The Classic Car Adventure

Driving Through History on the Road to Nostalgia

Lance Cole

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Transport
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473896413
• eBook ISBN: 9781473896437
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Nothing is new under the sun and classic cars books come and go. But here, instead of a heavy, large, glossy book of classic car images and details destined to stay on a shelf, is something new. This book is designed to be read as a companion, a book that can go in the car or on a 'plane, and which can be read in full, or dipped into anywhere for a classic car fix. Old stories and new details are presented and cover all eras of our cars. Gathered here is a compilation of the author's published and unpublished adventures and opinions about the design and the driving of some of the greatest cars in motoring history. From 'vintagent' to 'modern classic', pristine to oily-rag, up hill, down dale and across continents, award-winning motoring author, designer and serial classic car owner, Lance Cole, charts the great classic car enthusiasm in a series of engaging essays about cars, car design and the men that made the motor industry. From tales of Malcolm Sayer to Bedelia, and of BMW, Jaguar, Bugatti and Porsche, to tales of old Saabs and rusty Citroens, classic car life is here. Erik Carlsson, Jacques Gerin, Giovanni Michelotti and Innes Ireland are just a few of the names that can be found in these pages. From design to driving, here is a book that is a classic car adventure.

1

Plastique Fantastique

Alpine-Renault – The Essence of Getting It Right

Inside the glittering blue 700kg Gallic glass-fibre shell, I had to admit I was truly scared. A ‘plastic’ car wrapped around a central steel chassis tube or beam, is rarely safe or crashworthy. The occupants sit outside the chassis strength and are exposed to frontal, side, rear, and overhead intrusion when glass-fibre comes to the crunch. But let’s not obsess on safety – well, not until we are lying in the hospital bed. All of which was miles from my mind as the Alpine Club of France gathered in Malestroit, Brittany and I joined them for lunch, a photo-session and a drive. Arrayed about me in a field were examples of the Alpine marque – true plastic fantastics.

In France this marque is Alpine (say it Alpeen), but in Britain, it is a Renaultbadged affair (Peugeot-Talbot owned the name Alpine) and so often under the misnomer of Renault-Alpine, but we must call them Alpine-Renaults. They existed as blue, red, or yellow-hued moments of French design flair, something magnificent and confident that embraced the new. But on the day I encountered them in Brittany, nearly all these Alpines were wonderful iridescent blue and ranged from A108 to A610. Red and yellow variants populated the Alpine gathering, but it was the bluehued A110s laid out on the summer grass amid the smell of fine food and French enthusiasm that delivered the moment. Alpine is clearly revered, and the Renault bit is the sub-culture. Alpine in its own right is something far more important to the French than others realise. This is no marketing con, no ad-speak brand mirage. There really is something special about these cars and the devotion they inspire. I accepted the offer of a drive without really knowing what I was in for.

Open the flimsy door, struggle down and in, park yourself behind the cluster of dials and sniff the smell of plastic, leather, oil, alloy, and sweat; it’s just like being strapped into a Second World War fighter. The car (and its drive) is communicative, the way it is in a Lotus, an old Porsche, or one of those early Saab’s Erik Carlsson rallied. On start-up, the noise is amazing, and the fear is palpable; there’s no safety cage here. No matter; the drive is the thing. The little blue Renault Alpine A110 Berlinette wheezed, shook, rattled, and came to life. I moved off gingerly, creeping through the gears and, the car hated it.

‘Stop poncing about and floor it!’ said my tutor.

So I did, and we were instantly launched into a warp factor experience as the scenery came careering towards us.

‘Don’t brake!’ came the warning. ‘Steer, bloody steer! Change gear, add power, now!’

