Grand Prix ACF 1907 Dieppe - FELICE NAZZARO -
Many different adjectives have been used to describe early 20th century Grand Prix cars, though all of them illustrate the ambient
gigantism. It is really difficult for us --owners of stable, comfortable, fast cars that brake and whose tires don’t burst every 20km –
to fully understand the efforts necessary to drive these monsters at an average speed of over 100km/h on rocky roads.
At 30km/h one
can break, at 60km/h one can speed down; but at 100km/h, one needs to be called Nazzaro to have any kind of control over the car.
The most impressive feature on the car is the size of its engine. Let’s not forget that an engine is before all a factory that creates a mixture
of air and gas, and, to sum up, the more mixture gets created, the bigger the explosion is, and therefore, the bigger the engine needs to be.
On that matter, two schools of thinking face each other: some consider an engine should be small and should run really fast; some consider an
engine should be huge and should run slower. For instance, a 2L engine running at 5000rpm produces as much mixture as a 10L engine running at
1000rpm! When nowadays the small engine solution is universally chosen, it needs a perfect mastery of a still developing science back in 1907:
metallurgy. A simple glimpse at this FIAT engine is enough to realize that 1907 is still the Bronze Age!
Our model is based on a model created by Pocher a few years back. From the original model, only the chassis, the axles, the crankcase, the gearbox (modified later) and the gas tank were reused. The rest was recreated using documents from the era. The wheels are made of maple, the floor is made of pear tree, the radiator, the steering wheel, the steering column and the gears are all in polished brass…The leather seats are padded and the hood is made of sheet metal. The exhaust is a “four in one”, identical to the original one.
Creation entirely designed and made at my workshop in France.
