Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Mystery Missile Car

Posted July 06, 2011 8:00 AM by dstrohl

David Greenlees over at The Old Motor recently posted this photo from the Peter Helck collection showing an unidentified car on the sands of Daytona Beach in possibly the winter of 1905. Helck, one of the earliest collector car aficionados, was well versed in automotive history, so we find it baffling that he didn't include any sort of identification with this photo. As David noted, it's an underslung chassis, most likely powered by a horizontally opposed gasoline engine. Any ideas?

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#1

Re: Mystery Missile Car

07/06/2011 9:54 AM

What is a "Missile Car"?

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#2
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Re: Mystery Missile Car

07/07/2011 2:04 AM

Is it a rocket-propelled car?.

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#5
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Re: Mystery Missile Car

07/07/2011 8:26 AM

"Is it a rocket-propelled car?."

From the HEMMINGS blog: "...most likely powered by a horizontally opposed gasoline engine." In addition, a radiator is clearly in place. So, probably no rocket.

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#3

Re: Mystery Missile Car

07/07/2011 5:37 AM

It would seem the exhaust from the missile would keep the driver excessively warm.

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#4

Re: Mystery Missile Car

07/07/2011 7:54 AM

I would suspect the 'missle' shaped device was a fuel tank and the purpose of the vehicle was long-distance travel.

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