Buried in a stack of digitized patents is this design for a highly unconventional twin-engine race car.
Usually the internet winds up being a gigantic time-suck, leaving you with nothing but hours of burned productivity. Occasionally, though, you trip and fall into a rabbit hole and discover something truly wonderful. Such is the case with this strange patent filed by Italian race car driver Piero Taruffi. I couldn’t tell you exactly how I got here, but I’m sure glad I did.
First, a little background on the man behind US patent 2608264A: Piero Taruffi was not one of history’s great drivers in terms of the number of overall wins (in his six-season Formula 1 career, he won just once, at the 1952 Grand Prix de Paris — which didn’t even count for World Driver’s Championship points). But he had impressive range, and he was very, very good no matter what kind of riding or driving he was doing. Major wins included the 1951 Carrera Panamericana and the 1956 Nurburgring 1000 Kilometers (in a Maserati 300S alongside Jean Behra, Harry Schell and Stirling Moss, Behra and Moss having jumped in midrace when their 300S broke).
And most notably, he drove a Ferrari 315S to victory at the tragic 1957 Mille Miglia — the final running of the race, and Taruffi’s last outing as a pro driver. It was that same race that killed Alfonso de Portago, his navigator Edmond Nelson and 10 spectators, so perhaps Taruffi was wise to hang it up after that.
Out of the cockpit, he was the author of a noted book on racing, an advocate for motorsports safety during one of its most dangerous eras and an engineer and inventor with a handful of patents to his name. And he had a great head of silver hair, too, which earned him his nickname: the Silver Fox.
The tri-fuelselage design was intended to reduce the car’s frontal area, and thus, air resistance.
In addition to wheel-to-wheel racing, Taruffi pursued land speed records; he’d set the motorcycle land speed record in 1937, achieving a startling 170.373 mph over 1 mile on a Gilera Rondine. The Italcorsa/Tarf II, a craft he designed and constructed in 1951 for a shot at fastest car in the 2.0-liter class, was a Maserati four-powered bisiluro (“twin torpedo” in Italian). The driver sat in one fuselage, with engine beside him in the other. Conscious or not, the design comes off as a nod to his history of two-wheel racing — it looks more than a bit like two streamlined motorcycles joined together with Flash Gordon fins added to the rear of each for aerodynamic stability. And, I assume, flair.
It was as fast as it was fanciful: In 1952, his 185 mph two-way average speed was enough to earn him a spot in the record books.
But as crazy as it was, it was nowhere near as wacky as the machine detailed in one of Taruffi’s patents. If the Tarf II, and other similar cars from Italian designers, were “bisiluro” (Italian for twin torpedo), then this was a trisiluro.
The specifics of its design are detailed in a US patent filed Oct. 12, 1949, and granted Aug. 26, 1952. The line drawings accompanying the filing serve to illustrate the concept rather than reveal what an actual car might look like, but what’s shown is weird enough to make Smokey Yunick’s offset roadster look conventional.
From the patent: “The control devices, the motors, the driver and the eventual passengers will be placed in the aforementioned three parts so as to provide a streamlined vehicle, having better stability and handiness than the standard vehicles known up to the present, on account of the weights being placed prevailingly toward the middle of the unit and the drivers seat being displaced towards the rear end of the car. “
That “eventual passengers” part is intriguing: While the patent is very clearly for a race car, could Taruffi have been envisioning a commercial application for the design?
Per the filing, one of the main advantages of the design was centralized weight (the two engines could be mounted in the center of each of the pods, with no driver to get in the way). Another key goal was the reduction of aerodynamic resistance via minimization of frontal area — something Taruffi would have been very familiar with as a motorcycle land speed racer.
But the bizarre three-pod concept resembles nothing so much as a wingless airplane on floats. In fact, the patent filing cites another patent for an aircraft of vaguely similar design. It’s quite possible that Taruffi took some inspiration from the fighting aircraft of WWII; the legendary Lockheed P-38 Lightning saw action around the Mediterranean, and Italian firm Savoia-Marchetti experimented with a similar design, the SM.91.
What’s really curious is that, by the time Taruffi filed for the trisiluro patent, he was already experimenting with bisiluro cars: His sleek Tarf I, powered by a Guzzi V-twin motorcycle engine, debuted in 1948. We can’t say for sure why Taruffi failed to pursue the three-pod configuration, but I can offer some guesses.
Viewed from above, the design resembles a wingless, tailless floatplane.
First, air resistance increases with the square of velocity. For a land speed record car, perhaps Taruffi calculated that, at higher velocities, any power advantages offered by two engines was erased by the additional drag of a third fuselage — especially given the development of smaller, more power-dense auto engines after WWII.
Second, complexity: There’s the matter of synching two independent powertrains and figuring out how to steer the contraption from an elevated pod in the back. It’s hard enough to keep a conventional race car going as it is, and that’s without any extra high-strung racing engines threatening to grenade, unorthodox and delicate steering and shifting linkages, etc.
Third, it looks goofy, at least in the patent drawings. No self-respecting Italian would be caught dead in such a thing. Compare it to the Tarf II or its predecessor, the Tarf I (which looked even more like a proto-Bespin cloudcar); it’s not even close. Mechanically and visually, the bisiluro design is simply more elegant.
So there you have it: An interesting historical footnote tucked away in the vast, digitized repository of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, waiting for us to dust it off and wonder about what might have been. Who knows what I’ll stumble upon next!
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