1955 Talbot-Lago T26 GSL – Transition

1955 Talbot Lago T26 GSL

Vincent Van Gogh once asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” He certainly was not afraid to attempt things. Neither was Major Anthony Lago, the man responsible for some of the most significant French cars of the pre- and post-WWII era. It’s not often that an opportunity arises to get to know one of Lago’s special cars, but sometimes it happens—as it did last October, involving a very special Talbot Lago.

The Company

Talbot Lago was a company with a chronology of names for its cars that is sometimes difficult to follow. It was founded in 1902 when Lord Shrewsbury and Talbot, who had the finances, and Adolphe Clément, who had the auto manufacturing experience, combined to make automobiles in England and France. Clément was already building voiturettes, called Cléments, in France, so his cars were imported to England as Clément- Talbots while the English factory was being built. When production began in England in 1905, the cars were badged as Talbots. After WWI, the Earl lost interest in automobile manufacturing and sold the company to Darracq, which had been building cars in France since 1902. After a merger with Sunbeam in 1920, the company became known as Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq (STD) with factories at Wolverhamption in England and Suresnes in France.

The variety of names for their products was a problem for the company—they confused the public. The British cars were called Talbots (pronounced, TAL-butts), while the French cars were called Talbot-Darracqs (with that Talbot pronounced TAL-bow). Talbots were sold in France and Talbot-Darracqs were sold in England. The racecars were alternately called Talbots, Talbot Specials, and later, Sunbeams, with no regard to where they were built. Names, however, were just a symptom of the real problem at STD. Bad management was the real problem and, coupled with the Depression, resulted in STD entering receivership in 1934. In 1935, the Rootes Brothers, William and Reginald, bought the British holdings and subsequently merged them with Humber and Hillman. The French operation and the plant at Suresnes were left out of that purchase, but by then Anthony Lago had arrived in France and was running that operation.

The Man

Although he was best known for his time in France, Major Anthony Lago was Italian. Born in Venice in 1893, he studied at the Turin School of Engineering, and served in the Italian army in WWI, where he earned the rank of major. After the war, he moved to England where he first sold Isotta-Fraschinis then helped perfect the Wilson “self-changing” gearbox, while working for Armstrong-Siddeley. As a reward, he received the rights to foreign sales of the Wilson gearbox. In 1932, he was hired by Sunbeam-Talbot, the English part of Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq. While the English factory appeared to be working well, there were problems at the Suresnes plant where workers seemed apathetic and the public showed little interest in the cars being produced. Lago was sent to France in 1933 in the hope that he could improve the situation there. He was having some success, when Sunbeam-Talbot-Darracq was broken up. The Rootes group got the Wolverhampton factory and the rights to the Sunbeam and Talbot names. Lago took over the operations at Suresnes and began operating as the Société Anonyme Darracq cum Automobiles Talbot. Within 18 months, he had turned the factory around. His guideline for the cars his company would produce was speed and luxury, but his real passion was racing.

The Cars

Lago chose one of the cars already being manufactured as the platform that would transform the company and its products. The car was a Talbot-Darracq 3-liter Type K78 six-cylinder. Working in conjunction with his chief engineer, he designed and built a new high-performance head. Lago received a patent for this ingenious design that allowed an uncomplicated hemispherical head to be produced relatively inexpensively. The Ardun head developed much later by Zora Arkus-Duntov, and the Chrysler hemi head are very similar to the Talbot Lago design. With two Solex carburetors installed, this car produced 165-bhp at 4,200 rpm. It used a friction clutch and the Wilson pre-selector gearbox. That transmission would become standard on nearly all of Lago’s subsequent cars.

Lago had a strong belief that racing improved his road cars. In an article in Automobile Quarterly, Dave Emanuel quoted an interview with Lago that appeared in the Paris newspaper, L’Illustration:

“L’Illustration: Most French manufacturers are not interested in racing.

“Lago: You mean that they don’t care to lay out large sums of money for an uncertain return. The manufacturer who has conceived, designed and manufactured his own racecar, and in the process has discovered and corrected weak points at high speed, is the first to put the lessons he has learned in competition into effect in regular manufacturing. In one way or another, his experience brings profit to everyone….

“L’Illustration: Under what conditions do you think the racecar shows its usefulness?

“Lago: There must exist between the racecar and the vehicle sold to the client a very close and constant link. You are often tempted to break this link and put a monster on the track to establish prestige, which is the common element. I prefer to remain faithful to a principle I believe is basic or essential. Performance has true value only if you can bring out elements which will help the average driver.”

