Story and Photos by James Heine
There's no doubt that in the past two decades, Americans, perhaps because of the maturing of the Baby Boom generation, have become a bit classics crazy. If for example, you drive a vintage TR3 or MGA, or a '60s pony car or muscle car, you know the smile quotient on the highway is far higher than when you motor down the same stretch of road in your daily driver.
Now imagine that you are piloting something that resembles a refugee from a 1930s Dick Tracy cartoon, or from the styling studio of a slightly crazed Depression-era designer.
Jeff and Susan Lane don't have to imagine that scenario. They live it.
The Lanes, the founders of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tenn. (www.lanemotormuseum.org), rive a 1947 Tatra T87, a Czechoslovakian cruiser born in the second decade between the two World Wars.
In many respects, one could call the T87 a poster child for the streamlining approach to industrial design popular during the 1930s--down to the fact that the car sports a dorsal fin to improve aerodynamics and high-speed stability.
"We're shocked at how many people have a camera in their car as they're driving down the Interstate," Jeff Lane says. "They get up next to you, and they take a picture. They get in front of you, and then slow down, and then they speed up."
Most people on this side of the Atlantic have absolutely no idea what a Tatra is, Lane continues. In parking lots, at gas stations and elsewhere, they will ask, "What is it?"
"When you say, 'It's a Tatra,' they think you're mumbling," he says. "You have to explain, 'No, that's the name of the car.'"
The Lanes acquired their Tatra after Jeff attended Paris' Retromobile car show about a decade ago. A T87 was on display, and he was hooked. After unsuccessfully searching for a T87 in the U.S. for several years, Lane made a trip to Czechoslovakia in 2000 and acquired the car he and Susan drive.
"The more you look at a Tatra, the more you realize it was a very advanced car," he says. "The company had a tremendous amount of engineering expertise. They did a lot of really neat things back in the '30s and '40s that people don't know about."
Built for Speed
In addition to its striking looks, the T87's mechanicals are, well, revolutionary. It's powered by a rear-mounted, aluminum, single overhead-cam, air-cooled V8, and with its four-speed transmission, the car is capable of 100 mph, which was quite a feat for a luxury car of the period, Lane says.
"On the road, it's still an easy car to get in and drive around," Lane adds. "It has about 75 horsepower, and it weighs about 3200 lbs. It doesn't have great acceleration, although it's not terrible. But in terms of a car that you can get on the freeway and drive to California in, it's still a very comfortable car."
Not bad for a car whose design work started in 1931 or '32 and was first manufactured in 1936, Lane notes.
"Now, obviously, it's not as luxurious as the things we have now," he says, "but it goes down the road nicely; it has a comfortable ride; and the brakes are decent."
When compared to other cars of the period, the T87's rear-engine design incorporates another asset, Lane continues. "All the noise is behind you, and all the heat is behind you. The wind noise is also minimal, because they wanted to make it as aerodynamic as possible, to get the 100 mph out of it. People I've given rides to are just amazed that the car was designed more than 70 years ago."
Since acquiring the car, the Lanes have used it twice as a Great Race car. They have also used it around town, for shows and demonstration runs, and for excursions to Florida.
The attributes that make the Tatra a good Sunday and vacation choice also enhance its performance on the transcontinental Great Race, Lane says. Yes, it's comfortable, roomy and relatively cool (at least in terms of a non-air-conditioned world), and those attributes help fend off driver and navigator fatigue, but being able to zip down the freeway is also an asset.
"It cruises," Lane says. "That's one of the things essential for the Great Race."
Going from stage to stage, the Tatra will hold 60 or 65 mph on the freeway, and you can get to the next stage early enough that you can get a drink or have a snack, Lane explains. "If your car goes only 50 or 55, as some of them do, you spend almost all of your time in transit, and when you get to the next stage, you don't have a chance to relax for 5 or 10 or 15 minutes before you get started again."
In the past few years, Lane estimates that he and Susan have put more than 10,000 miles on the car.
"It's a reliable car," Lane says. "Tatras were built really well because they were made to go many, many miles."
The cars were also designed to withstand the poor roads of Central Europe, and that further enhances their reliability, Lane says.
The factory also considered its cars more than a throwaway item, Lane adds. At 100,000 miles or so, the company would rebuild a car for a customer.
"They would strip it out; repaint it; install a new interior," he says. "If they had any updates, like maybe in the '50 to early '60s, when they went from drum to disc brakes, they would put disc brakes on the cars. The cars were built tough."
While some T87 owners are afraid of using their cars, the key is getting everything right, Lane says. "Once you get it right, you don't need to be afraid of it."
However, as with any vintage or classic car, paying attention to regular maintenance enhances the reliability factor. "It is an old car," Lane cautions. "Don't kid yourself that it's going to start every time, or that you never have to do anything. But it's not a fragile car once it's put together properly."
