Cars!
We're in the midst of an unseasonably early blizzard at the moment. While the storm changed track in the last few hours and spared us the worst of it—instead, western Wisconsin is getting pasted right now with eight to ten inches of condensed global warming—nonetheless the wind is howling, and the temperatures are plummeting into the subzero range, and I woke up this morning out of an extraordinarily vivid dream that I'd left the Triumph out on the street again, with the top down, and I needed to get it dug out and moved before the snowplows came.
By the time I was awake enough to realize that it was just a dream, that I hadn't lived in that neighborhood in decades, and I'd never owned a TR31, it was too late to roll over and go back to sleep, so I figured I may as well write up an Ultimate Geek Fu. Therefore, today's topic is Cars!
No, not the Pixar movie, and not even the old Gary Numan hit single. What is the coolest car you can think of in sci-fi?
Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean? James Bond's Aston-Martin DB5? Luke Skywalker's rusty and Bondo'd-together landspeeder? The Mach Five? K.I.T.T.? (And if so, which incarnation?) Agent J's P.O.S. Crown Vic?
Actually, the more I think about this topic, the more difficult it gets. All the examples I can think of come from movies or TV shows. (I'm particularly fond of the Star Car from The Last Starfighter, but have personal reasons for that, and still think it would have been much cooler had its Earthly form had been that of a 1963 T-Bird.) Print science fiction as we know it today is largely the creation of a small group of writers and editors who lived and worked in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, and most of them did not drive. Therefore the profoundly socially, politically, culturally, and economically transformative technologies we refer to collectively as "the personal car" are not really much of a significant factor in printed science fiction.
True, Ray Bradbury has his Martian colonists puttering around in "beetle cars," and Keith Laumer was strangely fond of gyroscopically stabilized two-wheeled "Monojags"—(and granted, the concept of an even sleeker and racier E-type at first blush seems cool, but really, why not just ride a motorcycle?)—and of course, there are the ubiquitous "flyers"—but after that, I pretty much come up blank.
What have you got?
Oh. And let the arguments begin.
Since I have, however circumspectly, mentioned flying cars again, I'd best seize this opportunity to distract Henry by waving something shiny, and so for your edification I now present:
The True Story of Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang
Now, most of you probably recognize this name as being the title of one very strange 1968 movie musical starring Dick Van Dyke, and a few more of you may even associate it with the currently touring stage show adapted from Roald Dahl's movie script, but what I hope most of you know is that both the movie and stage show are based on Ian Fleming's one and only children's book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, first published in 1964.
What you probably do not know is that there was a real car named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In fact, there were at least three, each the hand-built creation of flamboyant millionaire and early motorsports fanatic, Count Louis Zborowski. The son of a Polish nobleman and an American mother, Zborowski lived in England, and was sort of a Roaring Twenties Art Arfons. Obsessed with auto racing and speed, after World War I he hit upon the idea of mating a military-surplus aircraft engine to minimalist automobile coachwork, and the result was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: a modified Mercedes chassis fitted with a 23-litre engine out of a German Gotha bomber.
No, I did not forget the decimal point. Twenty-three liters. Imagine an engine with pistons the size of one-gallon paint cans and you begin to get the picture.
The resulting behemoth made its debut at Brooklands2 in the 1921 Easter racing series, winning two races and turning laps at over 100 mph, which must have impressed the living daylights out of little 12-year-old Ian Fleming. Later that year, with an improved, lighter, and more streamlined body, Chitty was turning laps at 112 mph and clocked at 120 mph down the straightaways, but by this time Zborowski was already at work on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang II: a newer and lighter Mercedes chassis fitted with an 18.8-litre Benz aero engine and a four-seat touring body. When Chitty II proved disappointing as a race car Zborowski managed to get it licensed for street use, and throughout 1922 he drove it as his personal car, until he sold it to make room in his garage for Chitty III. Chitty II thereafter passed through several other hands and eventually ended up in a museum.
Chitty III, in the meantime, debuted in 1924 and proved to be as good a race winner as the original Chitty, albeit marginally safer. (Zborowski was nearly killed in a crack-up in Chitty I in 1922, and while the car came through relatively unscathed and was promptly repaired, he never raced it again.) Unfortunately Zborowski joined Team Mercedes and was killed driving a factory car in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza later in 1924, so Chitty III passed into other hands, and an uncompleted Chitty IV was scrapped. Chitty III was still being raced at Brooklands as late as 1939, after which it was sold for road use and eventually junked, while a fifth car—which for some reason was not called "Chitty" but rather the Higham Brooklands Special (and later on, "Babs"), despite being built on the same principle of having a massive 27-litre American Liberty V12 engine stuffed under the bonnet of a minimalist body—passed into the hands of Parry Thomas. Thomas subsequently used "Babs" to set the World Land Speed Record in 1927, then was killed trying to best his own record, and "Babs" was buried with him. (And then dug up again in 1969, restored, and put on display in a museum, fortunately this time without Thomas.)
But what of the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which Zborowski cracked up in 1922 and never drove again? Well, after Zborowski's death in 1924, the car was purchased by none other than the sons of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Denis and Adrian, who restored it and wanted to race it, but wisely regained their collective sanity after test-driving it in Brooklands speed trials in the 1930s. Thereafter Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was left to rust and eventually cut up for scrap: a sad end for such a remarkable piece of machinery.
ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.
1 Actually, I did once own a TR3, but only for as long as it took me to realize the car was in fact a Frankensteinian resurrection slapped together from the corpses of a TR3 and a TR3A. This experience forever cured me of bidding on vintage cars on eBay. I now drive a Spitfire, weather permitting.
2 I'd call the banked oval at Brooklands the U.K.'s answer to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, except Brooklands opened first. Racing there ceased in 1939 and it's now the site of an aviation and automotive museum. If you're ever in Surrey, check it out.
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