When he was ready to go racing, Lago successfully courted René Dreyfus to manage the race team. With Dreyfus as team leader, the outlook was good. The results in 1936 were promising while not great. In 1937, taking advantage of a rules change in France that allowed only sports cars in the French Grand Prix, Lago’s cars finished 1st through 3rd and 5th in that race, took 1st and 2nd in the Tourist Trophy at Donington in England, and won both the Marseilles and Tunis Grands Prix.

Lago employed an approach to racing that linked his racecars as closely as possible to his road cars. The 4½-liter race engines were detuned for the road cars; and his racers could be run with or without fenders and road equipment, so they served both in Grand Prix and sports car racing. Road car chassis went to the best of the coachbuilders for bodies—Figoni et Falaschi, Portout and Saoutchik, among others. The Talbot Lago automobiles that drove away from the coachbuilders shops were stunningly beautiful.

In an interview at the 2012 Amelia Island Concours, J. Willard Marriott, Jr. called his Talbot Lago the “ultimate” Art Deco car. Marriott’s car was the prototype for the Goutte D’eau (“Teardrop”) style Talbot Lagos, and it is an incredible automobile. This is a gorgeous car that screams Art Deco from every angle and in every detail. The bodies that came from Carrosserie Saoutchik were beautiful, but never subtle. The press in France began calling the Talbot Lago “the car that beguiles.”

Grand Prix rules were changed again after the 1937 season, and, by 1939, the state-subsidized Mercedes and Auto Union teams were so dominant that Lago broke his “close and constant link.” In order to compete with the German teams, not to mention the Italian Alfa Romeo and Maserati teams, Lago built a single-seat racecar. He still used the same 4-liter engine in his road cars—detuned of course—as he did in his racecars, and the basic chassis components were the same on both. It was David versus Goliath. Lago’s racecars had 210-hp and a top speed of 155 mph, while the Mercedes racers had 475-hp and could reach 190 mph. The only hope was the fuel economy of the Talbot Lagos as they were considerably less thirsty than their competition, improving track position by having fewer stops for fuel. Good racing results again bolstered the sales of Lago’s road cars.

In September 1939, France declared war on Germany. Lago turned his factory to war production, building aircraft engines. After the French surrender, the Suresnes factory was shut down. Because Lago was Italian, his factory was not seized by the Germans and was in much better condition to resume automobile production when the war ended. Lago was back racing in 1947 with considerable success—five wins in ’47, six in ’48, five in ’49 and ten in 1950, including breaking every record at Le Mans. Some of the top racers chose Talbot Lagos to race, including Louis Chiron, Louis Rosier, Raymond Sommer, “Phi-Phi” Entancelin, Harry Schell, Jose Froilan Gonzales and a new guy named Juan Manuel Fangio.

Racing rules were changed again in 1951, but this time to Lago’s disadvantage. As he had no 2-liter engine for the new formula, Talbot Lago ended its direct factory involvement in Grand Prix racing, though this departure from racing may have prolonged the life of his company, which was not financially sound, mostly because of the cost of racing. Racing success was not translating into the level of sales seen before the war. Only 100 cars were sold in 1951, compared to 1,000 in better years. The French government had imposed significant taxes on luxury automobiles, so the cost of a Talbot Lago became quite a burden, even for some of its traditionally wealthy customers. Privateers continued to race his cars, so Lago continued to finance racecar development, apparently to the detriment of product promotion. With little market for luxury sports cars in Europe and little interest in the United States for right-hand-drive cars, Lago revamped his model range, adding smaller cars in 1952. He had little money to spend on development, so effectively dropped the Grand Prix-derived Grand Sport, although its chassis would still be available to coachbuilders. For his new line, he took an older chassis and shortened it to a wheelbase of 2900-mm. Using his existing T26 engine, he equipped the six-cylinder with three inverted Solex carburetors instead of the Zenith-Strombergs found on earlier engines, boosting power to a claimed 210-hp at 4500 rpm. A beautiful body was designed in-house and, for the first time, was built in the Talbot Lago factory rather than by an outside coachbuilder. The body could be tagged Carrosserie Talbot. The car was designated T26 GSL, for Grand Sport Longue, and would have serial numbers of the form 111XXX to distinguish them from the previous Grand Sport line.

These were fast, expensive, elegant cars, but they were essentially a pre-war car and not up to the standard of other cars being built in Europe, especially those by the Italians. Production of these larger Grand Sports ended in 1955. A Sport 2500 replaced those cars, using a body that was an 8/10-scale version of the 1953 Grand Sport and was the first to use a conventional transmission instead of the Wilson pre-selector gearbox. Unfortunately, all Lago’s efforts to save the company with smaller cars failed. While he outlasted all the other French specialty manufacturers, his company was absorbed into Simca in 1959. Major Anthony Lago died just a year later, in December 1960, at the age of 67. Before he died, he said, “No one has ever been killed racing one of my cars.” Sadly, the death of his company may have been what killed him.