Don't Look Back
As a 1930s automobile, the Tatra has only a few weak points, with the most obvious being a nearly total lack of rear visibility. "You can't see through the back window," Lane says. "You can only see through the side windows. You get kind of used to that, although for some people it's a little unnerving when you first drive the car."
The T87 also lacks synchros in first and second gear, Lane adds, and that requires either double-clutching or simply grinding it in, if, for example, you're down-shifting from third to second as you approach an intersection at which you only have to yield.
And while the brakes are good for a classic car, and certainly good compared to other '30s cars, they're not up to the standard we expect from modern automobiles. "If you're going 70 mph down a freeway, you don't want to tailgate someone," Lane says. "If they stop, you'll never stop like they can."
Today, many T87s look great, but a potential owner is wise to conduct a careful mechanical inspection of the car, Lane says. Although it may have been restored, there may be issues that need attention if you plan to drive the car a lot.
Finding Help
While there has been no support network for T87s in the U.S., and the modern Tatra company, according to Lane, seems disinterested in its automobile heritage, there are active national organizations in Europe, including the Netherlands, Germany and, of course, Czechoslovakia. More important, there is an English club dedicated to Tatras, and the Lanes have recently begun a North American Tatra register (www.tatracars.com).
"We want to determine how many cars are located in the U.S. and Canada," Susan Lane says.
"I can read their newsletters and talk to them," Jeff Lane says about the UK (English) Tatra club. "Most of the Czech [Tatra] people don't speak English, and I can't speak Czech."
Surprisingly, parts are reasonably easy to acquire, Lane says. Technical and historical information is more difficult to obtain, because much of it is in Czech and German. For both, Lane's English friends are invaluable. "One of the club members is Czech. I call him, and he calls Czechoslovakia. They send me the parts, and I send him the money."
In Czechoslovakia, restoring Tatras, especially the T87, has become popular, and that has also helped the parts issue. Ecorra, a leading Czech restoration company, restores 5-10 T87s a year, Lane says. "Because of that, they're starting to remake the gears and other things that wear out."
Through time and persistence he's been able to get almost everything he needs, he adds, and that means more people get to see the T87 on the road, which is its real home.
"It's fun to take out on the road because a lot of enthusiasts have read about the car but never seen one," Susan Lane says.
While some are intrigued by the Tatra's technology, the car's styling attracts most people. "It's got a unique visual effect from any angle," Jeff Lane adds. "When people see it, they're always fascinated by it."
A Tatra Extra: The Winds of War
Throughout much of its history, geopolitical struggles have played a big role in the story of Tatra.
The company traces its roots to 1859, when a pair of enterprising carpenters and wheelwrights, Ignác Šustala and Adolf Raska, founded a business to manufacture horse-drawn carts and coaches in the northern Moravian town of Kopřivince, then known by its German name, Nesseldorf.
Moravia was a small part of the immense Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire, which included much of Central Europe (i.e., modern-day Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans). The empire provided a stable market for his innovative products, and Šustala and his company, the Nesseldorfer Wagenbau (Nesseldorf Wagon Factory), prospered.
By the 1880s the company was producing railway equipment, and in 1897 it introduced a "horseless" carriage, which it named the President. Powered by a five-horsepower Benz flat-twin engine, the President was the first passenger car in Central Europe. The company's first truck followed in 1898.
The company continued to prosper through the first two decades of the 20th century, not only because of its pursuit of innovative technologies and its railway and civilian truck production, but also because it produced vehicles for the Austrian and German armies during World War I.
After the war, the company became an important part of the new Czech economy. Led by designer Hans Ledwinka, it embarked upon a series of automotive innovations, including the T11. Introduced in 1923 at the Prague Motor Show, the T11 was designed by Ledwinka to be an "everyman's car." It featured an air-cooled, front-mounted 1156cc two-cylinder 12 horsepower engine rigidly connected to the clutch housing and then to the transmission housing. The T11 employed a backbone tubular frame and used rear swing axles, a rear differential and independent suspension on all four corners. The concept put the company ahead of most car manufactures of the day and served as the basis of subsequent cars and commercial vehicles.
Between 1923 and 1930, the company produced about 25,000 T11s and T12s, with the T12 having the added feature of four-wheel brakes. In 1927, the company changed its name from Nesseldorf to Tatra, in honor of the nearby mountains, where it tested the brakes on its trucks.
By the 1930s, Czechoslovakia ranked among the leaders in modernist trends in art, design and architecture, and Ledwinka and Tatra had enthusiastically embraced streamlining. In concert with their design work, Ledwinka and his associates also began experimenting with rear-engined cars. In this activity they followed a route parallel to that of Volkswagen and Ferdinand Porsche, whom Ledwinka knew socially and professionally. (Their parallel research also produced a decades-long patent debate, which was eventually settled in favor of Ledwinka and Tatra.)
