Petersen Automotive Museum’s exhibit on “supercars” offers a glimpse into the glory of Euro-American excess
What the Petersen Automotive Museum says about supercars and the philosophy behind their construction is without a doubt one of the most profound statements that could ever be made about sports cars: everyone wants one, but nobody really needs one. In this context, Petersen Automotive’s latest exotic display, Supercars: When Too Much is Almost Enough, captures the essence better than any of us ever could.
What their timeline of supercar history and development ultimately reveals is that the very idea of building a “supercar” can actually be traced to the late part of the 1890s into the early 1900s, when the very first “crude” autos began to operate on public roads. During the earliest phases of automotive development at the turn-of-the-Century, most autos were prone to break down and fall apart, so the idea of building a deluxe-versioned, high-performance automobile was, to say the very least, out of the question.
The early part of the 20th century, however, would see the beginnings of manufacturers’ experiments with engine displacement, valvetrain layouts/profiles and other features of high-performance auto building. At the beginning of the century, the philosophy behind supercar construction revolved around the car’s most fascinating and volatile part, the engine. With the front engine/rear-drive layout becoming standard by the early 1900s, the engine was also the most accessible part of the car, and so the “exotic” automakers of that time, such as Italy’s Isotta-Fraschini and England’s Napier, concentrated on building the most cubic inches possible. Because engine size was the number one issue with these European automakers, they strove to build engines with displacement ratings considered by the Petersen Museum exhibit to be “astronomical.” For example, Isotta-Fraschini’s KM series, in production from 1911-14, featured a 10.6 liter, or 640 cubic-inch engine, while one of their German competitors, Benz (Soon to become Mercedes-Benz in 1926), built their supercar, the Blitzen Benz, which featured a significantly larger, 21.5 liter four-cylinder.
The emphasis on large engine displacement also added a dynamic to supercar construction that would become characteristic of supercars until the introduction of Ferrari in the 1950s: a long nose relative to the length of the entire body, which became a social symbol to consumers of wealth and prestige. Little known to most of those consumers, the trend toward massive engine displacement, a technical attribute, was the cause of the front-end layout that would become associated with high-dollar automotive. But that very trend toward cubic inches in the world of exotics would gradually become diminished by the 1950s, when a prominent, Italian automaker named Enzo introduced the Western world of that time to the world of competitive, Euro-style motorsport.
In fact, it was Ferrari, with the manufacturers’ introduction in the ‘50s, who manifested the very concept that an exotic sports car can be small geometrically, and still be labeled formally as a “supercar.” Ferrari models were extremely small by the American standards of the time, but the automaker was hell-bent on eliminating size as the determining factor in supercar construction. Inspiring Aston-Martin to eventually build the DB3-S and the DBR-1, while also inspiring Maserati’s construction of the 300 and 450-S, Ferrari was the first mainstreamed automaker to market the exotic sports car as a street-legal variant of a racing capsule, using, of course, track-derived technology and styling cues.
But the Euro market’s innovation in the size-to-performance relationship of the industry has become characteristic of supercar construction in general, as Petersen Automotive’s exhibit on supercars reveals. The modern definition of “supercar” is one that exceeds in both horsepower and aesthetics, but the museum’s timeline of the Euro-American auto market reveals, on both sides of the Atlantic, that there is a continuing evolution within the art and craft of quality body design, and premium powertrain/drivetrain design.1
- Sal Alaimo Jr., B. A. S. J. A.