1955 T26 GSL COMPETIZIONE SN: 111017

Serendipity can be as important as planning. Planning is how a concours is selected to attend. Serendipity is finding a car that has one or more of the following characteristics—rarity, beauty, importance or provenance. Attending the Santa Fe Concorso resulted from planning. Finding the 1955 Talbot Lago T26 GSL of Alberto and Julie Gutiérrez was serendipity. This car ticks all the boxes, it has beauty—obvious; it is rare—one of 19 and the third to last to be produced; it is important because it highlights the transition from coachbuilt French luxury sports cars to factory coachwork; and it has provenance—it is the only one of the 19 built that was race-prepared (Competizione) by the factory.

In its day, this car was among the fastest available—0 to 60 mph in 12 seconds and a top speed of 125 mph. Each of the 19 cars was unique, but 111017 was always in a class of its own. Its unique factory competition package includes Dunlop tires, Borgo sport pistons, low- restriction air cleaners, racy cams, bumperettes instead of bumpers, dual shocks all around, driving lights, quick fill gas cap and a driver-operated side exhaust cut-out.

Gutiérrez discovered 111017 at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction in January 2014. He thought it an odd car to be in that auction rather than one of the other auction houses that specialize in cars like the Talbot Lago. He mentioned that when he first saw the car, “I knew it was a pretty unusual car. I knew Talbots as pre-war, Art Deco cars. [But] this car seemed to represent the end of an era to me. This was not a coachbuilt car, but was as close to a coachbuilt car [as possible] and still have a production body. That’s what I think they were trying to do—make the transition from coachbuilt cars to a modern production sports car.” He added, “I fell in love with it because of the way it looked, its rarity and the fact that it represents this transition. The rare competition package was an added bonus.”

He saw the car early in the week and asked to be put in contact with the owner and was soon in contact with Mr. Gordon Apker. Apker was paring down his 90-car collection and had cars in the hands of several auction houses. He said he consigned the Talbot Lago to Barrett-Jackson as a result of a long time friendship with Craig Jackson. They met later that week to inspect the car and “hit it off well.” Gutiérrez learned a lot about the car from Apker, about its history and about his passionate ownership and use of the car over 25 years. He said, “I asked Gordon if others had shown interest in the car, and he said there were several.” He had met one of them, a “Russian,” but after their meeting Apker had only spoken to someone he called a “handler” for the “Russian,” and who continued to inspect the car with a high degree of interest over several days.

The day before the auction, Apker told Gutiérrez he hoped Gutiérrez would buy the car. When the car was driven onto the block, Gutiérrez was with it on stage and started the bidding. As the price increased, Gutiérrez was thoughtful about his next bid, but the “Russian” would counter through his handler as soon as the bid was acknowledged—no delay with his paddle. After about a 30-second delay when Gutiérrez made his final bid there was no counter offer before the hammer fell, and he had bought the car. Later, said Gutiérrez, “Gordon smiled as he reported that the handler had been on the phone instantly bidding for the ‘Russian’ until suddenly he was pushing buttons on his phone as though he had lost the connection. Gordon called me shortly after I bought the car and said, jokingly, ‘You stole my car!’” But he was pleased that Gutiérrez had gotten it because he knew the car would continue to be used like he had always used it. Both the past and current owners agree: “That’s my philosophy—I use my cars,” said Gutiérrez.

Apker is a vintage racing and rallying enthusiast and had raced and rallied the GSL. In the 25 years he had owned the car, his competition with it included many vintage races and rallies, five Colorado Grands, and two Copperstate 1000 rallies. He restored the car to original condition in 2010 and showed it at the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance in 2011. Gutiérrez has been true to his word, he drives the GSL. And he takes it to shows. On January 11 this year, the car took 2nd in class at the Arizona Concours d’Elegance in Phoenix behind a “trailer queen” XKE and ahead of a Pegaso, a DB4 and a DB6, a Lancia, a California Spider and several other Ferraris. At least as important, “It also won the overall Classiccars.com prize as the car that their readers voted the most elegant and original car in the show,” reported Gutiérrez. The appreciation of this style is reflected in the growing level of investment interest in these rare cars, with a restored 1949 Talbot Lago selling this January in Scottsdale for $1.65 million.

