Wally Baran wanted a 1947 Tatra 87 badly enough to spend four years negotiating for one (the “See­ing Red” sidebar is below). He finally acquired our drive report car in 1979. The speed­ometer had been disconnected long before, so the real mile­age on it is anyone’s guess. Mechanically, it has been repaired but never truly restored. The paint and upholstery are new, but authentic. (Twice as liberal as Henry Ford, Ledwinka served up T87s in any color you wanted, as long as you wanted black or silver.) The dash remains original, largely because it is a structural component of the body and cannot be removed for restoration. Some minor parts, such as window seals and some trim, are simply unobtainable and had to be improvised and/or approximated. Second gear was un­available for comment during our drive, and the rear suspension had recently been rebuilt using leaf springs with a bit too much arch in them—compromising the rear end’s critical geometry. Such things are to be expected in a car so rare, and so far from home.

In 1995, Wally lent his Tatra to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montréal, as part of a 51-car exhibition titled Beaute Mo­bile. Since then, it has become something of an international celebrity. “I get calls from Oklahoma or Virginia,” Wally reported. “They say, ‘We’re going to be driving through Pennsylvania; exactly where are you?’ They want to stop and see the car, and they all seem to know something about it.”

During our test drive, we stopped briefly on a small-town Main Street, and people came out of their houses to stare. They couldn’t have looked more startled if the Tatra had just arrived from Mars.

The front doors open more suicide-style, and you step down into the interior. The front seats are broad and flat and high off the floor; they offer good support under the thighs and behind the shoulders. The steering wheel and pedals are offset toward the center—so much so that the wheel rubs my right thigh. (Wally, who is taller and thinner, doesn’t have this problem.)  Three rear-seat passengers can enjoy generous hip and leg room but might find the seatback a bit upright and head room critically tight, particularly in cars fitted, like this one, with the optional sunroof.

Unfortunately, the Tatra’s designers never quite worked out the problem of rearward visibility, either. From the driv­er’s seat, the token rear window looks about as large as a 5×7 index card. Behind it lies the luggage compartment, then another bulkhead with another window, then the engine bay and finally the louvers at the back of the car. Light filtering through the louvers, combined with reflections trapped between the two panes of glass, make what little you can see appear ghostly and ethereal. Nor do the fender-mounted mirrors help; they vibrate too much to stay adjusted. The best technique for seeing to the rear is to stick your head out the side window and look back. In comparison, the odd three-piece windshield seems downright normal.

Simply inserting the key switches on the ignition (a la Bugatti); twisting it turns on the lights. Pull out the choke, pump the accelerator, and push the but­ton in the center of the dash. The starter howls energetically, and then the engine explodes with a sound I didn’t ex­pect, but should have: the rumble of a high-performance V-8 crossed with the mechanical clatter of a VW Beetle. The gear lever is long, stiff, and substantial; and rotates smoothly in a ball-and-socket joint in the floor. First gear requires some hunting to engage and sings the usual vintage siren song. Third engages more easily and runs quieter. (An assist spring pushes the shifter toward the 3-4 gate.) Fourth, like third, is easily located; and once you’ve arrived there, little further shifting is required. Just like a US auto from the same era, the Tatra can be lugged around lazily in top gear without complaint. It starts smoothly in third, briskly in first, and with all four gears working, it would probably out-sprint most contemporary American sedans.

Handling is…interesting. The owner’s manual recommends inflating the tires to 18 psi in the front, and 27-29 psi in the rear—proportions familiar to Cor­vair owners. The rack-and-pinion steering is light and fast, with very good “road feel” for a 1947 automobile.  On the other hand, the Tatra does feel tail-heavy, more so than any vintage VW or Porsche I have driven. Even in relatively gentle driving, it’s easy to turn the wheel too hard into a corner, only to have to dial it back slightly to adjust the Tatra’s attitude. To its credit, the Tatra re­sponds to these corrections with instant obedience. And Wally assured me that his car’s tail-wagging tendencies have been greatly aggravated by the new springs.

The Tatra certainly rides comfortably on most roads, with about as much wind and mechanical noise as you might expect from a car of its age. On rough pavement its ride becomes stiff and jiggly, but not out of proportion to its sporty, responsive handling.