The result of Tatra's design work in the early 1930s was the Type 77. Introduced in 1934, the T77 featured the world's first all-enveloping streamlined body. It used a central box frame that forked behind the rear wheels to hold a 3.4-liter air-cooled V8 that produced 70 horsepower and could push the T77 down the road at 95 mph. Ludwinka and Tatra further refined the concept, first in the T77A and then with the significant T87, whose 75-horsepower 2960cc V8 could hit the magic 100 mph mark. Just as important, the 2.9-liter unit was considerably lighter than the 3.4-liter unit, and that helped Ludwinka mitigate the T77's tendency toward tail-happiness.
Not surprisingly, the company expanded into other areas as well, including aircraft production. In 1937, Tatra also produced a second significant rear-engined car, the 1760cc flat-four T97.
Unfortunately, the late 1930s introduced the seeds of the company's long decline. The decline had little to do with engineering or management issues and a whole lot to do with the rise of Adolf Hitler in neighboring Germany.
After its "Anschluss" with Austria in 1938, Nazi Germany turned its attention to Czechoslovakia. Hitler demanded, and got (thank you, Neville Chamberlain), Czechoslovakia's Sudatenland, including Moravia, in the fall of 1938. Effectively, Tatra was now part of Germany.
On March 15, 1939, Nazi troops marched into Prague, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as an independent nation. Tatra became part of the German war machine, and as in World War I, it produced trucks and other military vehicles for the Whermacht. It also continued a limited production of T87s, in part because the cars were favorite Autobahn cruisers of the German brass.
After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Tatra, like all of Czechoslovakia, found itself stranded behind the Iron Curtain and cut off from the West. The Communists imprisoned Ledwinka for collaboration with the Nazis and the Czech government nationalized the company. Tatra became little more than another industrial cog in Stalinist Eastern Europe. Car production concentrated on two types, the front-engined 57B and the rear-engined T87. However, the company's principal task was to replace the 60,000 railway cars Czechoslovakia lost during the war.
"Throughout Tatra's history they never made a lot of cars at any one time," says T87 owner Jeff Lane, "because trucks were more their thing, but the cars they did make, especially before World War II, and even after, were always luxurious."
If you talk to Czechs who remember the period, they will tell you that if you saw a Tatra going down the road, you knew that whoever was in the car was somebody, because regular people didn't own Tatras, Lane says. They were for the kind of people who employed--or were assigned--chauffeurs.
"The guy who ran the electric company got one, the bank got one, but as an individual, even if you had the money--and most people didn't have the money--you couldn't buy one."
The years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Czechoslovakia--now the Czech Republic and Slovakia--have not been kind to Tatra, Lane says. As with many industries in the former socialist sphere of the USSR, the company was unprepared for a market economy. It could still produce good, even great, cars, but not at a price people wanted to pay.
Tatra ceased automobile production in the late 1990s. Today the company specializes in heavy-duty off-road trucks for commercial and military applications.
--James Heine
Tatra on the Web
For a small car company with limited production and a short-circuited history because of the ideological proclivities of Communism, Tatra enjoys a surprisingly vibrant club life, thanks in part to the World Wide Web. Among the many Web sites, three English-oriented sites stand out:
• International Streamlined Tatra Site (www.tatra.demon.nl). Paul Schilperoord's entertaining site focuses on Tatras influenced by the 1930s streamlining trend.
• Tatra Register UK (www.tatra-register.co.uk). Web site of the English Tatra club. Good information and links.
• Tatra World (www.tatraworld.nl). A Dutch site dedicated to Tatras. Focuses on what's going on with Tatras today.
And, of course, there is Tatra's official site, if you want to know more about the modern-day company: www.tatra.cz/en/spodek_en.asp.
Schilperoord's site is also a good resource for the story of the "other Beetle," Tatra's T97. Like VW's "people's car, the T97 was an innovative automobile aimed at the masses, but its life was cut short by the convulsions leading up to the Second World War, the war itself, and finally by Communism.
Technical Specifications
1947 Tatra T87
Years produced 1936–50
Number produced 3023
Configuration rear engine, rear drive
Engine air-cooled, 3-liter, 90-degree V8
Compression ratio 5.8:1
Horsepower 75
Transmission 4-speed
Axles front, swinging parallelogram; rear, Tatra swinging axles
Suspension Transverse leafs front and rear
Brakes hydraulic drums front and rear
Wheels and tires 6.50x16
Wheelbase 114"
Weight 3014 lbs.
Top speed 100 mph
Source: Jeff Lane; International Streamlined Tatra Site.