Bring a Trailer
- The Tatra T87 was one of the most advanced cars of its era.
- Aerodynamic and innovative, it featured mind-blowing engineering like a rear-mounted, air-cooled V-8.
- This example was found in a Lithuanian barn, and its restoration was completed last year.
At a time when most cars were as aerodynamic as a barn, with the ride and handling of a covered wagon, the Tatra T87 was as slippery as an airliner and filled with clever engineering. Spot the unusual three-headlight setup and you might think of the Tucker Torpedo, but the earliest T87s predated that car by more than a decade. Swift, silent, and a bit tricky to an incautious driver, the T87 stands head and shoulders above its peers for automotive innovation.Bring a Trailer This one, up for sale on Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos), is a 1941 Tatra T87 with a slightly mysterious backstory, recent restoration, and all the proper paperwork. It’s gorgeous, and a wonderfully tantalizing glimpse of what the Czech car industry could have become had not WWII broken out.Tatra is still around today as a trucking company, but its years of producing automobiles created a series of highly unusual and forward-looking machines. Chief design engineer Hans Ledwinka was a genius, and under his direction, the world saw some of the very first mass-produced aerodynamic cars, beginning with the T77 in 1934.Bring a Trailer The T87 was a more mature expression of the T77’s design, and just over 3000 were built over 14 years despite a global war getting in the way. Fitted with a magnesium-alloy air-cooled V-8 in the rear, it was a sort of 1940s vision of what a proto-Panamera might have been like if it were closer to a 911 in spirit.Speaking of Porsche, ol’ Ferdinand was known to have lifted some of Ledwinka’s ideas to create the original Volkswagen Type 1. This luxury limousine can thus claim some parentage of every 911 ever built, a genteel Czech uncle left off the official Stuttgart family tree.Bring a Trailer This example has a 3.0-liter air-cooled V-8, with finned cylinders, hemispheric combustion chambers, and overhead camshafts. It produces roughly 85 horsepower, and with that streamlined body, should be good for about 100 mph. The transmission is a four-speed manual transaxle.The suspension is fully independent, the construction is unibody, and the drag coefficient is just 0.36. For a car that is entering its mid-octogenarian years, this T87 is shockingly modern. Six adults sitting in quiet comfort at a steady 90 mph on a newly-built autobahn must have felt like science fiction when it was new.Bring a Trailer However, the T87’s rear swing-axle setup makes it sensitive to tire pressures and was designed for the low-grip tires of the period. A bit of care is required at the helm, lest the smoothness of the speed fool you into thinking you’re driving something more contemporary.This example was originally delivered to German-occupied Prague on November 7, 1941. It later ended up stored in a barn in Lithuania, possibly abandoned as Soviet forces reoccupied the country late in the war.Happily, when rediscovered, it was sent to a specialist located in Kopřivnice, the birthplace of Tatra. Painted maroon and fitted with a lustrous brown leather interior, it’s stunning for its looks as well as its futuristic design.Hans Ledwinka never received proper acknowledgement for his achievements in life, nor compensation for them. However, today the T87 and its siblings are highly prized and rightly considered to be some of the coolest and most significant automobiles ever built. It’s great to see that this example has been rescued from its barn and returned to the glorious condition it deserves.The auction ends September 10th.Brendan McAleerContributing EditorBrendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.
Source: caranddriver.com
