By 1958 the game was up for the
prestige French marque, explains Jon Pressnell. So what should you think of the
last Simca flathead-powered car?
This is the Talbot that’s not mentioned in
polite company. A car with its nobility compromised. No classy twin-cam under
the bonnet. Instead-and how demeaning – just an old side valve Ford V8 as used
by Simca for its most-flash for your cash Vedettes. How could such a thing have
happened?
Talbot-Lago
America
In fact, there’s no need to get hot under
the collar about this bastardised blue-blood. These final Lago America coupés
with their Simca engines were nothing more than an end-of-line act of
expediency to use up the remaining stock of parts after Anthony Lago had
decided to sell out to Henri-Théodore Pigozzi of Simca. Look at it as a
praiseworthy act housekeeping and waste-not-want-not recycling rather than a
deliberate besmirching of the Talbot escutcheon and you’ll start to understand
the car better.
The history of the model goes back to the
’54 Paris Salon, when Talbot showed a new 21/2-litre,
four-cylinder engine – actually just a five-main-bearing development of the
2.7-litre twin-cam used in the Talbot Baby saloon first seen at the ’49 show.
The last few examples of the Baby had this engine, but more significantly the
unit was fitted to the 2500 Lago Sport introduced in May ’55. This represented
a rethink for Talbot. Previously its front-line car was the 41/2-litre
T-26 GLS, announced in ’53. A heavy timber-framed coupé, the T-26 could trace
its lineage back to the 1934 Talbot T150. It looked good, thanks to lines by
hired-gun and sometime Chapron stylist Carlo Delaisse, and it went well,
courtesy of the 210bhp developed by its high-cam hemi-head twin-cam ‘six’. But
it was costly to make, drank petrol, and had a price-tag that was nearly half
as much again as that of a Jaguar XK120.
Cabin
design may be unique to this car
For the 2500 Lago Sport – or T-14LS –
Talbot took the Delaisse body, shrunk it, and mounted it on a cruciform-braced
tubular chassis into which the 2491cc engine was dropped, mated to an
all-sychro Pont-à-Mousson gearbox. The front suspension was by transverse leaf
and upper wish-bones, with an anti-roll bar, and there was an under slung rear
axle on leaf springs. With lever-arm dampers all-round, there was nothing even
vaguely adventurous about the running gear, but it was no better or worse than
many other top drawer sporting cars of the time. The engine, however, was
relatively sophisticated, being an extrapolation of the twin-cams that Walter
Becchia had designed for Talbot before leaving for Citroen. It thus had short
pushrods, inclined valves and hemispherical combustion chambers, a recipe that
resulted in 120bhp at 5000rpm. Helping to exploit this, weight was kept down to
a quoted 1000kg, thanks to the car’s two-seater configuration, its hollow doors
with sliding windows and its lightweight bucket seats.
It was all to no avail. Including two
cabriolets, only 54 were made, the last in spring 1957. The engine was not
reliable, and rumors about the firm being in difficulty did not reassure
potential buyers. Such fears were well- founded: Anthony Lago was always
under-capitalized, and had taken on assembly of the Velam bubble car and 2CV
van to keep his head above water. After the winding-down of the T-14 LS, Lago
tried his luck in the US, and rejigged the car to take a small-bore 2476cc
version of the BMW VS; this developed 138bhp, and was used with a ZF gearbox.
Known as the Lago America, just 12 were built, all with left-hand drive - for
the first time on a Talbot.
Dual
exhausts aid finely resolved looks
Such was the back-history behind the
Simca-powered Talbot at the moment when Lago put his business up for sale in
spring 1958. Pigozzi, canny as ever, soon expressed an interest, following the
same policy as with Simca's Nanterre factory, formerly Donnet's, and its Poissy
works, purchased from Ford. Rather than build a new plant to gain extra
capacity, Pigozzi kept his eye out for going concerns with decent facilities,
which he could buy at an attractive price. The spacious Talbot premises at
Suresnes were again just the ticket when he needed to expand. Right across the
road from the Unic truck factory that had passed into Simca hands a few years
before, they would be a perfect addition to these facilities. There was plenty
of surplus land that could be sold for a healthy profit, too. Lago was ill, and
really didn't want to be dragged through the bankruptcy courts, so a deal was
set up between the two Italians, for a largely symbolic price.