The bottom-hinged brake pedal re­quires some effort to push it “over the top”; still, the binders are effective for 1947—and remarkably fade resistant. Without second gear, we relied on them heavily; and they shrugged off steep hills that would have evaporated the braking power of many American cars built in the sixties.

Tempting as it is to think of the T87 as a giant VW Beetle, the resemblance is only superficial; the Czech car is not only bigger, but more powerful, more ex­pensive, and far more quiet and refined.

Yes, Ledwinka’s masterpiece is flawed by the inherent imbalance of its rear-engine design. And yet, this relentlessly odd machine drives easily and smoothly, combining the aggressive handling of a sports car with luxurious accommodations for five. It is truly a “sports sedan”—created decades before the marketing mavens popularized the phrase.

History and Background

Nestled in a small village in eastern Moravia, across the Slovak border from the mountains that gave it its name, the Tatra factory built heavy trucks and railway wagons and hardly more than a thousand automobiles per year. Yet in the 1920s and thirties, this little firm commanded the attention of Europe’s cognoscenti for its daring innovation. Even US automakers imported Tatras for study.

When the T87 debuted in 1936, it marked the pinnacle of Tatra’s technical success—a fast, comfortable flagship, hand-crafted in limited numbers for a discerning and adventurous few. Ivan Margolius and John G. Henry, the authors of the only English-language book on Tatra history, crowned the T87 as “the ultimate Tatra achievement.” Who knows what might have followed—had not war and communist oppression stifled further development for the next half-century.

The Tatra could trace its ancestry to the Nesselsdorfer car of 1897, named for its home village in the Austro-Hun­garian empire. But when the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain assembled the new nation of Czechoslovakia from the former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slo­vakia, German names were enthusiastically expunged in a wave of Czech na­tionalism. Thus Nesselsdorf (“Nettle Vil­lage” in German) became Koprivnice; and the Nesselsdorfer Wagenbaufabrik became Koprivnicka vozovka.

Shortly after that, while testing prototypes with four-wheel brakes (in 1918!) in the snow-covered mountains, the Koprivnicka engineers pulled into the village of Lomnice, amazing the local population with their conquest of the slippery slopes. “This would be a car for the Tatras!” shouted one bold individual. The new badge began to appear on Koprivnicka products the following year, although the corporate title did not change to Zavody Tatra a.s. until 1927.

For 1923, Tatra debuted its first popularly priced car: the bold and rugged T11, designed specifically for the poor road conditions and extreme temperatures of middle Europe. Literally central to its design was a tubular backbone frame, which isolated the lightweight body-work from torsional stress. The front end of this tube fanned out to cradle a 1,056-cc, air-cooled opposed twin producing 13 bhp, with the transmission bolted up directly behind it. The driveshaft ran straight through the tube to a Rumpler-type jointless swing axle (the “It Don’t Mean a Thing if the Joint Doesn’t Swing” sidebar is below).

The T11 won its class in the Solitude Hill Climb of 1924, and won outright the grueling Tiflis-Leningrad-Moscow rally of 1925. Racing versions with 35 bhp and independent front suspension won the 1,100-cc class of the Targa Florio. In all, Tatra built 3,524 T11s in 1922-25; then another 7,525 T12s—with four-wheel brakes and other improvements—in 1926-33.

Tatra technical chief Hans Ledwinka did not invent the backbone frame; Rover used the earliest known example in 1904. But no one else exploited the idea so thoroughly. Convinced that his backbone-and-swing-axle combination was equally valid for small cars, big trucks, and everything in between, Ledwinka developed a series of larger models based on the layout of the T11/12, beginning with the T17 in 1926, powered by a two-liter, water-cooled, ohc six. Several intermediate models followed—the T30, T52, T54, and T57—all with air-cooled flat fours.

In 1930 he launched the T80, with a 150-inch wheelbase, four-wheel hy­draulic brakes, and independent suspension all around. A six-liter, water-cooled L-head V-12 provided the power. Only 25 were built—and not all of those sold. The T70 and 70a, six-cylinder models based on the same chassis, enjoyed only slightly better success, with 120 produced in 1930-38.