I did and the lightweight plastic blancmange responded and hurled itself down the lane. I caught the oh-so-slightly tail wagging car with a tiny hint of opposite lock, then we were off again, power back on. There was plenty of feedback – the car seems to talk to you telepathically and I learned that it will let you know when the swing-axled, engine-hung-out the-back, rear end is about to let go in readiness for a bigger moment. The front brakes felt light and snappy, but not as useless as they are in a Lancia Monte Carlo. The steering seemed to feel every angle and aspect of the road passing under the tyres. Although the car bobbed and nodded, the front-end never went ‘light’ to a point where I did not know what it or I was doing. All told, this was obviously a superb tool; the little car simply flew along, skimming across the tarmac like a round flat pebble scythed across water. Hell, it was fast. You could set it up for the road ahead and sweep from bend to bend, it was so utterly involving.

Just for moment, delusions of competence pervaded my mind. Here was a car you had to take by the scruff of the neck. It needed a firm, determined hand, otherwise it might bite. And this was on a dry road. What was the Alpine like on ice? What on earth was this thing like plunging down an ice-strewn ‘Col’ in France or Italy? Imagine that at night for the pucker factor of all time. This drive reminded me of my first attempt to fly a really powerful single-engined aircraft. Utterly frightening, yet at the same time enthralling, addictive and very rewarding if you mastered the beast; but you must master the thing, or it would do for you. Indeed, in the A110 you could die quite easily on ice on a mountain road with precipitous drops lying just beyond the gutter. Clearly talent, talent far beyond my own, was required.

The sound was amazing, the sensations rushed at me. This one had 1442cc and went with vitesse. Road-going production cars are not like this anymore. You would have to drive a rally car to get these same reward of sensations. I got out of the dart-like, A110, with its ability to change direction like a wasp, feeling hot, sweaty, utterly wrecked and deafened but also elated. This was a true, experience, it was real driving – of the type that is so fast receding from view in today’s cars. A drive I will cherish.

Renault (and Lotus) discovered early on that glass-fibre or GRP was light, as light as you wanted to make it. Lotus abandoned a ‘safer’ glass-fibre monocoque with separate ‘crush zones’ when it gave up on the advanced, multi-panelled and reinforced body of its first composite car in the Elite and reverted to a single-piece moulded hull for the Elan and subsequent models. Knowledge of composite bodies had stemmed from experiments in building glass-fibre bodies for the Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf 109 – early iterations of moulded plastics technology; the Horten brothers had built a ‘plastic’ glider and, a plastic composite jet fighter so advanced that it was seized by American forces in April 1945 and towed across Germany and France to be shipped back to America before VE day! Soon the new plastics-based stuff was all the rage for making curved forms in aircraft, yachts and cars. Daimler mirrored Chevrolet’s original GRP Corvette by building the SP250 Dart, a ‘plastic’ car so floppy that the doors opened on corners and bracing had to be added. At Standard Triumph, Sir John Black ordered the building of a glass-fibre Triumph Herald prototype in the 1960s with an eye to the overseas market where cars were built up from completely-knock-down-kit (CKD) construction deals. The Turks built an Ogle-designed glass-fibre Anadol – a Cortina Mk1 in plastic drag! So resin, plastic, glass-fibre or GRP cars were not solely from Lotus or TVR. And the French were at it early on – before these cars were made.

Perhaps the earliest recorded attempt to physically ‘mould’ new technology for car body making purposes did not come from Germany or Britain, but from France, as early as 1926 from Carrosseries Nagal of Bordeaux. The Nagal concern of Monsieur Gustave Carde exhibited at the 20th Annual Salon d’Automobile in Paris in October 1926 to demonstrate their coachwork ‘Moulees’ – a ‘fibro’ moulded complete one-piece body for a Ford Sedan. Fast-forward to Bakelite in the 1930s and the moulded glass-fibre plastic stuff would soon be seized upon in the 1940s by aircraft builders. But Fibro of 1926 makes the plasticised Duroplast of the Trabant body construction seem new! Today, composites are all the rage, yet our tools for examining them as they age and deteriorate are minimal and antediluvian, yet we still stick simple ‘plastic’ tail fins on airliners and await the inevitable.

