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.
Why It Mattered
The Gee Bee R-1 was built for a single purpose: to win the 1932 Thompson Trophy, America's premier pylon race, at the Cleveland National Air Races. With Jimmy Doolittle flying, it won, and at the same meeting he set a world landplane speed record of 294.418 mph in the Shell Speed Dash. The speed came from a big radial engine wrapped in the smallest airframe its builders could manage, at a time when service fighters were far slower. The R-1 became an emblem of golden-age air racing — and of its costs, for it soon acquired a reputation as a dangerous aircraft.
Design Notes
The R-1 was designed by Zantford Granville working with Pete Miller, a young aeronautical engineer, and the design was refined in wind-tunnel testing at New York University. Granville's thinking was that a fuselage shaped like a teardrop would slip through the air more cleanly than one tapering in a straight line, so the fuselage was made wider than the engine itself, bulging at the wing. The cockpit sat very far aft, just ahead of the vertical stabilizer, to give the pilot better vision in crowded pylon turns. Power was a Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp nine-cylinder radial of about 800 hp, in an airframe measuring just 25 feet in span and 17 feet 8 inches in length. The compact layout left little margin: Doolittle later recalled the airplane as touchy and probably unpredictable, demanding a hand on the stick at every moment.
Operational History
In an abandoned Springfield dance hall, the Granville brothers and about a dozen employees built two racers in 90 days: the R-1 and its sister ship, the R-2. The R-1 first flew on 13 August 1932, weeks before the Cleveland races. There, Doolittle won the Thompson Trophy, lapping all but one of his competitors, and set the landplane speed record in the Shell Speed Dash. The next year, in the 1933 Bendix Trophy race, Russell Boardman was killed when the R-1 stalled and crashed during takeoff from a refuelling stop at Indianapolis. The wreck was repaired with an 18-inch fuselage extension and the R-2's wings, becoming the hybrid known as the Long Tail Racer. It was damaged again in a landing overrun, but there was no money left for repairs, and the unrepaired aircraft was sold to Cecil Allen. Allen rebuilt it with a new wing and an added rear fuel tank, despite a written warning from Pete Miller never to put fuel in that tank, because it would move the center of gravity too far aft. Starting from Burbank in the 1935 Bendix race with all tanks full, Allen crashed in a field just beyond the runway and was killed; the aircraft was never rebuilt.
Afterlife
No original R-1 or R-2 exists; most of the Granville racers crashed, and the company itself ended in a bankruptcy auction. The type survives through full-size reproductions built from the original plans. The New England Air Museum's reproduction, displayed at Windsor Locks, Connecticut, was built in 1990; Pete Miller, who had co-designed the original, helped with it. Volunteers at the San Diego Air & Space Museum built a second reproduction from the same plans, to airworthy standards, though the museum had no intention of flying it. A third static replica is displayed at the Museum of Springfield History, in the city where the original was built.