These were good times for Czecho­slo­vakia, a young, proud country enjoying a democratic constitution and new-found industrial prosperity. By 1929, ten Czech automakers were producing a combined annual total of 12,000 automobiles—a significant number, but still modest compared to western Europe. Ledwinka looked to the more lucrative markets in Germany and France, convinced that a large and powerful engineering tour-de-force would sell the Tatra name abroad.

Next, Ledwinka tried a small, rear-engine prototype: the two-cylinder, 850-cc V570 of 1933. The rear-engine layout ap­pealed to Ledwinka for several reasons. First, it put the sound of the en­gine behind the passenger space, an es­pecially important consideration in a small car. Second, it eliminated the drive­shaft—a potential source of imbalance and vibration—and with it, the me­chanical inefficiency of U-joints. It also allowed more room in a lower car, with a lower center of gravity. And it forced the passengers forward, into the center of the wheelbase, for a more comfortable ride and better forward visibility.

The V570 looked like a slab-sided preliminary sketch for the still-to-come Volks­wagen, and surely Ledwinka realized that Tatra couldn’t produce so small a car in profitable numbers. But the experiment convinced him that a bigger, faster, rear-engined streamliner might indeed crack the rich western market. Certainly, the Autobahn network proposed by Germany’s new Führer would create a demand for such a vehicle there.

Engineer Erich Übelacker, who had also worked on the V570, laid out the basic design for the new big car, suggesting an air-cooled V-8 for power. Übelacker believed that seven was his lucky number, so it isn’t surprising that he named this critical creation Type 77.

Tatra unveiled the T77 in early 1934, when it was hailed as the star of the Berlin Auto Show. Übelacker had de­signed the body as a self-supporting mono­coque, all steel except for some wood in the doors. Margolius and Henry describe it, after a cursory nod to the Chrysler Airflow, as “the world’s first all-enveloping streamlined body.” Dr. Paul Jaray, the celebrated prophet of the wind tunnel, had traveled to Koprivnice personally to consult on the design.

Certainly the T77 advanced the art of automotive styling. It was too low to need running boards, and wider than its axle at the rear—although it retained rear fender blisters as a styling element. Übelacker wanted a curved windshield, too, but curved safety glass was unobtainable in central Europe. Photos show at least one prototype with a flat windscreen, although production models settled for a three-piece, bay-window compromise.

Underneath, the traditional Tatra chassis tube had been replaced by a box-section girder, forked at the rear to support the 2,970-cc (75 x 84 mm), 90-degree V-8—on three very modern rubber engine mounts. The central girder en­closed the fuel lines, shift linkage, and wiring harness; with access ports to permit repairs. Two spare tires and the battery balanced the nose. Some soft luggage would fit there, too, although the main luggage area lay behind the rear seat, above the transmission. Led­winka retained a jointless swing axle at the rear, suspended on diagonally cantilevered leaf springs. Each half-axle was in turn “suspended” from its spring by a rubber block, and the crown wheels were continuously sprayed with oil from a pump in the transmission. The front suspension was independent as well, sprung by a transverse leaf.

With hemispherical heads and single overhead cams, the aluminum-alloy V-8 produced 60 bhp at 3,500 rpm. A scirocco fan under each bank of cylinders, driven by a V-belt from the crankshaft, forced pressurized cooling air into a sheet-metal jacket. Dry-sump lubrication with a separate oil cooler dissipated additional engine heat. The top three of four forward gears were helically cut and in constant mesh, but not synchronized. The engine and transaxle were easily removable as a single unit.

The T77 was a big car, riding a 123-inch wheelbase and weighing some 3,700 pounds. Its advanced styling and comfortable interior generated brisk sales (by Tatra standards). Still, its performance and handling were disappointing—and Ledwinka knew he could do better.

A band-aid solution for the performance problem arrived in 1935 with the T77a, which had its bore enlarged from 75 to 80 mm for 3,380 cc and 70 bhp. A more stylish front end moved the headlights from the hood out to the fenders, and sprouted a spotlight in the center, which could be made to steer with the front wheels. At the rear, the 77a body swallowed the last vestiges of the T77’s separate rear fenders.