Over twenty years ago, the last Alpine-Renault, an A610 model, rolled off the Dieppe production line. Now, there is a new Alpine from Renault; in between, the company produced some amazing cars including the mid-engined R5 Turbo, the Renaultsport Spider two-seaters in the Alpine tradition and a rash of tweaked-up Clios including a Williams variant and a mid-engined V6 of ‘widow-maker’ threat, as well as the A310, GTA and A610. But they all lie in the afterwards and firstly, we need to visit the before.

Imagine a Renault 4; remove the boxy body, strap a thin glass-fibre jelly mould shell to it, and throw in tuned suspension, engine and brakes. Then evolve it into something more powerful, but just as light. The result, via the first iteration of such tuning – the Renault-based 747cc engined A106 of 1955-59 – was the Renault Alpine; nothing, by the way, to do with a British Rootes car of the same name.

This happened in 1955 and the Alpine A110 – or the Ah cent dix – is what emerged by 1960, when a Dieppe Renault dealer’s son had spent some time rallying Renault 4CVs and then tinkering with stock Renault parts and the new-fangled glass-fibre stuff, with help from the Chappe brothers who were pioneering its use in France. The car’s creative genius was Jean Rédelé and so good was his work that Renault soon absorbed the project under its brand, buying the Alpine name in 1973. Rédelé was the son of a long-established Renault dealership owner and Emile Rédelé senior had (latterly) been mechanic to the 1906 Renault works driver Ferenc Szisz – who had won the 1906 grand prix at La Sarthe – better known as Le Mans.

Decades later, the Rédelé family turned out tuned-up Renaults as Alpines (Alpine was founded in 1955) and the secret to the Alpine was this; it was a bit Porsche 356-like in layout, but blessed for want of a better word with four, not six cylinders of the later Porsche 911 – its main rally competitor. The French car’s advantage lay in the lightweight build. It was named Alpine after the icy rally known as the Coupé des Alpes. The Alpine was to become the Renault brand’s latter entry into modern motorsport, so it’s fair to say that the little plastic car made history. The newer Renaultsport Clio 197 model had some plastic panels too. Little did anyone know that at Le Mans, in 2016, an Alpine-Nissan badged car would win its class – Renault owning a share in Nissan being a later curiosity.

The first A106, Michelotti-styled and using a Renault chassis, won the 1956 Mille Miglia in 43bhp in a ‘plastic’ body styled for a car Renault failed to truly productionalise – a two-door fast-backed coupé designed to lure American tastes of the ‘Fifties. But it set a fashion for glass-fibre and lightweight, rear-engined power. Soon there came the definitive A108 and A110 as special-bodied Renault Dauphin-based developments.

Rear-engined, with the GRP body strapped to a central chassis tube, tuned, with go-kart chuckability, yet also fragile, the Renault A110 boasted great traction and an aerodynamic Giovanni Michelotti-designed body, whose carefully shaped rear end was designed to meet the needs of airflow efficiency and engine cooling.

Renault would buy Alpine as a brand and running motor sport entity from the Rédelé family in 1973. yet the brand name was retained for obvious reasons.

Close your eyes and imagine Cibie headlamps slashing through the dark; smell the ice and snow and hear the howl of that tiny engine; watch a French racing blue-hued shark, sweep past in a flash. You’re on the Monte Carlo Rally, and the A110 is scything to victory circa 1970-something; Jean-Claude Andruet and Ove Andersson take the victor’s podium. An A110 came third too – an Alpine 1-2-3. So, an A110 had won the 1973 World Rally Championship on 1647cc. Decades later in 1994 an A110 won the RAC Britannia Rally.

