Bateau Lafitte

Part car, part motorcycle, part aeroplane. This 1926 Lafitte Trèfle (a three-seater in cloverleaf formation) can claim genes from all three engine-powered species. Maybe a bit of boat, too. Back then, ‘conventional’ was still far from a fully formed concept.

Not that any notion of conventionality influenced the mind of Theodore Lafitte, an engineer noted also for his hand grenades. He saw no reason not to power his flyweight motor car, so spindly that it fell happily into the ‘cyclecar’ category of minimal 1920s family transport, with a three-cylinder, air-cooled, radial engine with a small propeller on the front, and to give it a range of gear ratios not by coupling it to a gearbox but by making the whole engine tilt on a transverse axis.

Why? Because it’s part of Lafitte’s patented transmission system, one like no other. The rear face of the flywheel is shaped like the head of a mushroom, and it mates with a correspondingly concave, layered-paper-faced wheel attached to the propeller shaft. That shaft drives a crownwheel in the rear axle, and thence the rear wheels with nothing as unnecessarily bourgeois as a differential to apportion torque to each one. Both wheels get the full thrust of engine effort, an