David Phillips, 26, an automotive restoration specialist and car collection caretaker living in Pingree Grove, Ill., on his 1934 British Salmson S4C, as told to A.J. Baime.
Growing up, I was always a tinkerer, and at a young age I started collecting antique outboard boat engines. I got into cars when I was older. I was studying at a community college to be an auto technician, and one day I got a call from some friends, the late John and Lisa Weinberger, owners of Continental AutoSports, a Ferrari dealership outside Chicago. They had given me a scholarship for college. They asked if I had ever heard of this school in central Kansas called McPherson College. I hadn’t.
We flew down there and I discovered that McPherson offered the only college degree of its kind in the country in automotive restoration. I applied, was accepted, and the Weinbergers doubled my scholarship. It was a dream program, and after that, I got a job working for my current employer caretaking a rare car collection.
I have always been enamored of the boat tail body style—a car that has a tail shaped like the hull of a boat—and one day I showed up at work to find this boat tail sitting in the shop. I asked my boss about it and he said, “Well, it’s a 1934 British Salmson.” I had no idea what that was. He said he had bought it and was looking to sell it, at no profit, to a young enthusiast who would use it and take care of it. I was looking for exactly this kind of project. We came to an agreement, and he helped me get it titled this past February.
British Salmson started out as a producer of aircraft engines. The company turned to making cars, producing them from 1934 to 1939. My car’s serial number is BZ219; The 219 stands for the second production run and the 19th car. The British Salmson is a rare vehicle to begin with, and mine was one of the first 50 built. (There are French Salmsons, but that was a different company.)
The previous owner had a lot of documentation. The car was imported in the mid-1950s by the wife of Sandy MacArthur, a legendary sports car racer of that era, and he is believed to be the one who built the current boat tail body, as originally this car was a saloon [a sedan with a roof]. It has a four-cylinder engine with an early twin-cam design and four hemispherical cylinders, displacing about 1500 cc’s, so it is a crazy unique little engine for its time. I have had the car up to 65 mph, surprisingly comfortably, but I think it will do 80.
The 1934 Salmson came with a big file of documents that tell its story going back to the mid-1950s when it was first imported into the U.S.
Photo:
Lyndon French for The Wall Street Journal
In its current form, the car was meant to be sporty and racy. June 18 was my 26th birthday, and I raced the Salmson for the first time at a Vintage Sports Car Drivers Association event at Blackhawk Farms, a racetrack north of Rockford, Ill. My group included several other pre-World War II cars; this was gentleman’s racing. We were not putting our cars in any danger.
Everything went great. The car didn’t break. I didn’t break. I am so thankful to all the people who helped me get the car this far, and look forward to more racing.
Write to A.J. Baime at myride@wsj.com
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