EP44: More Elegant Before Restoration; ‘25 Pebble Winner, the Tulipwood Hispano-Suiza

Jon discusses the fascinating history of the 1924 Hispano-Suiza “Tulipwood,” the recent winner at the Pebble Beach Concours. Despite initially not recognizing the car, he provides an in-depth overview of its background, from its commission by fighter pilot Andre Dubonnet to its construction out of mahogany, contrary to its ‘Tulipwood’ nickname. He elaborates on its various restorations, particularly by Don Williams and the Blackhawk Museum, highlighting the debate between historical accuracy and aesthetic enhancements in car restoration. Jon also touches on other notable cars at the Pebble Beach event, such as a Jaguar C-Type racer and an XK120, and shares anecdotes about the display and appreciation of classic cars.

Notes

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

J missed it on the field
Andre Dubbonnet
Rodney Walkerley’s book on the Targa
The Tulipwood now
The Tulipwood at the ‘24 Targa Florio
The Tulipwood as it appeared at the Blackhawk
Extended fenders, copper fittings and gold wheels
Don Williams and Ken Behring
The Blackhawk aesthetic of the eighties
J believes the inauthentic, Blackhawk form was more elegant than the original and current black wheel, fender extension less design
Preservation class Jaguar C-Type – that contradiction in terms, an original racing car
Preservation class Jaguar XK120 – 1043 miles
Perusing the Cobra class with a guy who looks after and prepared one of the cars we were looking at

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider hailing from California. He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day. Good morning, good afternoon. It is John Summers, the Motoring historian brief vignette. This one, just wanting to offer a little overview on this year’s Pebble Beach Concor winner. The Hispano swr. Tulipwood. Gonna open with a confession. Saw the car on the field. Didn’t recognize it. Didn’t recognize it as a winner.

Didn’t recognize the fact that I know the [00:01:00] car. So let’s talk a little bit about that and and why the car won. So it’s a 1924. It was commissioned by a guy called Andre Dubnet. I don’t know what kind of a drink it is. I guess it was bigger years ago in France. It’s like an after dinner kind of dubnet cognac.

If you’re the pebble beaches, they know it like it was Budweiser or or PBR. Or, or ley bitter if you’re from Northern England kind of thing. But it’s not quite, I mean, so, so Dubnet commissioned it, I guess Dubnet background was, he was a fighter pilot in the First World War and those early aircraft, it was all about being able to fly higher and longer.

Than anyone else. So it was all about whose engine was best. And the guys that built those engines were BMW. There was Rolls Royce, there was Damer Benz, and there was his Spano Swer. And the guy that worked for his Spano Swer, the key figure is this guy, [00:02:00] mark ett. So the company is one of these companies a bit like Bugatti, where it was based in one country, but the founder was somewhere else and ’cause of the war and revolution and, and all of that.

And the company survives now the stork motif that is his spano Suza that survives today making high quality machine tools. So Berg, it was Swiss, but they set up in Spain or something like that. And I, I don’t know where the French connection came in. It may have been Dubnet money, but the point here is that Dubnet used wealth from the booze to go most racing after the excitement of being a fighter pilot in the first World War, it ended and obviously, what were you gonna build the car out of?

Well, the best bloody engine. From the plains, right? So that was his baro, SWER, and Burke. And you know, since we well know that for every 10 pounds you save, you gain a horsepower. The thought was that they would build the car out of wood, tulip wood, you say, well, [00:03:00] actually no. It just sort of looked that color and that’s what people call it now.

This is a very important detail on the car because I learned just today reading about it that it was actually mahogany. That the car was made from. I mean, the point is right, the, the body weighs 160 pounds, so Dubnet races finishes reasonably well. I want to say fourth, I’ve not done my preparation, but finishes fourth in the 1924 Target, Florio.

Now if you know anything about the target florio, you’ll know that, you know, I mean, I drove the course in an Alpha 1 4 7 rental car, and it was all second and third gear stuff. So how you got on in a car that had the same wheel base as like a speed six Bentley, like how that was many get on on the mountains of Sicily.

I’m not really sure, but it did do reasonably well. I, as I say, I, I, I wanna say it finished fourth. Now I have. Rodney W’s book on the tag Florio. He was a [00:04:00] writer for the Motorist and he wrote a book about the tag Florio years ago, and in that book, there is a picture of the car competing in the event. Now, for me, at the time when I saw that photo, when I first got the book, it was stunning to me because you see, I met the tulip wood.

In 2000, and I would say six, 2007, when I first visited the Black Hawk Museum in California, now the Black Hawk Museum was put together by a guy called Don Williams and another guy. Ken Baring, I can’t remember how Ken made his money, but Ken was friends with Don, and Don helped Ken collect the right kind of cars, and, and Don was very, very well known within the Pebble Beach community.

But what Don did was what they did in the eighties, what Bill Har. Did and, and what these West coast guys did, which was they, they took cars that nobody cared about that were derelict and they [00:05:00] restored them, but they restored them to be the best that they could possibly be, so that in that car show at Pebble Beach, they could win best in show.

So that meant consulting their wives often about what color combination was best. You didn’t worry about authenticity. It meant that. If originally a normal steel screw had been used, but now you could use a chrome one or a bronze one and it might look better. Well, that’s what you did. In other words, it was about making the cars look great rather than about making the cars authentically correct.