By now, however, Ledwinka was convinced that a better solution for both performance and handling was not a bigger engine but a smaller car. He assigned Übelacker’s team to shorten and lighten the T77a without compromising its interior room. Ultimately, the en­gineers shaved nearly a foot off of the wheelbase. At the same time, they re­designed the body to stiffen its structure, and restyled it for a smoother, more fluid look. The front fenders now faded into the doors in a manner that would not be seen on US cars for another half-dozen years. Neat air scoops, mounted high on the body behind the rear doors, replaced the huge, awkward intake that had yawned across the engine hood of the T77a.

Ledwinka’s son Erich developed the “a” engine, conceptually similar to the old one, but 24 percent lighter, and de­veloping 75 bhp from just 2,968 cc. The factory now claimed a top end of 100 mph. (In actual testing at the Padua Auto­strada, the new model topped out at 93.9.) Third and fourth gears were synchronized, second engaged by a dog clutch, and first and reverse by sliding in and out of mesh, the old-fashioned way.

New convenience items added sales appeal. One was a Bijur central lubrication system; the other a sliding steel roof panel to replace the canvas sunroof option on the T77 and 77a. The result was the T87 of 1936. Ledwinka considered it his favorite creation.

At the same time, Tatra announced an even smaller companion model called T97, riding on a 102.4-inch wheelbase, and powered by a 1,760-cc, 40 bhp, air-cooled flat four. For two-thirds of the price, the T97 looked almost exactly like its big brother, but with two headlights and a one-piece flat windshield. Top speed was 81 mph.

Tatra was still enjoying the success of these new models when the Munich Agree­­ment of September 30, 1938, turned Koprivnice over to Nazi Germany as part of the Sudetenland. The German military occupied the factory on October 10, confiscated key patents, and stopped production of new vehicles, allowing only the manufacture of spare parts. (Up to that time Tatra had built 12,015 T57s, about 500 T97s, and a combined total of 1,000 of the T77, T77a, and T87.) Later in the war, the German conquerors allowed Tatra to build trucks and T87s—but no smaller models. Dr. Fritz Todt, general inspector of the Autobahn, drove a T87 himself, and arranged for production to resume. For a while, Tatra was the only company in Europe manufacturing new passenger cars.

For the rest of his life, Ledwinka be­lieved that the Germans had shut him down to protect their domestic industry—particularly the newborn Volks­wagen—from Tatra’s more advanced products.

Vauxhall engineers extensively examined, disassembled, and tested a captured T87 in 1946. Experimental engineer H.A. Dean prepared a report noting that “the designers of this unorthodox car have produced a vehicle that is full of interest, having several good features…. This advantage is, however, more than offset by the fact that under all load conditions the vehicle is inherently unstable at moderately high speeds.” By Dean’s own admission, however, his Tatra was a poor specimen with many hard miles; its engine was smoking badly, and its brake linings were worn to nothing.

Volkswagen engineers tested Led­winka’s own T87 in their wind tunnel in 1979 and measured a Cd of 0.36, still bet­ter than most cars then in production.

After the war, T87s trickled from the nationalized factory—with their steering wheels moved to the left, as the Ger­mans had dictated. Only Party members could afford them. Postwar reality finally caught up with Tatra in 1949, and the big car was discontinued in favor of the 1,950-cc, flat-four T600 “Tatraplan” that Ledwinka had developed during the war. It looked very much like a modernized T97, with front fenders and headlights at last fully integrated into its pontoon-sided body.

Still, the ghost of the T87 must have haunted Koprivnice. As prosperity re­turned to Europe, Tatra returned to a rear-mounted, air-cooled V-8 with the 2.5-liter T603 of 1956, featuring modern bodywork and an all-coil suspension. Today Tatra is best known for its heavy-duty trucks, which have competed successfully in the revived Paris-Dakar rally.

Hans Ledwinka, 1878-1967

Although his name is permanently linked with Czechoslovakia’s most famous automobile, Hans Ledwinka never learned to speak Czech, and always considered himself an Austrian. During his long career he was offered both Czech and German citizenship; he turned both offers down.

