Packard Forum Index » Pre-War (1899-1942)

G'day TxGoat,
to PackardInfo.

I invite you to include any Packard/s, you may own, in PackardInfo's Packard Vehicle Registry.

If your car's free of sidemounts, don't add them. Old front-engined cars left the showroom floor with a tendency to plow (understeer), so if you see your fine 120--arguably Packard's best ever product for double or triple the money-- as a road car, not a garish clown car with every bolt-on option as so many old domestic owners in recent years, skip them. The front coil springs in sidemount cars have a different part number, which should tell you something.

The above posters right. Sidemounts detract from your car's trim lines, look especially silly on the diminutive juniors, and make attending to the engine bay a nuisance. Packard's 1933 Twelve "Car of the Dome," which was a bigger hit with both judges and public alike than Cadillac's V-16 aero coupe, Duesenberg's "Twenty Grand" and Pierce's Silver Arrow sedans at the Chicago World's Fair, was free of sidemounts.

Packard continued sidemounts into 1941, a losing year other than their new Clipper, simply as some older conservative folks liked them, the sort who more than likely despised FDR.

In the late '70s, when things more lax out here in the greater CA Bay Area, i pulled the '40 120 i then owned off the freeway at one of those big rig weigh stations. The attendant was glad to let me drive across the scale, first front end, then rear. Would that i still had that receipt and could share the numbers with you.

The fact that Packard used a different spring rate on cars with factory sidemounts tells me that they were diligent about matching the springs to the weight range of the individual car. A pair of sidemounts with covers and brackets would add about as much weight up front as 2 large men riding in a coupe. The pair of sidemounts would raise the center of gravity very slightly. The heavy Packard chassis and engine rode pretty low, and as heavy as the engine was, most of its mass was down low in the crankshaft and skirted block, and well back of the front axle in, in the bellhousing and flywheel/clutch and down within the frame rails. Double acting shocks all around and a roll bar in the back helped stabilize the car. I believe the 120 C cars had about the best suspension on the road in 1937, and the convertible coupe was probably the ideal body style to take maximum advantage of the chassis layout and the suspension's competence. For myself, I'll stick with a single spare in the trunk and keep the gas tank half full or more. New springs are available for pre-war Packards, but how accurately they match any particular car's orignal equipment springs, I do not know.

Didn't FDR ride in a sidemounted Packard?

I have little use for FDR, except as a war president, but I've been a Packard fan for over 60 years, from JFK right through today.

Don't read too much into what FDR and other leaders rode in. Such fire trucks/parade floats were meant to impress, convey power, dignity and usually had sidemounts simply as tire technology made such prudent. That, and in the event of a double blowout, albeit unlikely, it wouldn't do to have such an imposing barouche stranded on a crowded public street while Secret Service and local cops scurried around trying to find a nearby shop stocking 7.50 x 16 or 8.25 x 16 tires.

Remember what a paltry slivver of the auto industry such outsized automobiles were.

Such white elephants went for a song on the back row of big city used car lots not just because they were too big for routine driving and slurped gas, but because there were no longer tire sources.

Off subject, but some then young greater NYC/NJ/CT junior execs enamored of these cars launched the Classic Car Club of America in 1952 hoping to attract others so smitten. No one used the term "classic" until LA car buff lawyer Robert J. Gottlieb coined the term in one of his Motor Trend columns the preceding year. Before that, car mad adolescents and others referred to such as "fine cars."

When a Duesenberg first owned by Greta Garbo became the first car sold at auction to approach $100,000 in 1972, every old car became "classic." Then the me-generation boomers wanted their Mustangs and muscle cars to bask in the fiscal trickle down, so they, as well as Coke, pizza, and soon anything out of Kelley Blue Book became "classic."

Another case of spreading semi-literacy. Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, the Beatles, the Four Tops, Paul Simon and Joan Baez aren't classical music, but will survive the ages long as Vivaldi, Chopin, Brahms, Ravel, Villa-Lobos.

Further afield, but what does it tell you about the CCCA mindset that most Buick Roadmasters aren't "Classics," but the same car on a longer wheelbase with fancier interior (Limited) is? As well as the 1941-on cutrate Series 62 Cadillac, which shares every body panel with Pontiac, simply as oldsters prefer driving HydraMatic golf carts.

Why is this overview important? Because for too many years, the CCCA's arbitrary list of accepted wheels has second-tiered a field of better road cars, many of equal quality. The paucity of old sports cars underscores the CCCA lauding sheer size as much as anything.

But then some of us are catholic in our autoholia, and big tent politically, believing in democracy in all endeavors.

Early tires were notoriously un-dependable, and what roads existed were usually rough and well-salted with horse shoe nails and other debris. Pre-1920 cars were often festooned with dual sidemounts and dual rear mounts, and perhaps a couple of spare casings and tubes lashed on somewhere. Prudent motorists carried assorted tools and patching supplies, boots, liners, tire pumps, etc, and many larger cars had an on-board air compressor. By the late 1930s, sidemounts were as much a styling feature as anything else, much like the "Continental" rear mount spares and faux-spares that were in vogue in the 1950s and early 60's.

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The family that took their Packard coast-to-coast in 1908 packed, to start, 3 spare tires and 9 inner tubes, with more forwarded to Ogden, UT for resupply.