Last year I saw this interesting machine for the first time during the Kilomètre Lancé, held on the runway of Engadin Airport, in Switzerland. It's called Delahaye 107 Racer and having its name I was pretty sure I would have found more info on the internet. Nothing could be more wrong. Honestly I'm still not very knowledgeable about pre-war cars but I've learned you can find anything nowdays. Yet this Darracq V8-style vehicle seemed a total mystery.

Luckily at this year's Kilomètre Lancé I managed to see it again and get some info on this amazing build. And everything comes from the passion for cars of Riccardo Beccarelli, owner and driver of this 107 Racer, from OldtimergarageGR.ch.

From what I understood, the idea behind this project was to replicate the 1904 Premier Vanderbilt Cup Racer built by Carl Fisher, who later founded the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909. This car had a huge 15-liter (923 cu. in.) four-cylinder engine. Riccardo's car is called 'Delahaye 107' because the starting point for his recreation was a chassis of this car from 1924. Then he took him around 15 years to meticulously find pieces and parts from the exact same period of that chassis.

The engine on this Delahaye is a 6.2-litre, four-cylinder, air-cooled de Havilland Gipsy Major airplane engine that was used on biplanes. His initial idea was to run with a modified 6-cylinder inline engine from a Franklin car of those years, powered by methanol, but it didn't last long. The Gipsy Major has around 150 hp, with a rev limiter set at 2,500 rpm. But there's a further particularity: the original Jipsy was a so called 'inverted engine', which has the cylinder heads directly beneath the crankshaft.

The inverted layout was adopted in aviation for a number of benefits such as improved access to cylinder heads and manifolds for the ground crew, having a lower centre of mass in the engine and, for engines mounted in the nose, improved visibility for the pilot and placing the widest part of a multi-bank engine closer to the midline of the fuselage, which is typically its widest point.

This was a further challenge for Riccardo who had to mount and modify it to work like a typical automotive engine. He also had to change the camshaft because the engine was rotating in the wrong direction but he also placed it on the chassis with crankcase facing the front of it. This was done to have quick access to the gears and easily change them to vary the maximum speed.

Enjoy some bizarre start-up procedures, details and some runs down the airstrip of this incredible piece of machinery!

0:00 Close Ups - Pre-Event Day
0:40 Warm Up - Pre-Event Day
3:51 Further Close Ups
4:33 Morning Warm Up
6:41 Heading to the start line
8:19 Accelerations on the runway (2023)
9:40 Accelerations on the runway (2022)

#Delahaye107Racer #Delahaye107 #JipsyMajor
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Camcorder: Canon Legria GX10 + Zoom H5 & Canon Legria HF G30 + Canon DM-100 Microphone
Event: Kilomètre Lancé 2022 & 2023
Where: Engadin Airport, Switzerland

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