From 1963 to 1977, with increasingly bigger engines going from the 954cc, 55bhp original via 1.1 litres up to the 1.6-litre unit that came from the Renault 16TX, the A110 turned into a 125mph-plus speed sledge. There was even a rare four-seater version. A blue, aerodynamic Alpine ‘special’ with a front end seemingly cribbed form a Ferrari GTO and a rear Kamm spoiler grafted on, shot round Le Mans in the 1970s and Alpine would continue to build Le Mans cars and to win. In 1978, Jean-Pierre Jabouille and Patrick Depailler drove their yellow Alpine A443 V6 Turbo to what looked like a certain victory in the twenty-four hours event that was Alpine’s focus – hopefully rewarding the massive amount of money Renault had thrown at trying to dominate Le Mans. Yet circumstance and controversy would ruin the day when an engineering tweak designed to preserve the engine’s life by reducing its power, rendered it broken beside the road and victory denied for the A443 – and handed not to Porsche but to a fellow Alpine-Renault A442B driven by Didier Pironi sitting under an aerodynamic perspex canopy that added speed to the open-cockpit car.

Only Porsche’s 917-derived 936 Le Mans cars seemed to equal the audacity of the A443 ‘long-tail’ Alpine A443 design for 1978. The dynamic team management of Renault’s Gerard Larousse – the true driving force of the attempt – which included seizing British driver Derek Bell from the certainties of Porsche’s Le Mans team, Alpine, was a huge success.

Back with the Alpine road-going iteration, with tuning tweaks taken from the Gordini and Mignot outfits, the original plastic fantastic had grown into a hallmark brand that was also manufactured in Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Bulgaria. From a 1.3 Gordini, to a special-edition 1.8-litre factory car the Alpine provided many with a rush of speed and patriotism. The car won the Monte three times, took the 1973 World Rally Championship and was placed in 2,000 other events. Fettled Alpines appeared with boot lids propped open to allow the engine bay heat to escape and with heavy roll-cages somehow fixed to the ultra-thin shell. In Britain, they found favour with privateers with names such as Hollier, Coleman, Roger Clark and Pat Moss – Sir Stirling’s sister and Erik Carlsson’s wife.

The records say that nearly 8,000 A110s were made, but it is the pure French factory cars that are really worth big money now, especially real race cars. A110s also exist as non-French ‘copies’ (including the Mexican ‘DinAlpine’), although most of us would be unlikely to turn an A110 down just because it was Spanish or of other origin. ‘Real’ Dieppe-built A110s (with thinner and therefore lighter glass-fibre) with history now sell for £50,000+ and are rising fast. .

But the A110 was not the end of the Alpine story. Renault turned it into a 1980s and 1990s supercar – larger, less nimble, yet still rear-engined, made of plastic and with a power-to-weight ratio that made it very quick. These were the last of the Alpine line as the A310 (from 1972-1984), and the later GTA (1984-1990) and 1990-1994 built A610s with its pop-up headlamps. They were wedge-shaped supercars derived from related parts that partially side-stepped the purist principles of their antecedents, yet which still gave Renault something special to play with. They even had floor-mounted pedals, racing seats, and the point and shoot abilities of their forebears. The gearbox and its change quality remained close and slick, the handling, particularly at the rear was safely planted – no swing-axles here! The front suspension was finely tuned and the steering ‘weighted-up’ if you ploughed into a bend too fast.

The A310 – no relation to the Airbus of that name – took on the Porsche 911 and A310s four-cylinders gave way to a six-cylinder engine in 1976, yet it remained an acquired taste. The subsequent GTA model, had a CD of 0.28 – at that time the lowest drag figure for any production car in the world.

Alpine-Renault had really thought about these cars and today they remain a ‘sleeper’, a fantastic modern classic, still cheap, still a secret gem forgotten by most, except those in the know. I have always adored the GTA and at the time of writing, suggest that it is a sure fire investment as a classic car-slow-burner, but investment is not what we about here; it is the design and the driving of the Alpine that captivates.

The last Alpine-Renault GTA Turbos into the British market were all painted a rather dull maroon hue, some with black roofs. They were ‘Le Mans’ special editions and twenty-six right-hand-drive cars were sent across the Channel. They had a douze soupape/twelve valve 2458cc (latterly expanded to 2,975cc in the A610) and the ubiquitous Garrett T3 turbocharger bolted to the narrow-angle 90-degree V-6 engine of Peugeot-Renault-Volvo ancestry that had been used in the mainstream Renault 25 range. The result was 200bhp at a 5700rpm in a car weighing only 1180kg. Later cars hit 250bhp. So the top speed of 150mph/241kph and 0-60 mph/0-95kph of 6sec, was of the Porsche-eating variety and in its latter version that hit 165mph/265kmh. Turbo-lag was minimal compared to the 911 930 Turbo series and the drive was simply exceptional – hugely ‘responsive’. Yet if you forked out £24,000 for one when new, today’s low values seem odd.

