Owned by the Mullin Automotive Museum and seen with four other Delage Grand Prix cars at the special exhibition at this year’s Rétromobile in Paris, this Delage-ERA is one of six cars – but with unique history.
Delage chief engineer Albert Lory designed his Type 15-S-8 cars for the 1926 racing season to meet the ACF’s new rules for maximum engine capacity. The cars therefore had 1½-litre straight-eight, twin-overhead-cam supercharged engines. They were highly successful, winning the championship for 1927.
Almost ten years later, Dick Seaman was still winning races with one of these cars – so Prince Chula of Siam bought that same car for his cousin Prince Bira. He then acquired all the remaining chassis and asked Lory to design two new chassis, this time with more modern independent front suspension.
One of these, chassis 6, was used as a spare, and was only completed in 1946 by Reg Parnell. In 1949 it received a new Wade supercharger, which was too powerful for the chassis and proceeded to destroy, one after the other, the remaining original engines. So Rob Walker decided to fit a two-stage-supercharged E-Type ERA engine – to create the Delage ERA in our picture. Walker successfully campaigned the car until he sold it in 1954. It passed through seven owners, until Peter Mullin acquired it in 2006.
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