lat fours, inboard brakes and front-wheel drive

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

David R. Johnson writes "I do wonder though whether any of the cars John
mentioned combined a longitudinal OHC flat-4 with inboard brakes and front-
wheel drive."

No, I'm afraid not quite. 

The inboard brakes with front-wheel drive is fairly easy. The L-29 Cord did
it, as I believe the Ruxton did also, and as did some but not all of the
Miller 91 ci f.w.d. Indianapolis cars. And the BSA, as did the f.w.d. Alvis
Sprint cars of 1925, Grand Prix cars of 1926-27, and 1928-30 sports cars. In
my earlier post I had referred to the six-cylinder boxer f.w.d. sports car
which Ben Gregory was driving in Kansas City in the fifties; I do not know
with any certainty whether it had inboard brakes, but Ben Gregory had been
running f.w.d. racing cars, powered by Curtis and Hispano Suiza aircraft
engines, on dirt tracks around the midwest in 1918-1922, and when C.W. Van
Ranst designed the f.w.d. inboard-brake L-29 Cord in 1928 Cord had to settle
out of court with Gregory for infringing his patents - which leads me to
assume a fair possibility that Gregory was using inboard brakes, or at least
knew about them. It always had logic going for it; apart from the unsprung
weight issue, the linkages (with mechanical brakes) or plumbing (with
hydraulics) would be simpler and less vulnerable inboard.

Incidentally, some post-war Mercedes competition cars used inboard front
brakes, even though the cars were r.w.d.; Daimler Benz thought that the
unsprung weight advantages warranted the added weight of driveshafts and
universals.

As for longitudinal OHC flat four f.w.d. cars in Italy, Antonio Fessia, who
had been Technical Director of Fiat since 1936, left to join Cemsa where he
designed the Cemsa Caproni F11, a forward-engine 1100 cc flat four f.w.d.
shown at the 1947 Turin Motor Show, twenty-four years before the Alfasud's
debut in the same show. In 1952 Fessia rejoined Fiat and designed Fiat's first
f.w.d. car, the NSU-Fiat F03, with an air-cooled two-cylinder boxer. In 1955
he joined Lancia under the same Vittorio Jano who had been unceremoniously
dumped as a has-been by Alfa in 1937. After Jano left Lancia to rejoin Ferrari
(yet another Alfa has-been) Fessia developed the Lancia Flavia, a forward
engine flat-four front-wheel-drive car introduced in the 1960 Turin show,
eleven years before the Alfasud. The prototypes had inboard brakes but the
production brakes were at the wheels; the engine had hemispherical combustion
chambers but only two cams like the Alfa V-6, and it was never smaller than
1500 cc, so it was not an exact parallel to the Alfasud. 

The Flavia was a larger and certainly more expensive car than the Alfasud; it
and its sister Fulvia were in more direct competition with the Giulias, as the
Appia had been with the Giuliettas. I will steer clear of any invidious
Alfa/Lancia comparisons, leaving that for others. I won't even mention the
date of the Aurelia GT, with its 2.5 liter V6, transaxle, DeDion, inboard
brakes, and sublime body. 

David wrote, of the Alfasud, "However, I applaud Alfa's seemingly constant
ability to avoid the obvious or commonplace and choose drivetrain layouts
which combine performance with packaging, and make you wonder why few if any
volume producers use them." I join him to a degree in that applause, but was
more impressed by Alfa's seemingly constant ability to refine modern
expressions of ideal classic solutions. Different emphasis, but both highly
commendable.

John H. 
Raleigh, N.C.

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