The Great Patriotic War ended, and the Soviet motor sport was gradually reviving, the experience of creating high-speed cars, albeit slowly, was accumulating. It was a long and difficult process, since many eminent designers of pre-war times during the fighting were retrained as creators and designers of military equipment, for example, A. Pukhalin and A. Nikitin. And some talented engineers (for example, V. Tsipulin) were completely repressed. And, nevertheless, there were people who can be safely called the flagships of the Soviet car industry. At ZIS it was V. Rostkov, and at GAZ it was A. Smolin.
It was Smolin who in 1951 came up with a unique design for the new development of GAZ - the SG-2 model, which is known to the general public under the name Torpedo.
Post-war motorsport in the USSR could not boast of an abundance of disciplines: the most popular and fastest growing were linear races and cross-country races. On the one hand, these types of motor sports were quite democratic, and on the other hand, the technical requirements of that time were very liberal, allowing serious changes to be made to the design of serial cars. For example, the 1950 USSR Championship Regulations made it possible to make any changes to the design of a serial car. This also applied to the body shape and engine modifications. In the design of the latter, both a change in valve timing and an increase in the working volume were allowed, in accordance with the class of the declared car. True, such liberties quickly came into conflict with another general idea of the development of Soviet sports - mass character.
The experience of the first USSR championship in auto racing, held in 1950, showed that the existing technical requirements put individual racers and those who have powerful production bases in unequal conditions. And therefore, to create a certain balance, the technical requirements of the USSR championship changed almost every year. So, already in 1951, strict restrictions were introduced on changing the body structure, and a year later the level of engine modifications was also limited. Nevertheless, motorsport at the time remained fertile ground for innovative designers. It was only important to enlist the support of enterprise managers.
It was these conditions that were created at the Gorky Automobile Plant, the experimental design bureau of which was headed by Alexey Andreevich Smolin, who also led the sports direction. Before joining GAZ, Aleksey Andreevich worked there, in Gorky, as a chief designer at an aircraft plant and now used the ideas used in the development of aircraft and in the automotive industry. Therefore, it is not surprising that it was from under Smolin's pencil that a project of an unusual car came out, which took place in the bureau under the symbol SG-2, and later received the name GAZ-Torpedo. Probably, from the group of designers led by Smolin, in the near future one could expect further development of the successful GAZ Pobeda-Sport project, but what an aviation engineer presented in 1951 looked very unusual.
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By analogy with airplanes, the frame and body panels of the GAZ-Torpedo were made of aluminum, and the body shape was as close as possible to a drop-shaped - the most aerodynamic shape created by nature itself
GAZ-Torpedo was a car, the body of which was designed and manufactured with the maximum use of aviation technology. At the heart of the cigar-shaped (Smolin was a brilliant specialist in the field of aerodynamics of aircraft), the body was a spatial frame made of aluminum profiles, sheathed with thin-walled aluminum sheets.
The streamlined teardrop-shaped body was not at all like another famous brainchild of GAZ - Pobeda-Sport. It was a completely new design, created literally from scratch. When developing his project, Smolin resorted to the use of advanced aviation technologies.
This car turned out to be much lighter than its predecessor - Pobeda, while having much better streamlining. The body consisted of duralumin profiles, sheathed with aluminum sheets. The body length was as much as 6300 mm, the width was 2070 mm, and the height was 1200 mm. The weight of the car was 1100 kg. The engine was used the same as on the GAZ Pobeda-Sport car - a forced GAZ-20 engine with a Roots supercharger and a volume increased to 2487 cm3. This engine produced 105 hp. at 4000 rpm, but the weight of the GAZ-Torpedo was 100 kg less than that of Pobeda-Sport.
Cardan shaft as in Pobeda-Sport, consisting of two parts, separated by an intermediate support. The engine consisted of four cylinders with a compression ratio of 6.0.
There was also a three-speed gearbox without synchronizers, an SV valve train and one carburetor. The car turned out to be quite powerful - 105 horsepower at 4000 rpm. But, despite all the technical tricks, she could not break the speed record of the ZIS-112. The maximum speed of the Torpedo is 190 km / h. This sports car was set two records of all-Union significance.
And yet, one cannot fail to note the advanced ideas of Smolin used to create the GAZ-Torpedo. It was a kind of training before creating more advanced structures, because for the first time a car with such excellent aerodynamic properties was built. They were achieved precisely thanks to the unique streamlined body design proposed by the talented engineer Smolin. Torpedo is characterized by excellent handling, which, by the way, neither ZIS-112 nor Pobeda-Sport can boast of.
And many cars of the 50s were not distinguished by ease and maneuverability. As a result, the SG1 and SG2 models served as the starting point for the implementation of ideas for a super-fast car that can easily beat world records. And such a device was soon built and equipped with a turbo engine, but this, of course, is another story.
According to the technical requirements of that time, the cabins of all sports cars, with the exception of those that took part in the record races, were two-seater: the crew consisted of a driver and a mechanic. During the race in linear races, the mechanic added oil to the engine, if necessary, switched to the spare ignition system, controlled the readings of the instruments …
This car had several names: at the stage of the project it was GAZ-SG2, on the sides of the already finished prototype was the inscription "Torpedo" - GAZ, and in the racing protocols the car was declared as GAZ-Torpedo
As already mentioned, the technical requirements of 1951 seriously limited work with the bodies of production cars, and the GAZ-Torpedo could not be called a prototype either - the sample was piece. Therefore, the plant tester Nikolai Sorokin and the mechanic Gleb Zyablov took the GAZ-Torpedo out of the classification to the 1951 USSR championship linear race. The car covered a distance of 300 km at an average speed of 166 km / h, setting a new USSR record. There is another significant indicator - the car covered 1 km from a start in 33.7 seconds, which was also the best national achievement of that time.
AZ-Torpedo during testing. Behind him are his predecessors, the GAZ-SG1 Pobeda-Sport, built on the chassis of the serial Pobeda.
Well, then … Due to the fact that the car did not fit into the racing technical regulations, they gradually forgot about it, leaving it gathering dust in the factory backyards.
According to some reports, the amazing cigar-shaped car GAZ-Torpedo has been very well preserved to this day. Now the GAZ Automobile Museum is working on the restoration of this beautiful example of Soviet engineering.
And by the way, "Pobeda-Sport" is closer: