Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster
The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster was a single-seat racing aircraft built by Granville Brothers Aircraft of Springfield, Massachusetts, for the 1932 National Air Races. Around a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial it wrapped the smallest airframe its designers could manage: a teardrop fuselage wider than its engine and a cockpit set just ahead of the tail. Flown by Jimmy Doolittle, it won the 1932 Thompson Trophy and set a world landplane speed record. Demanding to fly and unstable at low speed, it was wrecked and rebuilt once, then destroyed in a second fatal Bendix Trophy accident in 1935; no original survives.