Beschreibung:

Every serious motorist needs to have driven a car with a displacement of more than ten liters at least once in their lifetime, but only a very fortunate few can aspire to the ownership of such awesome monsters, for which a special class has been created at the world-renowned Pebble Beach Concours. The combination of high road speed at low revolutions and immense torque all the way through is an experience that cannot be matched by any other kind of motor car. And among the exclusive group of ten liter-plus production cars, the 10,618cc Tipo KM Isotta Fraschini of 1911-14 stands supreme, for it combines the most advanced technology of the pre-Great war era with effortless performance. “It was,” wrote Angelo Tito Anselmi of the Tipo KM in his 1977 history of the Isotta Fraschini marque, “a car built for the pure pleasure of speed, without regard for any racing formula and utterly without compromise.” Pioneer motor racer Charles Jarrott was equally uncompromising: “He named the 100-hp Isotta Fraschini as ‘tops’ of the pre-1914 sports cars,” recalled that discriminating “purveyor of horseless carriages to the nobility and gentry”, the late David Scott Moncrieff. Famed as the manufacturers in the 1920s of the world’s first production straight-eight motor car, the Isotta Fraschini company was founded in 1900 as a garage and sales agency by Cesare Isotta and the brothers Vincenzo and Oreste Fraschini. The firm soon turned to manufacture of shaft-driven voiturettes in its little factory on the Via Melzi d’Eril in Milan. These were designed by the firm’s engineering consultant Giuseppe Gaetano Stefanini, who was supplanted in 1906 by the high-spirited Venetian engineer Giustino Cattaneo, although he retained his connection with the company and collaborated with Cattaneo for several years more. The pair’s output was prodigious; by the outbreak of the Great War, Isotta Fraschini had produced almost 40 different models, with an enviable sporting record: victory in the 1907 Coppa Florio and Briarcliff Trophy, victory again in the 1908 Briarcliff, as well as at Lowell, Long Island and Savannah, and highest-placed four-cylinder racers in the Coupe des Voiturettes, were high points of the company’s involvement in competition. Stefanini had been a pioneer of the overhead camshaft engine with his 1905 100-hp, 17-liter, Tipo D racer and the influential 1.2-liter Tipo FE voiturette of 1908, and Cattaneo – who defined the layout of the production machinery in Isotta’s new factory in the Via Monterosa, made necessary by the increasing demand for the firm’s automobiles – followed his predecessor’s lead when laying out the 1911 Tipo KM and its “little brothers” the 6.2-liter Tipo TM and TC and 7.2-liter Tipo IM. These advanced single overhead camshaft fours drew on the company’s experience in the new technology of aeroengine design and manufacture, with bi-block cylinders, four big valves per cylinder and lightweight construction based on that of the Series V dirigible engine. The engine of the Tipo KM, which developed 120 hp at 1600 rpm, had a bore and stroke of 130x200mm (5.12x7.87 in), liberally-drilled pistons of the finest BND Derihon steel that weighed less than 32 ounces and tubular BND conrods 16 inches long that tipped the scales at just 7 lb. Equally significantly, the Tipo KM pioneered the fitment of internal-expanding front-wheel brakes, which has been described as Cattaneo’s greatest contribution to automotive technology and was patented as early as February 1910. It enabled the fortunate – and fortuned – owner of the Tipo KM to enjoy its performance to the full in an era when every other high-powered car on the roads had braking on the rear wheels only. Cattaneo’s solution to the problem of locking the wheel on the inside of the curve under braking that beset so many early attempts to provide front wheel braking was both simple and demanding of absolute accuracy in manufacture, with the transverse operating shaft of the internal expandi