Worth another look

The Automotive Driving Museum located in El Segundo California (near the LAX airport) has several spectacular nineteen thirties luxury cars, including this Weymann bodied 1930 Stutz Monte Carlo, a four-door sedan produced decades before Chevrolet’s coupe of the same name. We featured this car several years ago, but it’s worth another look.   

This four-door Stutz Monte Carlo Sedan is powered by a 287-cubic inch "Vertical Eight" 8-cylinder engine mounted in a chassis equipped with four-wheel hydraulic brakes. This car one of three built sold for $4,495 when new in 1930.

The Weymann body was a patented design system that used a jointed wood frame covered in fabric. It was popular because the body system reduced the usual squeaks and rattles of metallic bodies and improved performance because of the body's lighter weight.  

After World War I French test pilot Charles Weymann who held dual American and French citizenship (both his parents were American citizens) used his knowledge of aircraft manufacturing techniques learned when he worked for Nieuport  and developed a patented system for fabric covered automobile bodies. 

He opened his first factory in Paris in 1921 and through the roaring twenties the market for Weymann fabrics bodies grew quickly and Weymann licensed his system to many of Europe's most prestigious manufacturers. Weymann opened a factory in Indianapolis Indiana in 1928 that was devoted to building custom bodies for Stutz automobiles.

Early in the new decade of the nineteen thirties, the automobile buying public tastes shifted to high-gloss painted bodies and the Weymann fabric bodies with their matte finish fell out of fashion. Weymann's Paris factory closed in 1930 followed by the Indianapolis factory in 1931 making this 1930 Stutz one of the last of its breed.

All photos by the author

Mazda's first "rotary rocket" 

On display at the Blackhawk Museum in Danville is a stunningly restored example of a 1968 Mazda Cosmo 110 A Series 1 coupe, the first car produced by the Japanese automaker that used the eccentric rotary design Wankel engine which the company made famous.

The Wankel rotary engine was envisioned German engineer Felix Wankel, who patented his engine design in 1929 and produced his first working prototype in 1957. Wankel’s creation offered the advantages of compact design and lighter weight over conventional connecting rod/crankshaft reciprocating engine designs. Wankel’s employer, the German car manufacturer NSU built the first Wankel powered car but also licensed the engine design to Mazda in 1961.

Mazda introduced the prototype Cosmo coupe at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1964, and after solving reliability problems with the engine production began in 1967. The first Cosmos were powered by a twin-rotor engine that developed 110 horsepower (thus the name of the car 110A), but in 1968 introduced the Cosmo series 2 which was fitted with a more powerful rotary engine that developed 126 horsepower. All Cosmos featured manual transmissions, the series 1 cars, a 4-speed box and the series 2 cars equipped with five-speed transmissions.

Mazda raced the 110A Cosmo Series 1 in only one race, the 1968 Marathon de la Route 84-hour endurance race on the torturous German Nürburgring circuit. Two Cosmos were entered to prove the rotary engine’s durability. One car, driven by an all-Japanese team, did not finish after an axle broke, but the second car piloted by a team of Belgian drivers finished the 84-hour grind in fourth place, albeit 12 laps behind the winning Porsche 911.       

The car shown at Blackhawk is a rare series 1, one of only 343 series 1 cars produced. The car is white with a black trimmed interior with black and white hounds-tooth cloth seat inserts and right-hand drive. The car was “resto-modded” in Japan in 2008; while it appears stock on the exterior, this car has an upgraded RX-7 engine, transmission and disc brakes and is fitted with aftermarket 15-wheel alloy wheels.

By the time Mazda ended production of the 110A Cosmo in the Fall of 1972, 1,176 of the hand-built cars had been built.  Mazda would go on to build nearly 2 million rotary powered cars and use a rotary powered car to win the 24 hours of LeMans in 1991 but produced its last RX-8 sports car in 2012.  

photos by the author