The French only built nine Talbot-Lago Type 150 CS teardrop coupes and one of the running examples happens to be in California at the Mullin Automotive Museum. If there’s a must see, this burgundy wonder is it.
When Talbot and Italian engineer Antonio Lago teamed up to create the perfect teardrop coupe, the resulting car could only be the pinnacle of art deco and pre-war automotive engineering.
The 1937 Type 150 CS came with a four liter engine with hemispherical combustion chambers and a trio of carburetors, a four-speed fully mechanical Wilson preselector-gearbox and a dashboard turned towards the driver. With about a 140 horsepower on tap, of course some went racing with them straight away at Le Mans.
There’s also a story of a chap called Freddy McEvoy who won a $10,000 bet driving this car from Paris to Nice in under 10 hours. Google says today, without using any highways like in the 30s, the trip takes 14 hours and 13 minutes. He only needed 9:45.
The preselector gearbox won’t necessarily work all the time, it’s almost eight decades old. On the plus side, you won’t find a car that looks this good standing still.
Photo credit: Jay Leno’s Garage
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