Scimitar

Scimitar (pronounced sim·i·tar or sim-i-ter)

An oriental sword with a curved blade broadening towards the point

1540s: From the Middle French cimeterre or the Italian scimitarra (and in English originally spelled also as cimiterie).  Most etymologists agree it’s from an unknown Ottoman Turkish word and ultimately from the Persian شمشیر‎ (šamšir) (sword), an unusual event because the linguistic variations in the Ottoman dialects are otherwise so well documented.  There are contested variations too in the Persian shimshir (pronounced shamsher), said by some to be derived from the Greek sampsera (a barbarian sword) but most authorities find this explanation unsatisfactory.  There were many variations too in spelling, the preferred modern form scimitar reflecting the influence of Italian but at least one dictionary preferred simitar as late as 1902.  In palaeontology, the term "scimitar-toothed cat" describes any of the various species of extinct prehistoric cats of the tribe Homotheriini.  Scimitar is a noun & verb and the gruesome sounding scimitared is an adjective; the noun plural is scimitars.

Antique Persian scimitar with leather wood scabbard featuring natural engraving on pommel and wooden handle adorned with embossed metal.  The heavy curved blade is hand-forged and thirty inches (760mm) in length with a deep blood grove.  The leather-covered wooden scabbard is equipped with a pair of belt rings and wire decoration.  The drag is heavily embossed with nature designs and is thirty-eight inches (965mm) long.

1973 Reliant Scimitar SE5a.

Produced between 1968-1986 (and based on an earlier coupé of the same name launched in 1964), the Reliant Scimitar was an early and successful attempt to combine the stylistic appeal of a coupé with the practicality of an estate.  Although English manufacturers had a long tradition of (mostly bespoke) two-door estates called shooting-brakes, they were expensive and (except for the rakish Aston Martins) often rather staid designs optimised for the carriage of dogs, shotguns, picnic baskets and such rather than style.  The Scimitar, although in some ways crude and lacking the refinement of the better-bred, was at the time unique in the market and sold well, triggering a trend for the design which is still sometimes seen.

1973: Marilyn Cole, Volvo 1800ES.

Beginning in 1964, Playboy magazine (much read for the interviews) began rewarding the Playmate of the Year (PotY) with a pink car and in 1973 it was awarded to Ms Marilyn Cole (b 1949).  Still one of the more admired Volvos, the 1800ES (1972-1973) underwent a conversion from a coupé (1961-1972) which was exquisitely executed, the re-design undertaken entirely in-house, the proposal by Pietro Frua's (1913-1983) studio (the P1800’s original designer) thought too avant-garde for Volvo buyers.  They may have had a point because Volvo owners do seem impressed more by frugality of operation and longevity than anything flashy and there are several 1800s which are documented as having covered more than a million miles (1.6 million km).  The coupé gained much from its use in a popular TV series shown in the early 1960s, a promotional opportunity made possible only because Jaguar declined to loan the production company one of its new E-Types (XKE) which had debuted in the same year as the P1800.  Still, the seductive E-Type hardly needed a TV series to create its image.  Doubtlessly the equally seductive Ms Cole won PotY on merit but her photo-shoot was the first in which a "full-frontal nude" image appealed in the magazine so that alone may have been enough to persuade the judges.

Aston Martin's original 1965 DB5 Shooting Brake (left) and one of the eleven subsequently built by Radford (right).

Before Reliant adopted the style, there were Aston Martin shooting brakes.  Sir David Brown (1904–1993) liked his DB5 coupé (which the factory, in their English way, called a "saloon") but found it too cramped comfortably to accommodate his polo gear, shotguns and hunting dogs.  Now, that would be called a “first world problem” but because Brown then owned Aston Martin, he simply wrote out a work order and had his craftsmen create a bespoke shooting brake (thereby confirming the informal English definition of the term: “station wagon owned by someone rich”) which they did by hand-forming the aluminum with hammers over wooden formers.  It delighted him and solved his problem but created another because good customers stared writing him letters asking for their own but Aston Martin was at full capacity building DB5s and developing the up-coming DB6 and V8 models.  With a bulging order book, the resources didn’t exist to add another niche model so the project was out-sourced to the coachbuilder Radford which built a further 11 (and subsequently another 6 based on the DB6).  That Brown’s original car was bespoke seems clear but the others are a gray area because the coachbuilder’s records and assessments of the cars indicate they were identical in all but the color of the paint and leather trim.  There may have been only 12 DB5s and 6 DB6s but by conventional definition, all but one from some sort of production line (albeit one both leisurely and exclusive) so can all but the original be thought truly bespoke?  According to the Aston Martin website, all are bespoke so presumably that will remain the last word on the subject.

1970 Aston Martin DBS shooting brake by FLM Panelcraft (left), 1992 Aston Martin Virage Shooting Brake (centre) and 2023 Aston Martin Vanquish Zagato Shooting Brake (right).