So I’m gonna include a picture of the tulip wood as it originally was. In fact, I may even use it as the thumbnail as it was in 2008 when I found it, certainly not as it originally was. Let’s make that clear as it was in 2008, when it was in the Black Hawk Museum, 2000, you know, early two thousands, it had gold wheels, it had those fenders, trailing fenders put [00:06:00] on the end of it.

Put on the end of the fenders. And actually, if you looked at the car under the lights of the Black Hawk, the body actually looked less bright than the fenders and those gold wheels. Now the whole thing about the Black Hawk was that one evening in Geneva after dinner. Ken Baring and Don Williams were walking together.

It was the eighties. They were talking about cars. And if you’ve ever been to Geneva, you’ll know that there’s the fountain in the center of town and after you’ve had the fondue, you want to like walk a little bit and there’s Porsches on the street to look out, but there’s also shops with watches in. So they were looking in the window with watches and they were talking about the watches, and they were amusing at the idea.

Could you display cars like jewelry? And they came up with a notion that you could build a museum that was like that. So the Black Hawk is all this black marble and the cars jump off this black marble. Pretty impressive concepts. Now, for us docents, it was kind of annoying because we like to do things like if you [00:07:00] add a car from the 1890s, you like to show, you know, the manic Kidd with the dress.

And that really made it come alive for the school kids. And that definitely wasn’t. Ken and Don’s mantra of the car, like a piece of jewelry twinkling in the window of a Geneva jewelry shop like it was a Breitling or a a Patite Philippe, if I pronounced that correctly, which I probably haven’t. So this is the ethos of the his Spana Swer.

Tulip wood. It’s not really tulip wood, it’s a fighter pilot’s racing car. But how serious was as a racing car, who really knows? I mean, I, I, well, I’ve not dug into the history of it. Maybe you know the pebble description would have it, but the point is that in the 1980s. The way the Tule wood was, was in hearts.

I don’t think Don did it. I think some other guy did it in the sixties or the seventies. But the, the point is that the car was gussied up. It was made to look in the eyes of the [00:08:00] Don Williams era. People better than original. So the car that won Pebble Beach and the car that you’ll be familiar with had black wheels and it had nothing.

No crazy trailing fenders did it? It just had the torpedo body. And that prompted me to want to do this pot because I actually believe the car was more elegant in the form that I saw it in, in the Black Hawk, in the form that I saw it in, in the Black Hawk with the bright lights and the gold wheels and the fenders and elevated it.

It was as the, I read a quote where the owner had said, when I acquired the car, it was a piece of furniture. It was, it was a piece of furniture. Are you kidding me? Now it’s like a car. Is he gonna take it to the Monterey Historics and race it next year alongside the Ragtime Races? No, he is not. It’s a piece of furniture now, except now it doesn’t have the fenders and the gold wheels, and it’s.

It’s less Shazam for sure. Is it [00:09:00] less elegant? You might argue it’s more elegant. It’s more original looking now, but you know, in the pod that we recorded earlier today, Ollie and I, Ollie amusingly used a parallel between a pebble car and the Fox Mustang. And he said, you know, if I take the pony wheels off and if I put American racing wheels on the car is more elegant ’cause it looks better, but it’s less elegant ’cause it’s less original.

So which is it? Well, it’s a great point, isn’t it? And it’s a point which pervades directly to this car ’cause it looked better with the gold wheels. I rarely agree with Don Williams. Don Williams once stood up at the Blackhawk Museum and talked about how he liked shiny cars and how he didn’t like crap.

And I’ve always, ever since then thought to myself, well, Don, I love. Crap. I can’t consistently collect crap, partly because that’s what nobody else wants to do. I don’t need it to be shiny or glossy. I like it to be grubby and used and have the story. And if you’ve listened to my pods, you already know that about collector cars.

So what an interesting anecdote [00:10:00] in and around that show winning Hispano Swer. So just to wrap up, there are a couple of other cars on the show field that really do. Deserve every car deserves some attention. There are a couple more that I really wanna draw attention to. Firstly, a pair of jaguars that were in the post-war preservation class.

The first was a sea type racer that has a contiguous history, original paint. It was just a flat out, lovely, lovely old car. Like when do you see an original racing car? And this had a beautiful. Patina on it. It was kind of a metallic blue JSU, but plate on it. Lovely. The other one was, uh, an XK one 20, which had been sold new in la, driven to San Francisco, stored, taken outta storage, driven another 600 miles, and then put back in storage.

The car had 1,043 miles original. Well, he was like, but what would you do with it? It’s like, it’s like a hearing [00:11:00] yourself, speak back. ’cause I’m like, I don’t know. What would you do with it? I mean, look at it. It’s all you could do, isn’t it? I mean, it’s awesome. The smell and the whole like, I mean, after you’ve brought it to Pebble Beach, what do you do with it?

You can’t drive it. You can’t even change the tires without like hurting. What makes it special? Like it’s special. ’cause nothing’s ever happened to it. It’s that truly is a piece of furniture, isn’t it? There was, uh, a Cobra class as well. It was. Big block cars. It was like SC cars or something, like exactly what the, the designation was.

But it was lovely to look at that with, uh, one of my docent colleagues, or the guy who has been a docent with me in the past, one of the cobras on the field he prepared in his shop. So looking at. Cobras with somebody who basically has the skillset to be a pebble judge. Oh, that is really very pleasing as well.

And that is, of course, experience. It’s a very special thank you. Drive through.[00:12:00]

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