Ledwinka was born in Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, on St. Valentine’s day in 1878. By 1897, with the ink barely dry on his Staatsgewerbeschule diploma, he as­sisted pioneer Karl Gräf in the design of an advanced front-drive prototype. Then he traveled to Moravia to seek employment at the Nesselsdorf Wagon Works. The factory there had manufactured railway cars since 1890, and management had just decided to launch their own automobile-building branch—the first in the territory that would be Czechoslovakia. Ledwinka was officially assigned to the railroad side of the business, but closely followed the automotive project, which was headed by his fellow Viennese, Edmund Rumpler. Rumpler was just 24 then, fresh out of school himself, and soon moved on to greener pastures in Berlin. Ledwinka slipped comfortably into his shoes.

By 1902, however, Ledwinka himself was feeling restless—and chafing at his un­comfortable relationship with Nessels­dorf production manager Leopold Svitak. So the young engineer left to join a team that was designing a new steam car in Vienna.

But December 1905 found the steam-car effort folded, and Ledwinka back in Nes­sels­dorf as the chief engineer of the automobile division. One of his first projects, which debuted in 1909, was a sohc hemi-head six with the gearbox attached in unit with the engine. But again he locked horns with management, and left Nesselsdorf in May 1916 to help Austrian arms manufacturer Steyr set up its own automotive division. In all probability, he conceived the T11 for Steyr. By 1921, however, Nessels­dorf (Koprivnice, by then) sorely missed its resident genius, and new managing director Leopold Pasching personally traveled to Austria to offer Ledwinka the position of chief engineer and technical director. Led­winka accepted, and returned with the drawings for the T11.

Because he could not speak Czech, Ledwinka surrounded himself with bilingual associates—many of them brought over from Steyr. On his orders, all Tatra drawings were captioned in German. Baron Hans Freiherr von Ringhoffer, the in­dustrialist who bought the factory in 1923, trusted Ledwinka implicitly and allowed him near total autonomy. Led­winka could be an intense, driven worker, rigid regarding deadlines. He dictated letters from the shop floor and talked out loud to himself (often critically) while drawing plans. But he also boosted morale during overtime by ordering meals for the workers—and he never hesitated to take an afternoon off when the work was lighter.

He disliked publicity and generously shared credit for his successes. And for all his interest in innovation, he cared little for sports or race cars, preferring the real chal­lenge of developing reliable family transportation for reasonable prices. He enjoyed driving, and tested many prototypes himself, but he also liked the convenience of a chauffeur when traveling on business.

The extent of his influence over the Volks­wagen is still disputed. Having seen the V570 at the 1933 Berlin auto show, Adolf Hitler summoned Ledwinka to a private meeting. Ledwinka’s younger son Erich later claimed that his father used this occasion to sell Hitler on the basic layout for the Volkswagen, which the Führer then dictated to Dr. Porsche—an interpretation surely colored by family loyalty. But Ledwinka did discuss his rear-engine ideas with Porsche, and Porsche himself ac­knowledged the Tatra influence in his Zün­dapp Typ 12—itself a direct ancestor of the Beetle. “Sometimes I looked over his shoulder,” shrugged Herr Doktor Porsche, “and sometimes he looked over mine.”

In 1942, Ledwinka was named honorary director of the Technical Museum of Vienna; and in 1944, the Vienna Technical College presented him with an honorary doctorate. Such honors did him little good when the war gave way to Soviet occupation. The newly ensconced Czech communists savagely purged ethnic Germans and Hungarians who could not prove that they had actively opposed Fascism. They ac­cused Ledwinka of supplying trucks to the Nazis and hence, collaboration. They had to try him three times before they obtained a conviction. Ledwinka served six years in prison at Novy Jicin.

The Communists released Ledwinka into exile in Austria 1951—then realized they needed him at Tatra. Would he return to manage the company—with no hard feelings, eh? Ledwinka turned them down. By 1954 he had set up an engineering consulting firm in Munich, and had been awarded the medal of honor for technical achievement by the German journal VDI.