The troubled 1970s were unforgiving times for the coachbuilders for which shooting brakes had been a minor but lucrative side-hustle and FLM’s Panelcraft’s 1970 Aston Martin DBS shooting brake remained a one-off.  Things had improved by the 1990s and although the industry in the years since has had its ups & downs, by 2023 it was possible for one buyer in Japan to order a Vanquish Zagato Shooting Brake in pink.  Aston Martin are one of the English manufacturers which have long offered custom (even one-off) colors (at a price) and Bristol used to emphasise the nature of their clientele by mentioning often they would match the tints to old-school or regimental ties.  Sadly, Bristol entered liquidation in 2020 and the world lost one of its more charming anachronisms.

1970 Range Rover, the car which for a generation doomed the after-market shooting brake.

Although now thought a "luxury car", the original Range Rover was a utilitarian device with rubber floor mats, provided because it was assumed owners would need to "hose it out" after a day on the farm in their muddy boots.  As late as 1969, the plan had been for a basic four-cylinder version and an up-market V8 but constraints of time and budget meant only a single version was released, combining the interior fittings of the former with the latter's mechanical specification.  Not until the release in 1981 of the Range Rover Vogue did carpet, air-conditioning, leather and walnut facias appear, a response to the fit-outs being offered by a number of third-party operations.   

The industry never settled on an agreed definition of the shooting brake body style but from the 1930s it’s been used usually to describe a two-door car (there were variations) with estate-car coachwork added.  In recent years, what are (sometimes misleadingly) labelled shooting brakes have tended to be based on fast sports cars rather than the large chassis familiar in the 1930s when the intent was to offer the rich a large, comfortable car for outings like shooting parties, the enlarged rear compartment easily accessible and sufficiently capacious handily to accommodate guns, picnic baskets and (on a good day) a few brace of grouse on the trip home.  For reasons related to economics and engineering, the creation of shooting brakes declined in the post-war years and the release of the Range-Rover in 1970 rendered the style redundant except for the rare creations for those who still hankered for conspicuous exclusivity.  The sporty breed of coupés with estate coachwork which many (Volvo, Reliant, BMW, Ferrari, Lancia et al) have offered in recent decades are really not shooting brakes, the design instead intended to enlarge luggage space beyond the “toothbrush & bikini” capacity of some sports cars.  However, nobody seems to have thought of a better term and because of the historic association with class & wealth, the target market likes “shooting brake”.  The origin of the name lies in the shooting brake which was a large horse-drawn cart suitable for use by shooting parties.  The “brake” in the name is derived from the popularity among shooting parties of the heavy-framed carts used when “breaking-in” spirited horses although, etymologists have pointed out the Dutch word brik (cart or carriage) but any link is speculative.  In the UK, the term brake became so identified with large horse-drawn carts than it came to be applied widely, extended to wagons generally, whether used for shooting parties or not.  In France, an estate car (station wagon) was called a break, the French (somewhat unusually) following the example in English, the original form having been break de chasse (hunting break).

Dog owner Lindsay Lohan is part of the target market for shooting brake manufacturers although it's doubtful she's a fan of hunting & shooting.  Her first dog she name Gucci because the hound "chewed up" a pair of Gucci boots, something for which she was forgiven, living to the age of fifteen.

Borrowing shamelessly from Jensen which between 1966-1973 produced the FF, Ferrari chose the model name FF to allude to the specification (4 seats and 4 wheel-drive) although it was all-wheel-drive (AWD) rather than four-wheel-drive (4WD), the latter now indicating something built with some emphasis on off-road use.  The Jensen FF nomenclature was a reference to “Ferguson Formula” the AWD system developed by Ferguson Research, a company founded by Harry Ferguson (1884–1960).  Ferguson had developed its system for agricultural vehicles but the advantages for cars on the road or racetrack were obvious and a number of projects followed, all successful pieces of engineering but the economics were at the time not compelling and it wasn’t until the 1970s that AWD vehicles began to appear in any volume.

1966 Jensen FF Series 1 (left) and 1971 Series III, one of only 15 built (right).

Visually, the FF was distinguished from the standard Interceptor by a 5 inch (127 mm) longer wheelbase, added ahead of the windscreen to accommodate the transfer case and associated hardware, the twin vents the obvious marker (the standard Interceptor used one).  All used the combination of Chrysler's 383 cubic inch (6.3 litre) B-Series V8 and TorqueFlite (727) automatic transmission and tales of some leaving the factory with the 440 (7.2) RB engine or manual transmissions are apocryphal.  Nor it would seem have any FFs subsequently been been fitted with the bigger engine although some have been transformed into convertibles using the parts from the factory's run of 267 (1974-1976), no small project but one which demands no modification of the complex drivetrain.

GKN FFF 100, MIRA (Motor Industry Research Association) proving ground, Warwickshire, England, September 1972, the images from the on-line Jensen Museum.  The car just prior to the test run (left) shows the raised centre panel which allowed the carburettors to protrude; the dual Holley 3116 carburetors atop the short cross-ram manifold  (centre) and the 0-100 mph-0 run in the wet (right).       

