Nice car in auction

Thanks for posting, there's some really interesting cars on the auction list, my favourites include the Armstrong Siddeley and especially the NSU RO80 - it's amazing how this car still manages to look reasonably modern, it's a shame they were so let down by the Wankel technology not being up to the task at the time, if they'd used a conventional engine that car would possibly have been a real winner.

THE FOLLOWING 6 VEHICLES ARE FROM A SOUTH NORFOLK BASED PRIVATE COLLECTION

And the 2nd car is a 1988 Nissan Micra. Funny collection.

Zitat von "Argonaut"

...especially the NSU RO80...

Near 50 years down the track and still looking great that little bee
Imagine what people thought when this car made it to the streets in the late 60´s...

I grew up in that tiny town Neckarsulm a bit north of Stuttgart, where in the late 19th century a company existed that next to knitting machines also produced bicycles and later on motor bikes which were sold by the million well into the 1950´s. Every adolescent boy in the 60´s was more than happy being able to call a NSU Quickly his own.

Although they don´t look much they could be tuned to run up to 70-80 kph screaming at the top of their 50cc two-stroke lung.
NSU also was hugely successful with larger bikes like the Fox and the Max, winning uncounted races and championships and became the largest manufacturer of motorbikes worldwide by the mid 50´s.

With the above "dashing sunbed" and a modified 50cc Quickly engine NSU held the speed world record of near 128kph and with a forced induction 50cc engine with 13.5 HP they achieved a max speed of 196kph

In the late 50´s with everyone recovering from WWII amidst the so called "Wirtschaftswunder" (tr: economical miracle) NSU also set out to produce small affordable cars, namely the Prinz series. The rear engined Prinz was in size similar to a VW Beetle and also very successful helping the company well into the 60´s.

They also proved very successful in races with the baddest of them being the TTS with up to 85HP for less than 700 kgs of weight

NSU also cooperated with the company run by Felix Wankel, the inventor of the rotary combustion engine and early in the 60´s they deemed the time had come for the world to be propelled by bumble bees, the first of them being the Wankel Spider (from 1964), which in essence was a Sports-Prinz with a different engine.

So great was the engineering confidence that with the seemingly ever growing purchasing power of the customers, development of larger and more powerful rotary engines with more than one rotating cylinder continued, culminating in that two piston near 1.000cc engine of the Ro80 and on a parallel line the also hugely inventive (conventional 4 cyl piston engine) K70.

The Ro 80 was nothing less than a car from another star when it was eventually presented to the public in 1967. Designer of this icon of the 60´s was Claus Luthe. It is often alleged that this wedged body type with spectacular aerodynamics (cd=0.355) was entirely conceived by wind channel experiments only Claus Luthe once said "This talk is all rubbish. The Ro80 was in the aerodynamics tunnel for the first time only after its design was finalized and all of us, including me, were surprised by the excellent drag coefficient"

1994 Top Gear video

Claus Luthe, until his death in 2008 was a much revered person in the NSU Ro80 community.

During the 70´s my dad had a practice in Neckarsulm and one of his patients was the then head of development at NSU, Richard van Bashuysen. As it goes, he´d have the latest and greatest of the prototype stuff for testing purposes and one day in the mid-70´s he arrived with a then already quite old Ro with which he took my father for a spin. When they came back the grins were firmly tacked into their faces - allegedly this car went like stink and up until 220kph, which at the time still was "racing car" territory.

In the mid 70´s economic recession and the oil crisis had a firm grip on many car manufacturers, amongst them Audi NSU (formed in 1969) and there were plans to shut down the Neckarsulm factory which eventually didn´t happen. As far as I know Neckarsulm today is the 2nd largest production site of the Audi company.

Of course, despite the Ro80 being a great car to look at and with an engine concept & sound entirely different from every other combustion engine it was plagued by technical problems and met its end after only 37.400 cars and almost 10 years into production. The rotary engine technology was licensed, then sold to Mazda where it continued to live on up until the Mazda RX8.

Did anything sound vaguely familiar to you whilst reading?
Well, of course.... Claus Luthe moved on to become the successor of Paul Bracq in the BMW design department and was responsible for our 8-series

Reitzle (then CTO, 2nd from left), Luthe 3rd from left

It is just by chance that production figures and time of the Ro80 and the E31 are quite similar. Neither one was hugely successful but the Ro80 was an instant icon and the 8-series at least for us has achieved the same status - it´s only the others that don´t know (yet)

Cheers
Reinhard

PS: the 840 is CC66782 and was last advertised in August for 7K.

Reinhard, many thanks for the insights into NSU, I always found NSU to be an interesting piece of automotive history but I was unaware of the link with the designer.
A friend of mine (in Norwich) some years ago had an old NSU Prinz in a lock up garage. It had been there for years and I helped him move it out of the garage so that he could start work on it. It was in excellent condition and just needed a service and a clean up. I wonder what happened to it.
Interestingly, the prinz bears a striking resemblance to the Hillman Imp but it's larger overall. A decent looking car.
There used to be an R080 close to where I lived in Budapest but it was looking a little down on its luck.

Great post as always, Reinhard!

Cheers,
Steve

Thanks for the write-up Reinhard, really interesting. My first motor vehicle was either a Norman Nippy or a NSU Quickly, can't remember which, I was only 9 at the time!