July 27th

Dear Kees Smit

Thanks so much for posting a link to our Tatra’s victory in the New York Times Collectible Car Contest on Tatraworld.

Yesterday, Paul Greenstein and I celebrated that victory by throwing a party for all the people who voted for the car in the contest (and were able to make it to Los Angeles to celebrate). Some 300 people (including the Czech Consul General) attended, and it was the largest known public gathering of Tatras on the American West Coast (3). Those gathered enjoyed Czech food (home-made goulash and ook nog Hollandsche rooie kool zoals mijn Oma vroeger gemaakt heeft), Czech beer, Czech cars, as well as Tatra cookies and a T87 cake.

Paul Greenstein & Dydia DeLyser

Restoration history in two pages:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/automobiles/collectibles/25contest.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&ref=automobiles&adxnnlx=1280516473-sXqLJ3zGxoOk9Z1TdggMGQ
http://clunkbucket.com/tatra-t87-world-tour/

Summaries:

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/31/1941-tatra-t87-named-the-new-york-times-collectible-car/

http://www.carthrottle.com/nyt-collectible-car-of-the-year-1941-tatra-t87/

Lucas_Sztukowsk from Poland created his own 3D T 87s.

http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?p=788466

Remember Vladimír Cettl, the Czech guy that made phantastic photos of neglected Tatras at car scrapyards?  TW paid attention to his photos on an earlier posting: http://www.tatraworld.nl/index.php?s=Cettl&search.x=31&search.y=6 

Now Cettl has written TW a letter.

Dear Sir, 

I was very pleased with the information got from Google network that my photos are also present on your webpage!
Because nowadays has become modern to recycle everything, I can harly find similar places covered with rusty old-timers and still it is more difficult to discover some.

So, I am really happy to find a such area.
For my fans I have a good news that the TATRA vehicles are one my priorities for this year. I am going to take pictures the renovated ones. So, not only the rusty old-timer Tatras.

Thank you for your favour!
I wish our Tatra cars make us only happy!

From the north of Bohemia,
yours,
Vladimír Cettl

PS: The link refers to latest picture report from one of „Prague´s Tatra 613, 603 cemetery“ >>> http://11-55.nolimit.cz/volna-fotografie/tak-trochu-vetsi-tatraplacek-c.html

The Tatraplan of Josef Krümpelbeck was used by two Holocaust survivors for an European tour.
 
Landkreis, Tuesday, 06:04:10
By Thomas Vorwerk

Emstek (Germany)- Josef Krümpelbeck needs only to be given a keyword and then it gushes out of him: Tatra. The automotive forger from the former Czechoslovakia has infected the Emstek resident and what began with an initial flirtation, has become an obsession that made him curious about its backgrounds. “I then drove a beetle and had some VW books too. It said that in the development of Porsche’s car has been inspired by the Tatra, “recalls the 35-year-old. The more he dealt with the topic, the more he became interested in the streamlined vehicle with the boxer engine in the rear.

Eventually a black Tatra 600 stood in the yard of orthopedic shoemaker, after he had himself had bought one in the Czech Republic. “A lot had to be repaired,” decibes Krümpelbeck its condition. Really happy he did not become from this purchase, But now he had contacts in the Tatra scene. He sold the black Tatra and purchased aother one from Adolf Kunz. “With him I had been looking for spare parts and as he became very ill, he wanted to give his car in good hands.”Quite a bit of time passed by however as Kunz had a hard time to be separated from his sweetheart. “Always in the mirror, always look in the mirror,” he had told Krümpelbeck during the trial run in 2003 numerous times. Rightly so, because the rear visibility is very limited and the supply of spare parts is not without problems. “There is a club however which has contacts in the Czech Republic. Some parts are still to have.

Krümpelbeck is not afraid to reair the car. “Most of it I do myself. Many things I try out and the technique is also very managable. “I also have a workshop manual in German, which is very detailed. “A reasonably talented amateur can do the job”.

The 600, also known as Tatraplan, was built between 1948 and 1951 at  Tatra and then a few years at Skoda, as a separate truck-(Tatra) and automobileproduction (Skoda) was enacted politically.

About another previous owner’s history, Krümpelbeck has been touched. Adolf Kunz bought the car from Edgar Mannheimer. Edgar, also shoemaker,and his brother Max, who survived the Holocaust, unlike their parents and three of her siblings. ( See also an earlier posting: http://www.tatraworld.nl/2010/04/02/max-mannheimer-a-man-with-a-mission/) Max Mannheimer is now 90 years and lectures on the Holocaust. “This week he called me. I had written him a letter and told him that the car has landed with me. “The painter and writer told me that he drove with his brother in that very car to England and Vienna. “A very good car,” enthused the Munich citizen Krümpelbeck.

