Journalist Gordon Wilkins wrote that “although it has an impressive performance, it produces in the driver the uneasy exhilaration which may be got from shampooing a lion.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader called it the only car that was less safe than the much–oft unjustly–maligned Corvair. The German Army was said to have barred its officers from driving it, lest their numbers be diminished even more rapidly than World War II was already managing.
How are we to evaluate these harsh estimations of the Type 87 Tatra? I found a good assessment to be 14 years of ownership of just such a car. Why did I buy a Tatra T87 from the Honda dealer to whom it had been traded for two motorcycles? I’d always nursed a passion for the innovative experiments of the 1930s with streamlined rear-engined cars. Burney, Stout, Tjaarda, Porsche, Fuller, Bel Geddes, Ledwinka and Schjolin were only the best-known of the many adventurous designers and engineers who saw the future of the automobile in rear engines and advanced aerodynamics.
Ledwinka was 59 when the T87 was introduced at the Prague Auto Salon in the autumn of 1937. Engineer Erich Übelacker worked under Ledwinka to create the astonishingly aerodynamic forms of the T87 and its predecessor the T77 (he had a hankering for sevens). Before he left to join Steyr in 1936, Übelacker completed the upgrading of the first model of the T77a and the design and initial proving of the T87.
Tatra’s T87 was enthusiastically welcomed by the German high command as a big, fast, comfortable courier that seemed tailor-made for the four-lane Autobahns that Fritz Todt’s engineers were building throughout the Greater Reich. Todt himself owned and was driven in one, according to Tatra historians Ivan Margolius and John G. Henry. It was one of the more expensive cars of the day, selling in Germany for RM8,450. A 2½-liter 6-cylinder Opel Kapitän was less than half as costly at RM3,975.
Shorter and lighter than the more cumbersome T77, the T87 was the first Tatra to combine air cooling with a chain-driven single overhead camshaft for each cylinder bank, opening vee-inclined valves through rocker arms. Each aluminum cylinder head was individually cast. Built like a light-aircraft engine, it looked like one when the big rear deck was unlocked and lifted. From its 3.0 liters it developed 74hp at 3,500 rpm.
Modest though this power seems today, its V-8 was capable of speeding the T87 to 96 mph with standard tires and 103 mph with special high-speed tires. This was because the T87 not only looked aerodynamic, it was aerodynamic. A measurement of a drag coefficient of 0.24 made contemporaneously on a one-fifth-scale model seemed too low to be true and indeed was. When an actual T87–Hans Ledwinka’s personal car–was tested in the big Volkswagen wind tunnel in 1979, it was found to have a coefficient of drag of Cd=0.36, still a stunningly low figure for the years in which it was built. Most cars then had a Cd well over 0.50.
Tatra’s production of cars and trucks was integrated into those of the Third Reich’s wartime vehicle sector, the rugged and fast T87 being seen as a useful addition to Germany’s military capability. Among other applications, the Luftwaffe was assigned one as an experimental vehicle. A military police unit that served in Italy and Yugoslavia maintained a fleet of T87s. Production of the T87 continued through the war, without interruption, to 1950. In all, 3,056 were made.
Made in 1947, my Type 87 was externally indistinguishable from the original of a decade earlier, apart from some ex post facto bumpers. It was said to have been resident in the United States for many years after being imported by the novelist John Steinbeck. Later owned by a motorcycle enthusiast who had no difficulty coping with an engine overhaul, it had clearly been driven far and fast.
Piloting the T87 produces a concatenation of impressions. Contrary to popular opinion, there is some vision through the rear louvers–though an outside mirror is essential. Its rack-and-pinion steering is sublime–light, direct, precise as a fine machine tool. Yet its gear shift is redolent of an earlier era with its long, deliberate travel, distinctly notchy gate and absence of constant-mesh gearing in first and reverse.
The T87’s performance is impressive. First and second gears are relatively short, well suited to hilly terrain. Sixty miles per hour is easily exceeded in third. The big Tatra cruises comfortably at any reasonable highway speed. And its top-speed claim was reinforced by the timing of a rebuilt T87 at a two-way average of 102 mph in Australia. The same car accelerated from rest to 50 mph in only 10 seconds, better than the 18 seconds recorded by Vauxhall’s test of a war-weary vehicle.
Handling? Damped in rebound only–and firmly–the T87 copes brilliantly with a wide range of surfaces. Wet roads want watching, but, with sensible driving, the Tatra is a pleasure to handle. And I experienced it at its worst: a rear-tire blowout at speed on the Connecticut Thruway! Substantial yaw angles were reached, but, thanks to the T87’s high polar moment of inertia and quick steering, I managed to gather it up and come safely to rest. So, I have shampooed the lion and lived to tell of it.
This article originally appeared in the NOVEMBER 1, 2008 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car
Karl Ludvigsen profile: Karl_Ludvigsen