Shortly before Germany annexed the Su­de­ten­land, Tatra had brought a suit against the KdF-Wagen organization for in­fringements of patents regarding ducted cooling, engine mounting, and gearbox layout. Ringhoffer’s heirs pursued the suit against Volkswagen after the war, and on October 12, 1961, the Regional Court in Düsseldorf upheld one of the three claims, which VW made good for $750,000. Led­winka tried to obtain a share of the settlement but could not afford an attorney. Hearing of his colleague’s plight, rotary-engine pioneer Felix Wankel volunteered his own legal counsel. But the 89-year-old Ledwinka died on March 2, 1967, before any results were obtained. He had, in the meantime, donated his personal T87 to the VW museum in April 1965.

Erich Ledwinka, who had succeeded Übelacker as chief engineer in 1936, left the nationalized factory ten years later. His place was taken by another protege of his father’s, Julius Mackerle, who designed the T603. Erich joined Steyr-Daimler-Puch and rose to chief engineer, a post he held as recently as the mid-eighties. His older brother Fritz was a sales executive at the same firm.

The American engineer Joseph Ledwinka (1869-1949), who pioneered pressed-steel body construction with Edward G. Budd, and later worked on the front-drive Rux­ton, was a distant cousin.

It Don’t Mean a Thing if the Joint Doesn’t Swing

As key to the Tatra design as its backbone frame is its jointless swing axle, which was patented by Nesselsdorfer alumnus Edmund Rumpler while working for Adler in 1903. Adler had been buying engines from De Dion in France, so Rumpler was familiar with that firm’s namesake jointed drive axles. He considered the De Dion system overly complicated, and set out to improve it.

Rumpler’s solution consisted of separate left and right axle halves that could slide up and down through slots in a fixed, center-section casing, guided by internal shoes. Inside, each half-shaft terminated in a large crown wheel, driven by a pinion. Rumpler dispensed with universal joints en­tirely by simply allowing the crown wheels to pivot around their driving pinions. Interference was avoided by using crown wheels and pinions of different di­ameters (but, obviously, the same gear ratio) for the right and left sides.

Adler chose not to put Rumpler’s design into production. In fact, no one else paid the swing-axle idea much attention either, until the Cornelian cyclecar—built in Allegan, Michigan—appeared in 1914. The tiny and almost unknown Cornelian rode on a swing axle with universal joints—probably the world’s first series-production application of independent rear suspension. The bold little company even entered a car in the 1915 Indi­an­ap­o­lis 500, with no less a driver than Louis Chev­rolet. The Cornelian performed well against the much larger-engined competition until it broke a valve on the 77th lap. Perhaps because of the Cornelian’s heroic performance—or perhaps just coincidentally—Rumpler filed several patents for im­proved versions of his jointless axle later that year. By 1919, he had built his first Tropfen-Auto, which incorporated a rear engine, swing axle, and other ad­vanced features. Ledwinka’s T11 followed in late 1922.

About a year later, Benz pointed the way to the future with its Typ RH race car, featuring a rear engine, inboard brakes—and a swing axle with two universal joints.