There was however one FF which did hint at the possibilities offered by mixing AWD with prodigious quantities of power and torque.  GKN (now an aerospace multi-national but originally Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds, a manufacturing concern with roots traceable to 1759 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution) in 1971, impressed by the FF, commissioned a special build.  Revealed in 1972 as the FFF 100 (claimed by some to be a reference to a planned production run but probably meaning nothing in particular unless an allusion to 100 mph (162 km/h), a speed which would later figure in the car's 15 minutes of fame), it used a one-off body of no great distinction but beneath the bland and derivative lines sat the intoxicating sight of a 426 cubic inch (7.0 litre) V8 (remembered as the much-vaunted "Street Hemi", a (slightly) civilized version of the unit used on the NASCAR ovals and on drag strips).  Complete with a power-boosting "short cross-ram" dual quad induction system and built to the A990 specification used in drag racing, the FFF 100 was lighter than the FF and when tested in a demonstration run, it achieved 0-100 mph-0 in 12.2 seconds and that was on a wet track; when the test was repeated in the dry the number was 11.5, a mark for road cars which would stand for three decades.  It proved beyond doubt the benefits of AWD & ABS although it wouldn't be until the 1990s many began to enjoy the combination.  However, any possibility of a production FFF 100 was fanciful, the FF and the Street-Hemi by 1972 already retired so all missed what would for decades been the world's fastest shooting brake.       

When the Jensen FF debuted, there was thus no AWD-4WD distinction and it was always referred to as “4WD”, its other notable innovation the fitting of Dunlop Maxaret’s mechanical anti-lock braking system, something which in rudimentary form had appeared on aircraft as early as 1908.  It was later used by railways but cars under braking on roads present more challenges for ABS than aircraft on runways or trains on tracks and it wasn’t until the 1950s that the first (almost) viable implementations appeared.  ABS is essentially a form of “pressure modulation” and the accepted abbreviation doesn’t actually reference the often quoted  “Anti-Lock Braking System”; the correct source is Anti-Bloc System, the name adopted in 1966 when Daimler-Benz and the Heidelberg electronics company Teldix (later absorbed by Bosch) began a co-development of a hybrid analogue-electronic system.  That was presented in a “proof-of-concept” display in 1970 during a media at the company’s Untertürkheim test track but what the engineers knew was that use in mass-production depended on the development of digital controllers, more reliable, more powerful and less complex than analogue electronics, the conclusion US manufacturers soon drew when their early implementation of electronic fuel-injection (EFI) proved so troublesome.  Such things were obviously going to be relatively cheap and available after Intel in 1971 released the 4004 (the first commercially available microprocessor and the ancestor of the x86 family and all which followed) and in 1978, Daimler-Benz made available the first version of ABS on some of the Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL 6.9s (1975-1980, the W116 platform 1972-1980) sold in the European market.  The Dunlop Maxaret mechanical ABS used on the Jensen FF was less sophisticated but was reliable and a remarkable advance and while some testers found adaptation a challenge, others noted that in skilled hands (and feet), it was in some ways superior because one could learn to “tramp-through” the system and induce wheel-locking selectively, something useful in the right circumstances.

Ferrari FF (2011-2016): The factory's official "hero" shot (left), an FF fitted with "aerodynamically optimized" ski boot (centre) and with rear compartment displaying "shooting brake" credentials (right). 

The Jensen FF really wasn’t a shooting brake although the huge and distinctive rear window was also a hatch so it did offer some of the advantages.  The Ferrari FF "shooting brake" (the factory seems not to have used the term although every journalist seems to thought it best) was very much in the same vein, its capaciousness closer to that of a “big coupé” rather than any size of station wagon although the factory did circulate photographs of the rear-compartment comfortably (if snugly) packed with a set of golf-clubs and a half dozen-odd travel bags; with folding rear seats, Ferrari claimed a trunk (boot) capacity of 450-800 litres (16-28 cubic feet).  Like the Jensen, it was aimed at those who like to drive to the ski-fields and the promotional material also included pictures of ski-racks and even a roof-mounted “ski-box”, able to hold ski-gear for four.  Despite the high price, the Jensen FF sold remarkably well but its market potential was limited because all Ferguson’s development work had been done in England using right-hand-drive (RHD) vehicles and the system was so specific it wasn’t possible to make a left-hand-drive (LHD) FF without re-engineering the whole mechanism which was so bulky the passenger's front seat was narrower than that of the driver so much did things intrude.  Consequently, only 320 were built, apparently at a financial loss.  Ferrari did better with their FF, over 2000 sold between 2011–2016 and although the packaging may have been remarkably efficient, with a 6.3 litre (382 cubic inch) V12 it was never going to be economical, listed by the 2013 US Department of Energy as the least fuel-efficient car in the midsize class, sharing that dubious honor with the bigger, heavier (though not as rapid) Bentley Mulsanne.  For owners, the 335 km/h (208 mph) top speed was presumably sufficient compensation.