Packard Forum Index » Post-War (1946-54)

I have been told that Dutch Darrin designed the 47 super clipper-I think I saw that in a Classic Car Mag a while back. Can anyone confirm that?

thks

As the story goes, Darrin submitted a design proposal for the new upcoming Clipper line. Supposedly the design or much of it was used, but Packard claimed it as their own. There is a lot more to the design and styling of the 41 - 47 Clippers, and Darrin's claim. Others here with more knowledge will fill in the gaps.

Short but accurate story/overview: Packard consecutively won the Gallop Poll's Most Beautiful Car in America 1935-37. But their pontoon fendered '38s lost to Buick. Two years later, Packard aped the '38 Buicks' hood louvers in chintzy fashion. Also in 1938, Cadillac's 60 Special Fleetwood, originally intended as the '37 LaSalle, cribbing its thin window frames from the '37 Panhard et Levassor Dynamic, and Lincoln Zephyr's horizontal grille simply as it aided cooling, gave Packard and the industry something to think about. The "Ford-and-a-half's" sideways grille set the industry on a lateral quest, focusing on width, not height, witness the horizontal side grilles on so many '40s automobiles, including your Clipper, Delahaye, and Alfa Romeo.

Packard's small design staff was at an impasse, even sticking 1940's new narrowed grille on a '40 Buick. GM's racy new 1940 C bodies available on all GMobiles save Chevrolet, made Packard's 1938 restyle look staid, shopworn by 1941, when East Grand's traditional bodies were box office poison, while Buick's and Cadillac's hits. Since Packard Darrins were already a well received counter to Lincoln's Continental, East Grand asked Dutch Darrin to render something. He did, and Alex Tremulis, then working for Briggs, and other insiders confirm the Clipper's theme was Darrin's, if adapted by Packard. East Grand's design chief, Werner Gubitz, responsible for Packard's crisp, chiseled look in the '30s, helping Packard look apart from the crowd, enabling the Company to capture 42% of all fine car (above $2,000 FOB) business through '36, and especially Howard Yaeger, even the '33 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow's designer, Phil Wright, were involved. They made a few changes: stopping the flow of the front fenders into the front doors, not at the bottom of the rear fenders as Darrin had, and Buick would, in bolt-on fashion, for 1942, decreased the size of Darrin's rear window for a more formal look, small bumps to conceal the vestigal runningboards, and used some GM C body cues.

Though introduced April first, 1941, halfway through that model year, and priced between the traditional bodied 120 and 160, the new Clipper outsold the former. Ford's Mustang was also introduced mid-year, in April '64, as a hedge, since that's traditionally when used car inventories at their lowest. Had war not intervened, largely Clipperized 1942 would've been Packards biggest year since 1937, when they whored themselves silly offering the little six--which should've been called something other than Packard-- but after years of Depression worry, who can blame them, and Packard had been offering juniors since late 1905; their Single Six/Six outsold the Eight over five to one through the 1920s. But Packard had never fielded a junior for less than a grand 'til the terrific '35 120, calling in B-O-P production men to help cost the project, even recruiting Chevrolet's sales manager Bill Packer to teach their dealers how to sell credit purchases to the middle class.

Packard was already fading, 1929 had been their most profitable year ever, and that was a long time ago. Owning the fine car business through 1936 was moot, since that was a slivver of industry sales. Their 1932-39 Twin Six/Twelve had never been intended as top of the line, only a 376 c.i. FWD V-12 Buick Model 80/90 contender, front wheel drive then the rage, witness Ruxton, Cord L-29, Miller racing cars, and was cheaper to produce than conventional rear wheel drive. But Cadillac, faced with three ton customs, realized a bigger V-8 would bring thermodynamic, balance, cooling woes. So after years of crowing over their V-8, to Packard's chagrin, introduced a straight eight with the firing impulses halved, a V-16, able to use their existing transmission. But with a public seeing more as better, Packard hurriedly stroked the new V-12--similar to Auburn's 391-ci Lycoming V-12 even to the splayed valve layout -- dropping it into the existing Custom 8 chassis, the '32 Twin Six having cooling issues as a result. Pierce Arrow's V-12, with three more main bearings, was designed from the outset as power for massive luxe barouches. However, if using GM's complicated valve silencers under license, while Pierce their patented new hydraulic valve lifters, Packard's Twelve was otherwise nonpareil, thanks to their penchant for over-engineering, quality, refinement, abetted by Gubitz's aforementioned sculpted tailoring, a chassis a trace more modern than Pierce's, certainly than the big archaic Lincolns which nonetheless had the finest craftsmanship of any big domestic, rivaling Rolls-Royce, which England's own respected Laurence Pomeroy dismissed as "a triumph of craftsmanship over engineering."

