The last Panhard to race in Le Mans is an aerodynamic piece of art | Hacker News Reader

The last Panhard to race in Le Mans is an aerodynamic piece of art

classicdriver.com

58 pointsKaibeezy22 comments

My wife is related to the Panhard family and many of them are collectors of the brand. There are 2 CDs in the family, perfectly restored. That car is indeed magnificent. The main problem is there's only a handful of mechanics who know and can work on such cars (leaving out the absurd money it requires). Replacing pieces can be an industrial endeavor to set up a factory line to craft new copies of the needed pieces.

> Replacing pieces can be an industrial endeavor to set up a factory line to craft new copies of the needed pieces.

Somehow I'm imagining that manufacturing parts for 60s small-volume car would be comparatively simple, considering that the original manufacturing processes could not have been that complex or specialized either? And I think cars in general were quite a lot simpler back then, especially this sort of light-weight race car would have been very much no frills?

Hah, you'd think so. But the skills required to make some gears are off the charts and CNC machinery doesn't fare all that much better because you first need to figure out what to make exactly. This requires a functional part, or at least one that will allow you do determine the key dimensions.

Bodywork and such is relatively easy, suspension and exhaust parts are doable. But engine parts and drivetrain components can be serious challenges.

>the original manufacturing processes could not have been that complex or specialized either?

this is sort of tangential, but I read that the NASA Saturn V rocket that took the astronauts to the moon could not be recreated today, the "manufacturing process" relied on a small army of skilled welders, machinists, fitters, etc. that just don't exist today. The new rockets being built now need to fit into the currently available industrial base.

For parts, additive manufacturing (3D printing) might be a suitable option? You can even print metal these days.

But what will you print? This is a non-obvious question: you will have to first design the part using nothing but an existing and often failed (sometimes catastrophically so) original. It wasn't rare in those days for every car to be unique.

Of course you need someone to design it. Which is not as difficult as it sounds. But the once-off nature is a hell of a lot easier than "setting up a manufacturing line" as the OP suggested.

Yes that was a bit of an exaggeration. It's not setting up a manufacturing line from scratch, but finding the spec sheets and contracting a workshop willing to do a small run on the desired parts, which is not that easy.

It feels somewhat exaggerated. These late Panhard are notorious for their finicky, aluminium-made air-cooled engines, however the parts can mostly be rebuild from scratch using a mill, a lathe and other common workshop tools. My grandfather (a mechanic) used to do that a lot back in the 60s for rare cars such as Bugattis.

The brand was pretty popular at some point, and there are a lot of enthusiasts, even a federation of Panhard fanclubs. When asking a workshop for some part, whether machining or molding or whatever, they generally group their needs to make runs of tens or hundreds of parts to make it viable.

Also I'm not talking about the CD, which is a race car and a different kind of beast, but most of their other models, from the start of the 20th century until the 60s.

> finished an impressive 16th overall, won its class on the ‘performance index’ basis and came third in the ‘efficiency’ category, completing the race at an average fuel consumption of 11.4 litres per 100 km for an average speed of 142 kmh.

In non-SI units, that’s 88 mph at 20.6 mpg.

It was a 750cc two-stroke running at WOT.

Notice it has licence plates. Back then it was not uncommon to drive the race cars from wherever they were (here, Paris) to Le Mans and other racetracks, simply driving it on ordinary roads :)

Some cars were driven on public roads from this [1] hotel to the Le Mans racetrack.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_de_France_(Le_Mans_/_La_...

> it boasts the lowest ‘Cd’ (co-efficient of drag) of any car ever built

Solar cars supposedly get a hair below 0.1 (Sunswift 7 is apparently at 0.095, the wiki claims Aurora is also there though it provides no source).

This makes the claim of 0.12 rather hard to believe unless they’re talking about completely different concepts.

"Sunswift 7" doesn't look completely different. In height and volume, they could be very similar.

Total drag is the coefficient multiplied by the frontal area. It may have a very good coefficient but with a much larger area and thus much more total drag.

Ah TIL, that would make sense.

the history and stories around le mans are just amazing.

i have a car that was bought to compete at the ‘63 le le mans. due to a fight between the stewards and and Lotus, it never ran — so they abandoned le mans for decades.

one thing to note that although the engineers of old built amazing things (the car feels incredible to drive) it is important to remember that racing was a blood sport and the safety level was not particularly high. just as a normal course of action, i was told to expect one or two cracks in the chassis annually, i have to have the wheels xrayed annually, etc.

What a beautiful car! But if I had a Citroën DS, you wouldn't be able to tear it from my cold, dead, fingers...

Owning one is a very achievable goal. They made almost 1.5 million of them; you can get a running example for under $25K and a very nice one for mid five-figures.

A DS-21 convertible is one of my dream cars. The issue is maintenance and parts of all those fancy features it introduced. There's a guy who maybe still at Netflix who has one.

I must be content to slog along refurbishing an '85 VW Westy (aka Transporter or T3). South Africa made them up until 2002, but those were RHD.

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