seeing red

Polish by ancestry, Wally Baran has visited his ancestral homeland nearly every year since 1957, when eastern Europe re-opened to tourism. While driving through Czechoslovakia in 1970 (to avoid the horrific bureaucratic hassle of passing through East Germany), he met up with an antique auto rally and struck up a friendship with several members of Amk Svazarm, the veteran car club of Prague. Through them, he developed a fascination with the Tatra, and asked his new friends to help him locate one for his collection.
They found our driveReport car in 1975, and Wally immediately began to negotiate its liberation. He made several trips to Czechoslovakia to secure permission from the Bureau of Museums and Antiquity, and to have the car appraised by the Bureau of Motor Transport. Friends at the Prague Museum of Automobiles and Transport helped. He was notified by mail that he could remove the car from Czechoslovakia in October 1979.
Profit is illegal in a Communist state, of course, so technically the Tatra’s owner sold it to the Czech government, who then marked up the price and re-sold it to Wally. The Czech authorities also insisted that Wally drive it out of the country personally. He flew to Prague and spent a day in the bank before someone believed that his American certified checks wouldn’t bounce. He finally drove off in his prize with a bill of sale and “the necessary papers for the Austrian border”—but no title. His club friends followed him for the 120-mile drive. A soldier stopped them about a half-mile from the border and, after thoroughly inspecting the Tatra and its papers, agreed that Wally could proceed but that his friends could not.
At the actual border, guards again stopped Wally, and after inspecting the Tatra for two hours (Wally thinks they just liked old cars) agreed to allow him to cross over into Austria. But the free world re­quires a title and proof of insurance—and you can’t buy insurance in Austria without a title. Nor were the Austrians particularly happy about Wally’s Pennsylvania “Antique Historic Auto” tags, although they hadn’t bothered the Communists a bit. Fortunately, the supervisor of the Aus­trian border guards was an old-car enthusiast, and he allowed Wally to pass after affixing a sign to the Tatra warning that it had no turn signals.
Wally had arranged to leave his Tatra in Schwertberg, to be shipped to America from there. He pulled in ten minutes before the shipping company office closed for the weekend. At first the clerk in charge refused to accept the Tatra without a title, but after much discussion the owner of the firm became involved, and it turned out that he had once had a ’37 T87 himself. Now he collected antique cars. He accepted the Tatra for shipment and then took Wally to see his own collection.
The Tatra arrived safely in Baltimore 16 days later, and from there Wally drove it home to Pennsylvania without further incident.

1947 Tatra 87 technical specs

• Standard equipment. includes
• individually reclining front seats
• lamination-type oi filter
• oil-filled air cleaner,
• heater and defroster
• Options equipment
• sliding steel sunroof
• V-8 ENGINE
• bore x stroke: 2.95 inches x 3.31 inches
• displacement: 181 cubic inches
• compression ratio: 5.6:1
• bhp @ rpm: 75 @ 3,500
• Valve gear: overhead valve, chain driven
• Carburetor: single solex 2-bbl downdraft
• Fuel system: mechanical pump
• Lubrication system: pressure, dry sump
• Cooling system: pressurized air cooling with auxiliary oil cooler
• Exhaust system: single with transverse muffler
• Electrical system: 12-volt
• TRANSMISSION
• Type; four-speed manual with synchro-mesh on third and fourth
• 1st 4.70:1
• 2nd 2.95:1
• 3rd 1.56:1
• 4th 1.04:1
• Reverse 5.92:1
• CLUTCH
• Type: single dry plate
• REAR AXLE
• Type: helical
• Ratio: 3.15:1
• STEERING
• Type: rack & pinion
• Turns: lock-to-lock 2.9
• Ratio: 21.3:1
• BRAKES
• Type : ATE-Lockheed 4-wheel hydraulic, drum type
• CHASSIS & BODY
• Construction: unit body with integral box- section backbone, forked at the rear to support the drive- line
• Body style: five-passenger sedan
• SUSPENSION
• Front: independent, with kingpin-type uprights located between upper and lower transverse leaf springs
• Rear: jointless swing axles, cantilevered semi-elliptic leaf springs
• Shock absorbers: hydraulic, lever-type, front and rear
• Tires: 6.50 x 16
• Wheels: stamped steel disc, 16-inch
• WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
• Wheelbase: 112.2 inches
• Overall length: 186.6 inches
• Overall width: 65.7 inches
• Overall height: 59.0 inches
• Front track: 49.2 inches
• Rear track: 49.2 inches
• Min. road clearance 9.0 inches
• Weight: 3,014 pounds
• Weight distribution (f/r): 38/62
• CAPACITIES
• Engine oil: 9.5 quarts (less filter)
• Transmission: 5.2 quarts
• Rear axle: included in transmission
• Lubrication system: 20 gallons
• Fuel tank: 14.5 gallons (including reserve)
• CALCULATED DATA
• Bhp per c.i.d.: 0.41
• Bhp/c.i.d.: 40.2 pounds
• Lb./c.i.d.: 16.7 pounds
• P.S.I. (brakes) N/A
• PERFORMANCE*
• 0-30 mph: 7.4 seconds
• 0-50 mph: 18.1 seconids
• Fuel consumption: 19.2 mpg
• Lateral acceleration: 0.35 g (on 108-foot skid pad)

*prewar T-87 evaluated by Vauxhall engineers in 1946.

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