The point of this rainy Saturday afternoon digression, P-49, is to underscore that an already waning Packard was facing a new era preferring smart, rationally sized upscale, thanks to engineering improvements making sheer size look comic opera dated, so survival demanded a coup, the Clipper being Packard's last. Remember, too, that the P-51 Mustang, powered by a Packard-built Rolls-Royce engine, was called "the Cadillac of the skies."

Packard's later Ultramatic absorbed war profits merely as GM would not allow Packard to use Hydra-Matic until a year passed after any improvement East Grand made. So the Company conjured, essentially, a Dynaflow with lock up torque convertor, since smoothness was a Packard byword. East Grand's sole major engineering feat of the '50s, Torsion Level, was from an outside engineer after GM and Ford declined, Chrysler having torsion bars at the front only for '57, as Lagonda had in '38 while using after the war, a copy of Packard's prewar Safe-T-Flex i.f.s at the rear -- at the front postwar Rolls-Royce and Bentley. In 1948, Coventry's new Mark V saloon and the XK-120 intended to promote the Mark VII saloon's new engine had front torsion bars. The 1941-47 Clipper abandoned Safe-T-Flex for the same reasons Crewe did 1956 on; cost cutting, and the new, lowered floor pans allowed no room for the long torque arms.


Though Packard insiders including John Reinhart wanted to retain and his word, "sweeten" the Clipper, Packard felt pressured by developments of the new envelope bodies postwar, and blew as much of their war profits clobbing 200 lbs. of pork onto the svelte Clipper as an entirely new body would've cost. The same year that sad effort debuted, even as Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Chrysler, even Studebaker about to debut or working on ohv V-8s, Packard, addicted to less hassle, lucrative govt. and jet engine contracts, increasingly phoning in their cars for the sake of largely heartland middle-class conservatives glad to have something called "Packard," bothered only to introduce a pair of new versions of their 1935 One Twenty engine. Good flathead straight eights, certainly. For hobbyists today. Not for the company that once led, not followed, the industry, guided as Packard now was by former GM production managers.

For Packard's final new body, East Grand parked a Chevy-based '49 Olds in their styling studio, told John Reinhart and his small crew to use its cowl and roof heights as their guide. Steel cheaper than glass, the "high pockets" result was decried by its skilled designer, John Reinhart, tho' one observer complimented its hood being akin to a Cisatalia, unfortunately offset by what Consumer Reports called "the largest and probably the homeliest grille die casting in the industry."

Treasure your Clipper. Packard's ads for it in 1941 alluded to a trio of famed designers, unnamed. Masonic, Detroit Athletic Club, boardroom egos at Packard would hardly admit their company saving bellringer was thanks to a foul-mouthed raconteur and lady's man living in Hollywood. Dutch Darrin had a habit of over-selling, self-aggrandizing. He did not need to do that, anymore than Jelly Roll Morton and Little Richard needed to proclaim they invented jazz and rock 'n' roll.

Educated folk, a man, and a woman, driving late model top-rung BMW, and Mercedes, approached me at the gas station, filling my '47 Super Clipper, a Buick Roadmaster according to Packard, asking if it was "a Bentley" or "one of those big Jaguar sedans from the '50s." R-R/Bentley could do no better in their 1956-on Silver Cloud/S-Type than razor edge your Clipper adding the dubious achievement of a curved, one-piece windshield.

Thanks for all the inputs-I found the Classic car mag that gives Darrin credit for the 41-47 clipper. Spring 2023-a article focused on Darrin and his career