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by Ross Finlay (15 Jun 01)
In action, the Fiat was so diabolical that press observers dubbed it Mephistopheles, which sounds suitably operatic in its Italian form of Mefistofele. In fact, that identity has tended to be back-dated to its pre-nickname days. It began life as a 1908 chain-driven Grand Prix car, using an engine of no less than 18 litres, with two individual but linked-together cylinder blocks. By 1922 it had come into the hands of John Duff, who was racing it at Brooklands when he became the innocent party in one of the biggest blow-ups ever recorded in the entire history of motorsport. One of the cylinder blocks exploded, separated itself from the rest of the engine, and departed skywards, taking the bonnet and several other supplementary components with it. Duff rather lost interest in the car after that, and went off instead to help start Bentley's winning run at Le Mans. The shattered remains of the Fiat were taken over by that amazing character Ernest Eldridge. He looked at the 18-litre engine and came to the conclusion that it was a little on the small side. It certainly was, in comparison with his current Isotta-Maybach, which had a 20.5-litre Maybach engine insinuated into an extended 1907 Isotta-Fraschini chassis. Creating A Record-Breaker Eldridge managed to acquire a 21.7-litre six-cylinder Fiat airship engine, but was then obliged to lengthen Mephistopheles to accommodate it. The story goes that elements of a London bus chassis were used in the conversion.
In July 1924, two teams converged on Arpajon. One was the factory Delage outfit, for whom René Thomas was the driver, although one Fiat historian got rather mixed-up at this point and went into print with the story that it was the Welshman Parry Thomas, whose LSR achievements were still to come. On other occasions, high on the Brooklands banking, Mephistopheles was a devil to control. On the straight road at Arpajon, it was still a major handful. But Eldridge was up to the job. One journalist described the car as "a terrifying sight" as it hurtled past, needing all the driver's considerable strength to keep it under control, snaking from one side of the road to the other. Eldridge didn't lift, though, (he never lifted) and went faster than the existing Land Speed Record with a two-way average of 143.26mph. Then the Delage team protested that the Fiat was unable to reverse. In fact, it didn't have the reverse gear insisted on by the regulations. The time set by Mephistopheles wasn't ratified. Eldridge took it away to a workshop in Paris, while Thomas, still at Arpajon, worked the V12 Delage up to 143.309mph and snatched the official record. The Delage was taken to the company's main Paris showroom in the Champs Elysées, and put on proud display. Eldridge went back to Arpajon, with Mephistopheles having been given some arcane mechanism which would move it, however briefly and convulsively, backwards, although Mick Walsh has pointed out in a recent article that there's no sign of a reverse gear on the car today. With his passenger/mechanic John Ames - a man whose nerves must have been as steely as his own - pumping up the fuel pressure, Eldridge gave it the works. Mephistopheles was once again using the whole width of the road, verge to verge, but it was going faster than ever, and took the record from the Delage at an average of 146.013mph over the flying kilometre. Then, as Mick Walsh has recalled, it was said to have been taken to Paris and parked, in a pointed manner, across the road from the Delage showrooms. Mephistopheles later raced in other hands, to nothing like the same effect. It was eventually bought by Fiat, which keeps it in its own museum and is sending it across to Goodwood. There, for the first time since 1924, it will be reunited with its old rival, the René Thomas Delage: two impressively restored cars which held the World Land Speed Record in the same week. Eldridge The Engineer And Eldridge? He kept up his record work, but with much smaller and more manageable machinery, often in association with his friend George Eyston. In 1929 they meant to co-operate in a joint assault on the 750cc world records with a French-built Ratier. When it was ready for testing at Montlhéry, Eyston was away racing somewhere else, and Eldridge took the wheel. As Eyston recalled in his book Flat Out: "I heard afterwards what a comic sight this had been. Ernest is by no means slim, and here he was sitting in a little bucket seat on the bare chassis, the wind ballooning his trousers and coat. He, I was told, looked like a true 'Bibendum' as he manipulated the chassis round Montlhéry." The Ratier project was scrapped, though, as the two friends became involved with the first-ever MG record car EX120. With Eyston at the wheel, it was the first 750cc car in the world to set records at more than 100mph. But Eldridge played an important part in the development of the pioneering MG record-breaker. He designed a counter-balanced crankshaft as part of the tuning work on the engine, before EX120's first visit to Montlhéry in December 1930, when it took several records at speeds up to 87mph. Then he told Cecil Kimber of MG that the car would have to be supercharged, if it were to have any chance of heading off a rival 100mph attempt by Malcolm Campbell in a blown Austin Seven. Kimber agreed, and Eldridge supervised the work as the engine was fitted with one of Eyston's Powerplus superchargers. And he was there at Montlhéry as Eyston's signaller: "Uncle Ernest stood out in the middle of the straight opposite the timekeepers' box with a little flag in his hand. He would raise or lower it in accordance with the lap speed I was putting up." It's an endearing thought that Eyston's tactical guidance came from Ernest Eldridge, just as keen on helping his friend's successful 750cc record attempt as he was at the wheel of the fearsome Mephistopheles, a car whose engine capacity was bigger than the MG's by something like 21 entry-level Vauxhall Corsas.
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The rebuilt car was no crude job, though. It was given rather elegant new bodywork with a shapely tail, and it had the centre line of the front wheels farther ahead of the radiator than any other record car of its day. Eldridge had also breathed on the engine, which, modified with four valves per cylinder, gave a full 320bhp. Still chain-drive, of course, and no front brakes.
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