Such long distances are not longer expected from the 60-year-old car. When it comes to a distant Tatra meeting, the Oldtimerfan rather prefers his Tatra 613 from 1979. The eight-cylinder car was actually built as a pure apparatschik car and and was quite comfortable. Only one batch that was originally destined for North Korea arrived to the free market, as the communist brother state could not pay. The T 613 was built over 20 years and a ready to use 8-cylinder Tatra you can buy after some research for 3000 euros,” says the lover. The car is easy to maintain and even has a lamp under its bonnet in its engine bay..

For one of the future Tatra meetings, Krümpelbeck will probably use his beloved Tatraplan. The Meeting of the Tatra Register Deutschland 2011 (August 4-8, 2011, http://www.tatraworld.nl/events-calendar/) will be held in the Cloppenburg district and will include a visit to a museum village. The Tatraplan will this year be used for classic car rallies nearby.

For his best trip ever the silver-painted 600 was used as well. Joseph and Ursula KrümpelbBeck have used the vintage car on their wedding day for their ride to church and when one looks today at the wedding photo, you could almost get the idea that it must have been early 50’s, when this photo was taken..

Original text in German: http://www.mt-news.de/contentphp/article.php?aid=21511&code=view

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

Max Mannheimer,a Jew born in Novy Jicin, the district town close to the Tatra factory, was imprisoned from the end of January 1943 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and then in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Via Warsaw he ended up in the Dachau concentration camp. In early 1945 he was transferred to the external camp Mühldorf that was evacuated on April 28,1945. At a successive evacuation transport he was liberated by the Americans on April 30, 1945 in Seehaupt. Neither his first wife Eva Bock has as much as his parents, James and Margaret, his brothers Ernst and Eric nor his sister Katherine survived the Holocaust.  Only his brother Edgar and he got away.

After his discharge from the hospital, he left Germany and vowed to never again set foot on German soil. But shortly afterwards he fell in love with the German Elfriede Eiselt, his second wife, and went back to Germany in 1946. His second wife died in 1964 of cancer. Nowadays he is married to an American. Mannheimer has a daughter and a son. He lives near Munich. Since 1988 he is chairman of the Dachau camp community. Since 1950 he works as a painter and uses Ben Jakov as a artist name.

Max Mannheimer has become known for his lectures on his experiences in concentration camps. He often visits schools and institutions (eg, in the Bundeswehr) to tell his audience about the horrors of the Third Reich and National Socialism.

Mannheimer about his presentations: “I come as a witness in the schools, not as a judge or prosecutor.”

Mannheim is a member of the advisory board of the Association Against Forgetting – For Democracy.

His love for Moravia never disappeared. He even bought a pre-war Tatra T 87 in the eighties and was proud of its RHD, a symbol for the independent Czechoslovakia shortly before its occupation in 1938-1939. He refused to convert the steering wheel from the Czechoslovak RHD position to the German LHD side, so emphasizing his identity. Apart from using his Tatra to transport him to his lectures, helping him to tell about his native town Novy Jicin, he took his Tatra to some rallies like the 100 year Tatra Rally Vienna-Koprivnice. Getting older and older, he sold his T 87 some years ago to concentrate on his mission, to tell the German youth about his experiences.

His brother Edgar bought himself a Tatraplan in the eighties and took it to the 90 years Tatra Rally Vienna-Koprivnice After his death, it was sold to the late Adolf Kunz and is now owned by German Tatra enthusiast Josef Krumpelbeck who recently has been in contact with Max and suggested TW to pay attention to Mannheimer’s story.

Mannheimer tells about his live in German (his T 87 plays a supporting and modest role):

Video1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia9aTKTDGSU&feature=related (T 87 starts after 1.12)

Video2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDMeClLhM0Y&feature=related

Video3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ua-UjHyeEU

Guido and Kees discussing the new website way back in 1987

After the new designed TatraWorld website went into the air just two weeks ago, we received lots of compliments both via postings and e-mails. A hot bath for us after a lot of work. Thank you. Most comments said the new design was more modern, faster and cleaner, just what we intended. Others asked us what happened to the posting on the old website. A good question, but some time was needed to assemble all the postings from my hard-disc, put them to order and to make them suitable for TW’s search engine. With some luck we succeeded and all the older postings are now easy accessible, either by the search engine or by scrolling down the year of your choice. We also were able to improve TW’s logo, making bit clearer.

With an average of 100 visitors a day on the old-style website, the new-style website seems to attract even more visitors with booming figures in the first days. The numbers are now cooling down, but they wiil stay higher compared to the old-style website mainly because somehow Google has shown interest in the new website.
Maintenance of the new website is much easier and postings can be put on TatraWorld from any computer around the globe.

So, stay tuned and we hope to see your online comments on featured stories.

Tatra World proudly presents its renewed website. Apart from the new lay-out it enables you to respond to all postings. Further, all TW pages have been renewed and updated, especially the T 77 Register Page and the Literature Page.

Tatra World Team: Kees Smit webmaster, Guido Smit webdesigner, Lise Smit Webstyling