Driving Impressions

Not only does Gutiérrez drive his cars, I’m pleased to report that he allows a few others to drive them as well! The car is comfortable in nearly every way. The dash is easily readable and has all the important gauges. The steering wheel is large but falls directly to hand. Even though it is right-hand drive, it was all very familiar—with one exception.

I knew that driving the Talbot Lago was going to be uniquely different for me, but I’ll let Gutiérrez explain: “I had never driven a car with a pre-select transmission, so that was a challenge. After I take off, I think, ‘what is the next gear I’m going to be in,’ and I put the selector in that position. When you’re ready for that gear, all you do is hit the gear selector pedal, and it goes into that gear. When it is in neutral, the zero position, that gear selector pedal is up against the floor—there’s no play in it at all. When you put it in the gear you want and step hard on the pedal, it releases way up. The pedal stays up when you’re driving. You can put it in any gear you want, but it doesn’t shift until you hit the gear selector pedal.”

Gear selector pedal…hmmm. Gutiérrez advised that it is not a clutch and doesn’t work like a clutch. “It really just selects a gear.” Do you have any idea how difficult it is to convince yourself that the pedal all the way to the left is not a clutch? The only time it is anything like a clutch is when starting from a stop. Still, it was a bit different because of the way you had to modulate the clutch and throttle—similar to what I’m used to, but different. The neighborhood where Gutiérrez lives has numerous speed bumps, and that required having the car in first and driving slowly across them. Having just started the drive, I failed in several attempts to keep the car moving and had to do the start from stop again. Once on the open road, though, the car was a dream. Yes, I had to keep telling myself “it’s not a clutch,” but with the selection of every new gear, it became more routine. Gutiérrez routinely reminded me to select the next gear as soon as I had engaged the gear selector pedal, which was appreciated, since I was fascinated with the car and how it drove. Overall, it is a fine driving car. Steering is heavy at slow speeds, but that’s expected. There is a little understeer, but it’s not terrible. The brakes do leave a bit to be desired—the big drums tend to grab when used hard. Thankfully, I had little need to use them hard. I just planned ahead when a stop loomed, which gave me a bit of time to think about the next gear and that gear selector pedal…it’s not a clutch, it’s not a clutch, it’s not a clutch.

Overall, it was a pleasant car to drive. I’m not sure I’d want to race a car of its size, but a rally like the Colorado Grand would be perfect for it. The coolest thing about the car, for me at least, is being able to drive a car with a Wilson pre-selector gearbox! How many people can say that? Gutiérrez is pleased with the transmission, “The coolest thing is that you’d think the transmission would be delicate, but it’s bulletproof! It has bands that self adjust, supposedly, but it can get out of adjustment.” As an example of how bulletproof it is, Gutierrez explained, “These transmissions were not uncommon in the pre-war cars, but they were used most commonly in buses and tanks! Many of the tanks in WWII had some variant of the Wilson pre-select transmission. They’re very rugged.” The only problem he has occasionally experienced with the transmission is with reverse gear. Sometimes it is difficult to get it into reverse, but mainly it takes a little getting used to where the gear selector pedal engages—never a problem with forward gears, but reverse sometimes can be challenging.

When Gutierrez was originally getting used to driving the car, he called Apker for advice, and Gordon told Alberto, “Drive it like you stole it and you won’t have a problem.” I’m not sure he drives it quite that way, but he is driving it—1950s luxury at speed. That’s the way these cars should be used.

Specifications

Chassis: Steel ladder frame

Body: Steel over wood frame with aluminum deck lid, hood and doors produced by Talbot Lago

Length: 4850-mm; 190.9-inches

Wheelbase: 2900-mm; 114.2-inches

Width: 1850-mm; 72.8-inches

Front Track: 1420-mm; 55.9-inches

Rear Track: 1485-mm; 58.5-inches

Height: 1590-mm; 62.6-inches

Weight: 1610 kilograms; 3549 pounds

Engine: Normally aspirated, dual-overhead-cam, straight six; two valves per cylinder; Borgo Sport Pistons

Displacement: 4482-cc; 273.508 cu.in.

Bore/Stroke: 93/110mm; 3.66/4.33-inches

Compression ratio: 8:1

Horsepower: 210 bhp @4500 rpm

Induction: 3 inverted Solex carburetors with low restriction air intakes

Transmission: Wilson pre-selector 4-speed

Front Suspension: Independent with anti-roll bar, dual shocks—one each hydraulic and friction per side

Rear Suspension: Half-elliptic springs with anti-roll bar, dual shocks—one each hydraulic and friction per side

Steering: Worm and nut

Brakes: 18-inch Lockheed hydraulic drums

Wheels: Rudge-Whitworth 3.62×18 72

Tires: Dunlop Racing Tires 6.00×18