Car-Nival

We drive the flashy lincoln Zephyr coupe

- Kyle Pereira

There’s something about Amer-ican cars that stirs the soul. For some, it is that flamboyant curvaceous styling and liberal application of chrome. Or perhaps the expansive cabin space on the inside and the shiplike proportions on the outside. For others, it is the massive powerplants that propel these land yachts down the road, each piston the size of a bucket. I, for one, am in it for the motors.

Which is why this Lincoln Zephyr, built in the early forties, held my attention like a tractor beam. Also the fact that Brough used these engines for their cars could have been another reason why the Zephyr’s motor got me gushing. Displacing a massive 4.4 litres, this V12 had its two six-cylinder banks sitting at 75 degrees from each other — to reduce the engine’s width — and made 110 horsepower on a good day. That might not sound like much from a gargantuan displacement, but this motor is all about the torque rather than power.

This was exactly the need of the hour at that time. Pulling grunt was where it was at, simply because the road system at the time wasn’t conducive to high-revving engines. Besides, engine technology, machining and metallurgy still had a lot of catching up to do. And the more luxurious the brand, the more heft the motor had to pull, courtesy the burgeoning extravagant coachwork that true opulence had come to justify.

Companies developed engines to cope with all of these requirements by increasing their displacements and adding cylinders. Inline-fours grew to inline-sixes which in turn went on to become inline-eights. But packaging so many cylinders beneath the bonnet probably became an issue and V8s became the norm, in effect being half the length of an inline equivalent. To satiate the need for even more power, V8s grew into V12s and some marques even went on to produce V16s.