Art & Inspiration Swoopy Cars Redux

I started the original "Swoopy Cars" thread in 2010 (http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/swoopy-cars.543790), which is currently at 781 posts and still climbing slowly. I praised a lot of European cars that had a fast and athletic look. It was a little more challenging to find examples of hot rods or customs with the swoopy quality.

That's changed in the last few years. A number of custom & hot rod builders are familiar with the French Figoni & Falaschi-bodied Delahayes of the '30s. Their shapes, and those of some other '30s Frenchies, served as the definition of swoopy cars:


In the '90s, some custom/hot rod guys explored the look of these '30s cars, sped up. Here's Chip Foose's Impression, a tribute to the '36 Ford roadster, which won an AMBR award:

Terry Cook's and Roger O'Dell's Lincoln Zephyrs:


Boyd Coddington's Whatthehaye:

A little later, Terry Cook's Bugnotti:

Still more recently, Rick Dore did a few more swoopies. The Auburn Slowburn, Black Pearl, and Aquarius:



And at this year's GNRS, the dam burst with Hollywood Hot Rods' Packard (which won the AMBR award):

...and three new swoopies from Rick Dore:

So Messrs. Foose, Cook, and Dore have been building swoopy custom/hot rod show cars for more than a decade, but it seems like the frequency of these builds is increasing rapidly. Other than Impression, I can't say that any of these look more athletic than the ones in the earlier Swoopies thread, but they sure look sleek and fast. What's next?

Credit should be acknowledged for Marcel DeLay, who built at least a half dozen of these bodies. He honors the prewar French coachbuilders like Figoni and Saoutchik quite masterfully.

 

I admire the work involved in building these cars.

 

yep, amazing creations - maybe build creations the look more like old time rocket ships

 

Really enjoyed seeing all of the above cars at the GNRS. We stopped at the Nethercutt for another visit, I just can't get enough of this Type 51 Bugatti, that body is fitted to a GP chassis, much shorter than a Type 57. It was a real shock last year to see the center piece of the Mullen collection and the Windswept Rolls-Royce at the Petersen. Two cars I had the pleasure of working on back in the 1970's. Bob

 

Damn beautiful cars , I respect the quality of worksmanship...but they don't make my pants fit funny like a real HOTROD!

 

What's next? is a good question.

What I enjoy about the red Packard is that its idiom is really 5-10 years earlier than the other examples. It's a more disciplined mode, more composed and less sculpted, more about process and massing and less about shape. There is a greater tie-in with the traditional ethic in that: process constraints have to be respected, conceptually if not technically, and that gives rise to the look.

One possibility is a further exploration of this earlier (albeit less swoopy) idiom, perhaps going to the classic American top-end roadster of c. 1928: square-rigged with golf bag doors, etc. and those characteristic contrasting labels along the door tops. Or even earlier, the era of Dagmar, Wasp, Cunningham, Daniels, McFarlan.

I've been exploring a variation of that with the massing focus shifted rearwards as on a FED. There's a lot of potential there.

The alternative is a dialectic counterreaction into daring non-trad weird: those huge skinny custom bike front tyres are waiting to be exploited. (Can you believe it? I used "dialectic" and "exploited" in a sentence that has nothing to do with political economy!)

Or the two could be combined. Hard to pull off, I'd expect.

 

I wondered at first if the HHR Packard had been influenced by the "Brown Bomber" Packard concept roadster built for Ed Macauley in 1933. Comparing their two profiles, I think their overall proportions are similar, but the detail work is quite different:

 

The Brown Bomber doesn't have a fat butt.

 

Thank you 50Fraud! What a great looking Packard, does it exist today, and is that a radio antena under the running board? Bob

 

Ed Macauley was a senior executive at Packard, and he had the Brown Bomber built for himself on a V12 chassis in 1933. Sadly, he had the car re-bodied again just a couple of years later, and the later car was not nearly as attractive. I think it was such an attractive car that it would be worth cloning today. Here's the only other picture I have of it, presumably with Ed standing alongside:

 

There is an earlier one off Packard boat tail that was built for the President of Packard I believe, that a friend has here in Connecticut. It has been a life long restoration project, with a planned Pebble Beach showing. Bob

 

Might be the later version of the Brown Bomber. I've never heard anything about what happened to it when Macauley was done with it.

 

A Google image search turns up only one other image:

Note the relative profusion of hardware. I'd think that getting that right in a well-considered way would be important in nailing the look.

Note also the louvred splash aprons: the design starts with the chassis. Hiding the floor plane was a major change from the earlier approach to the later. Being honest about the floor plane was one of many things which led to the 1919-1930 era being called "Vintage" - though not all Vintage designs had floors legible from outside the car.

(Edit: I was still typing this when 50Fraud posted the same image above.)

 

Here's what I've had in mind.

 

I think that Brown Bomber is one of the most sexy design Packard ever designed. Not over the top but a real, doable car


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