DIRTY STUFF

IT’S been almost 140 years since a powered automobile appeared, and changes to the basic chassis since then have been remarkable. The early builders first used stuff that was easy to get and cheap: wood. Then, after the termites got bad and engines became heavier and more powerful, they wrapped steel plate around the wooden rails. A notable exception was the advanced ‘Vis-à-vis’ runabout by French maker De Dion-bouton, which followed bicycle practice and built its chassis out of steel tubing. From there, designers worked out that if they made their wood-plated rails out of heavier metal, they could ditch the wood, and that’s how the modern ladder chassis began.

The first major change to the traditional method of creating cars – where they whacked a metal body on top of two chassis rails and added suspension and mounts for engine and transmission – was by Lancia in 1921. The brilliant Italians designed the long-wheelbase Lambda to be powered by a small V4. And instead of a conventional chassis, Lancia made the body strong enough through unitary construction to carry the stresses and weight of a normal road car. The Lambda was light and fast and 25 years ahead of its time. It was a huge success, and Lancia sold heaps.

There was a minor change made by the German DKW firm about the same time, which got rid of twin chassis rails and instead bolted its wood-framed bodies onto a single square steel tube. Being only powered by a 30ci two-stroke twin-cylinder engine, this new method worked well. And the VW ‘People’s Car’, introduced in 1938, also diversified its chassis construction by stamping out a flat metal platform strong enough to carry a conventional body.

Very quietly, General Motors had been experimenting with unitary construction in the US after World War II, designing a chassisless six-passenger car to be powered by a new 2.1-litre six-cylinder engine. Maybe GM got nervous about releasing this scaled-down sedan to the American market, so instead it sent this almost radical car to Australia. That was the 48-215 Holden ‘FX’, subsidised by the Australian Government, and we all know how that went.

The next change was by Lotus in the UK, which in 1954 came out with a front-engined, basic lightweight sports car built with a tube-steel spaceframe reinforced by riveted and glued stressed aluminium panels. That made a lot of money for Lotus, so in 1957 bossman Colin Chapman went radical again, using the new material of glass-reinforced plastic to make the world’s first unitary construction coupe, the Lotus Elite. No steel chassis anywhere. Grunt came from a 1.2litre Coventry Climax aluminium four, but the Elite had problems with the Chapman strut rear suspension, which often broke during race conditions.

The next innovative Lotus, the Elan, went down the Dkw-pioneered road, with a single, centrally located, ‘backbone’ steeltube chassis, strong enough to cope with the 130bhp of Ford’s twin cam-converted four-cylinder Cortina engine. Then, a much smaller UK company, Rochdale, created the Grp-constructed Olympic sports sedan, which was released during 1961 and sold in limited numbers with various English engines for years.

In the US of A, the car-buying public of the late 1950s wanted smaller and lighter cars, and this sparked the compact revolution. GM, Ford and Chrysler broke away from the conventional ladder-frame chassis that they were making for their larger, V8-engined offerings and went to unitary construction instead. The result was Ford’s Falcon, Chrysler’s R-series Valiant, and Chevrolet’s Corvair. The first two had pedestrian sixcylinder engines up front, but the Corvair went rear-engine, with an air-cooled flat-six. This could have made an impact on the American market, but Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe At Any Speed, took aim at rear-engined cars like the VWS, and this bad press quickly killed off the radical Corvair. But the engines were great for re-powering Kombis!

Then, in 1962, Colin Chapman did it again. Lotus unveiled a new Formula One race car; the 25. Smaller and slimmer than the competitive opposition, this lightweight open-wheeler was basically a riveted-together aluminium tube with a hole for the lay-down driver and a space for the rear-mounted 1.5-litre Coventry Climax V8. Of course, this new race car was hugely successful.

These days, F1 cars come with oven-moulded carbonfibre tubs, and this may be the way we build our future electric road cars.

DESIGNERS WORKED OUT THAT IF THEY MADE THEIR WOOD-PLATED RAILS OUT OF HEAVIER METAL, THEY COULD DITCH THE WOOD, AND THAT’S HOW THE MODERN LADDER CHASSIS BEGAN