A Car Life, by Larry Crane

I am probably changing gear at around 3500 revs. There is useful torque and the steering requires both effort and judgment. A few degrees changes our direction, but it takes so much effort that the perception is stability. The effect is incredibly exciting, but real speed is elusive – at least to me.

Is the best road racing car of its era exotic? You bet. Is it challenging to use well? Absolutely. Is it fast? Are you brave?

Fitting a pair of modern American feet around an enormous 1920’s steering wheel and into a foot well designed to be used by 120-pound athletes is a slow, careful process. The Type 51 body is simple aluminum pieces and the steering wheel is just another one with a thin ring of wood attached. Everything begins in the narrow foot well. The clutch is a T-handle about 5 inches tall that acts like an on/off switch. The accelerator is a bright, vertical rod with a pair of rollers at its bottom.

It is comfortable and effective. Bugatti’s 2.3-liter DOHC blown race motor is more responsive than I had expected (horsepower estimates vary, from 160 to 185). The brake pedal is a 12-inch-long spoon handle that pushes on a spur gear and works against a pair of ring-gear sections, one for each side, as a brake balance compensator, after which it pulls on a length of roller chain around three sprockets to pull cables and levers and finally a cam that push the shoes against the inside of enormous drums.

Don’t laugh. These are masterful tools. I am not running laps in traffic to see how long they will last, but running seven-tenths in mountain canyons at 6500 feet, outside of Denver, Colorado, they eliminate any deceleration anxiety.

Steering gives a new dimension to direct. Remember the pedal car with an L on the end of a rod that went through a hole in a plate that acted as the tie rod? It feels like that. If you twitch you might change lanes. Of course, you’ll have to twitch with some force. Cornering hard on a precise, predictable line is easier than one might think in a 1931 automobile. Bugatti maestro Jim Stranberg, my mentor here, tells me that the cars are remarkably well behaved at racetrack speed. Outside the car’s high limits of adhesion is balanced control. But all of the efforts are demanding. I can’t help thinking of Elizabeth Junek who drove her T 35B in the 1928 Targa Florio over a thousand miles of rocky Sicilian roads to finish fourth, after having coolant troubles while in the lead. I have to believe her favorite masseuse made good money during the following week.

There was a bunch of manual work to be done in the cockpit. Some of it has been eliminated by modern technology – read sealants and lubricants. The long lever inside the left side of the body operates an oil pump. Bugatti famously did not use gaskets. His belly pans acted as secondary sumps. They just didn’t offer any help to the engines. While the impromptu total-loss oiling was making a mess around the driver’s feet, it was concurrently emptying the primary sump. As the oil gauge in front of the riding mechanic began to flutter, the 100-pound teenager (the lightest kid they could find) would feverishly pump oil from the tank under his seat to replenish the engine. By the time the oil gauge had stabilized, the fuel pressure would have fallen and the hand pump knob protruding from the dash would be his next job. No one in the car could just enjoy the drive. But I am now.

It is noisy and windy and challenging, but this is a Bugatti Type 51 and I have been offered a drive by its generous, courageous Southern California owner, Peter Mullen. Jim reminds me, of course, if it all goes wrong he will have to fix it. Finally, he took the wheel and showed me how well it worked at about nine tenths. It is astonishing how well it sticks and how much of the car it seems safe to use on paved roads where much of its drifting balance is beyond even Jim’s experienced comfort. This is not a modern car, but it certainly feels nothing like 1931.

Thank you to Peter Mullen for his kindness and trust with this great treasure and Jim Stranberg at High Mountain Classics PO Box 46 Berthoud, Colorado 80513 970-532-2339.