In the original 1960s-era Alpines we have a real classic car; in the later GTA Alpines, we have something accessible as a modern classic that delivers a true driving experience for a fraction of the price of a Porsche 911. You might agree that these are some of the finest classic cars – old and new and that they reek of engineering, design, and above all, of driving. If you are a true car enthusiast, surely you cannot, not ‘get’ what A110 to GTA (and the A610 it morphed into) are and represent.

Alpine built 251, A106s, made 348, A108s, and 7,879 of the A110 – the ‘essential’ Alpine. Yet A310 sold 11,616 examples, GTA 6,054 (including the first-ever right-hand-drive Alpine) and only 818 A610s were produced. Ref 1

Hail the humble Renault turned into a legend; cars that make a Lotus Esprit or a Porsche 911 look a touch less unique. For me, and for many, GTA/A610 may have been one of the last, pre-drive-by wire, mechanical experiences of the modern age and A110 may have been one of the greatest moments in 1960s realisation of the car as a driver’s device. Suddenly, all these Alpines really are important cars, not just vital French cars.

Renault, under Carlos Ghosn as chairman, has realised that there is more kudos and cash to be made from the legend of the Alpines and the bleu and jaune eras of ‘Alpeen’, so there is a new Alpine concept – the ‘Vision’ that is, we are told, going to launch as a new Alpine-badged production car in 2017; styled to ape the original A110, unlike the fattening of the Porsche 911, Renault’s new Alpine remains trim and chuckable – but safe and sound from a structural standpoint. According to Renault’s Vision project’s lead designer, Antony Villain, the new Alpine is what an evolution of the Alpines might have looked like if the brand had not withered. He is correct, because the Vision and the new Alpine that it will become, is, thankfully, not a retro-pastiche, but a nicely organic shape seemingly grown from an A110 cutting with a bit of GTA thrown in; all the elements are there in a ‘just right’ package and it is a ‘real’ design and, importantly, it is not fat like a 911 has become.

However, Renault had better make sure the new Alpine drives like a mechanical device, for if it does not, and feels like a fly-by-wire marketing con wrapped around a halo of past exploits that ultimately fails to deliver real driving reality, Alpine will stay dead, and Monsieur Rédelé may well become even more a legend in his own Gallic lunchtime. But it was Renault that gave us the 16TX, the Renault 5 Turbo from the prosaic Renault 5 (Le Car in the USA), the Clio Williams, Clio V6, the Renault Sport Spider (built at the Alpine works in Dieppe) and the Megane 275 RS Trophy/Cup, so we know that they can do it. But can Alpine come back from the dead? If only, then that might encourage Fiat to do the same for Lancia. Could we then see Alpines competing against Lancias on the world’s rally stages? What joy that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Plastique Fantastique
• 2 Lancia Lamentation
• 3 Rear-Engined Entities
• 4 Madame Itier’s Bugatti and a Carrossier Conundrum
• 5 Malcolm Who?
• 6 Sydney Allard’s Towering Achievements
• 7 Riley to Rootes
• 8 The Porsche Passion
• 9 Old Saabs and Old Sods
• 10 Neckarsulm’s Neophyte
• 11 Michelotti: A Triumph of Design
• 12 Fiat’s ‘Fake’ Ferrari
• 13 Citroën GS
• 14 Mazda Cosmo
• 15 Leyland’s Antipodean Efforts
• 16 Volvo-Itis
• 17 Rover’s Revenge
• 18 Unsung Heroes
• 19 Innes Ireland
• 20 The Last Chance Saloon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate section