdinand Porsche's earliest classic racing car designs, the Prince Heinrich (sp?) Austro Daimler.  I understand that the sad engine cylinder went to a man in Scandinavia who has been trying to gather parts to resurrect a car.  One thing lacking has been a chassis frame.  Dr Porsche always had a reputation for using language that was blunt,  rather than diplomatic.  I cannot imagine what reaction he may have had, should he have ever known that part of one of his masterpieces has been improvised in the recreation of a later FIAT racing car.        It is believed that the wrecked Austro Daimler was dismantled over time for anything possibly useful. As they say in the Outback,  it has vanished into the "Never-Never".

[Craig Gillingham]

Ivan, I can add a little bit more regarding the L48 Napier Samson; I remember reading that some of the wheels used were off a 23/60 Vauxhall, so they would be Rudge 62's. However, the L48 has had a lot of different wheels fitted to it in the past 40 years, beaded edge, well based, straight side with lock rims, etc. I understand a lot of the engine was rebuilt, although the crankshaft was still the original. The speedboat in question used to be on display in Port Melbourne a while ago (engineless),  it may still be there, I'll have to check. The original chassis was scrapped by Napier, although they kept the engine.

 

There was a photo in the past couple of years in the VSCC newsletter of someone who had found one of the Austro-Daimler cylinders. I can't remember much about it; it was OHV, with three valves? maybe? something was broken on it.  I'd still have the issue and more details could be found out about it. I thought it may have found its way to Scandinavia by now.

 

If I'm reading this correctly, the S76 is using the chassis from the upside-down Austro-Daimler? The story really needs to be sorted out one day, as the details of the S76 and the A-D are very confusing, and I was always sceptical the S76 ever came here. There are a lot of people dying to know what the history is on both chassis.  

[gilletman]

Do you have a picture like this of the Pipe motorcar?  

 

Thanks.

[gilletman]

Thanks to this info i found that the car on the right above is mentioned as a Renault/MG constuction.  

This info is not correct. 

The car is a Belgian PIPE, wich participated on the Gordon Bennet 1904. (3 cars)

See www.bloggen.be/pre1930rally.

The driver Bernin  is unknown to me.  Attached picutre of a PIPE at the gordon bennet 1904.

[wayne sheldon]

Very interesting. Most of those cars pictured above, I am at least somewhat familiar with. The Belgian Pipe? I am not.  Something more to do some research and reading about.

Thank you for an interesting thread.

[gilletman]

you can find a lot on my blog www.bloggen.be/pre1930rally.  20 articles whit over 200 pictures. Enjoy the ride.

[pmhowe]

What a fascinating thread! And who wouldn't love a chance to drive that Napier!

[gilletman]

i wunder if any other cars of this event survived.

[gilletman]

line up picture

[Ivan Saxton]

Behind the left front wheel of the streamlined Pipe in post #13 the car looks very like one of the Napiers,  which could be an E61, a K5, or even the L 48 in its original form.  There seems to be a beam type staring handle, such as Napier used on some of their big racing cars.   ( call that an "armstrong starter"). It could be a non-competitive car; because the low -placed number at the bottom of the radiator is not a racing identity number; but is more like a road registration, perhaps?          The best collection of early Napier racing photos is in David Venables'   book "NAPIER.  The First to Wear the Green".  ISBN  0 85429 989 0 .  There are photos of other contemporary cars;  But the author may well have had many other photos of other cars from the same period, though the focus of the book was on Napier.      In only one of the current photos of Samson in West Australia I can see an unusual design of friction damper on the front.  This is the same style which is shown illustrated in the owners manual for the 1919 to 1923 six cylinder, 6 litre Type 156 cuff valve Peugeot.   It is possible that Jack Nelson or another past 156 owner had a sample that Bob Chamberlain was able to copy for its utility value.  Craig, it might be easier for you, being in Melbourne, to telephone Alan Morgan  to discuss an clarify what Bob did to re-create the car .  Alan started at Chamberlains as an apprentice during the 1940s, and did all the machining on all Bob's cars.

There is some detail in Tito Anselmi's book on Isotta Fraschini pertaining to Pipe cars designed according to Kaiserpreis regulations in 1907, which encouraged many of the competing cars to run with a larger bore than stroke.  Isotta's Tipo Taunus was an 8 litre  4 cylinder T-head, in which the piston crowns had minimal clearance to the combustion chamber roof.  So with a very high compression ratio,  and synchronised ignition with what amounted to a double sided Rickardo combustion chamber by a set of spark plugs on each side of the engine with HT spark from both ends of the high voltage magneto winding.  Minoia won the 1907 Coppa Florio in one of these cars.  He averaged 15 miles per gallon for the race of  302 miles!!!!!     I wonder why no-one except Finlay Robertson Porter, with the 1914 T-head Mercer Raceabout copied Giustino Cattaneo in this.