www.lezebre.eu

The unbearable doubts about the 6-cylinder Amilcar in Argentina
With Simon Moore's recent articles on the 6-cylinder Amilcar for The Automobile issue, and specially with his last letter to the editor on Macoco's Amilcar C6 competing in the city of Mar del Plata, I couldn't help but recalling the old mystery around these models in my country.
My father dedicated a great part of his life to the investigation and restoration of this French brand. He also owned one of these Amilcar Grand Prix that arrived to Argentina and were supposed to have belonged to Martín "Macoco" de Alzaga Unzué. Sadly he died many years ago and left very little about this in writing. He made some comments about the history of this brand only in a few articles that he published during his years working as a journalist for different automobile magazines. But more than anything he left us with all his doubts which are the same that I still have.

As a child he remembered going to a car agency located at Juan B. Justo Av. and Santa Fe Av., pretty close to his home, where a 6-cylinder was for sale. He used to fantasize his father was going to buy it for him some day and so he consistently went to see "his" car. He even got the salesmen to trust him so that he was allowed to sit inside and take the wheel to feel the power of history. One day, just like many others, he went to see it but it was not there anymore. This had been Chuzo Gonzalez' car, which was then exported to Germany in the late 50s or early 60s, according to some subject matter experts. Here is where the mystery begins.

I have been trying to reveal this enigma that raises little interest in my country for some years. The data that I have managed to collect is meager but here is more or less what it is. According to the book Fuerza Libre by Guillermo Sánchez, in 1925 there was an Amilcar representative office in Buenos Aires with a man called Raúl Chiesa in charge. Apparently there was a large number of these cars and many of them were seen racing in the old circuit in the district of San Martin. It is uncertain whether there were only small 4-cylinder models, which my father managed to find many, or also some 6-cylinder. According to most wise monkeys only the first ones participated but some of them were seen with a compressor. In the early 70s my father interviewed Macoco for Corsa magazine. From that moment on he started building a friendship with the dandy who stated, based on what he remembered, that he brought two from Europe in the 20s. Legend has it that one day he walked by the Amilcar agency in the Champs Elysées in Paris and saw two in exhibition. When he asked for the price he was told a very high one, equivalent to a Rolls Royce at that time. Macoco's answer was "Ok, I'll take both...". Nobody was ever able to prove this but the truth is that he had two which according to Guillermo Sánchez were a C6 and a C0. According to Macoco one was the Voiturettes Grand Prix 1925 winner and the other one was a 'replica' of the first one. I guess he referred to the C6 compared to the C0 with metal instead of ball bearing bedplates. I'm not sure what he was referring to with this but he participated in some races in Europe with one of these two, like the Behovia race in Pyrénées-Atlantiques where he made the second place behind a 12-cylinder Delage. He then came back to Argentina. There are doubts as to whether he brought one or both cars. From what I was able to deduce, he brought both. Macoco agrees, but there are people who believe he might have been "confused" and brought only one. In Simon Moore's picture published in The Automobile magazine we can see the car he used the most at a race in the city of Mar del Plata, which was then adapted a Ford V8 motor, first a 60 and then a HP 85. This car was slowly destroyed through time due to various modifications that it suffered in different lower categories. It is known that the last V8 was added a Mc Culoch compressor and that it ended up with a Lancia Augusta front wheel assembly. The last known information about this car is that it belonged to Enrique Moyano until he died. Then, like the old man said, "it was literally swallowed up by the earth". The other one may have been rescued by my father following Macoco's directions, from what he remembered. But the true data came in 1968 when somebody wanted to publish it for sale in the Corsa Magazine although it never happened. The car, with no engine, appeared in a car scrap yard outside the city of Buenos Aires, in the district of Temperley, with some modifications due to time and highly corroded but nothing too bad. It was complete. The engine was the most difficult part.

My father visited the various garages where the former owner remembered to have taken it to rectify but then never picked up. Time went by and from one garage to the other my father finally arrived at a rectifier where again he asked for that weird engine. "Oh, an old aluminum one?", the mechanic asked. "Yes, yes, that one", Sánchez Ortega replied. "You're in luck, we were just about to cover it with cement", said the mechanic while walking him towards the back part of the garage where there was a huge electricity post hole. It was being filled up with garbage and metal objects to pour liquid cement afterwards. In the dark back, an engine with the word Amilcar on it could be spotted on the camshaft caps. With the help of wizard Pichón Rocha they were able to make it work after a huge effort. Rodolfo Iriarte, witness to this story, remembers there were a lot of parts that could not be fixed and that the engine connecting rods were Ford and had been welded. The only solution they could come up with was to put in Mini Cooper connecting rods and customized pistons. This atrocity of the Ford connecting rods was Jorge Malbrán's idea, he confessed, when Chuzo owned the car and participated in the first Club de Automóviles Sport [Sports Car Club] races. So, is this the car owned by González and it was never exported to Germany as it was believed? Or was it just the engine that was left and the rest gone?

En segunda fila Chuzo y su Amilcar en una largada del CAS en la costanera

But the story is more complicated. Juan Jiménez Cabrera, an Uruguayan from Montevideo, imported a C6 to his country in 1929. Here is where the third one comes in. It is known that he participated in several races with it, among them at the Rambla Wilson in his city. In the mid 30s he sold it to Jorge Montero who raced some more years and also ended up adapting a Ford V8 to it. It is important to understand that these engines were very complex for the local mechanics and getting parts was very difficult or nearly impossible. The option to "Americanize" the mechanism was very tempting and it allowed for an excellent hybrid with the power and reliability of an American engine and the characteristics of an European Grand Prix chassis. After that nothing else was known about this car. According to some hypotheses, it may have been exported to Argentina but the truth is there is no record of this.

Enrique y Santiago con chasis Amilcar en Pergamino

Chasis en construccion en Pergamino 80s

My father's C6 restoration took years and there were a lot of bad moments. With the help of his friend Desmond Peacock from England and many others in Buenos Aires, they managed to make it "roar". A big part of the help on this job was done by Héctor "Chiquito" Solmi in the farm shed in the city of Pergamino. He mainly did all of the chassis work. Once it was completely restored, the car looked amazing and sounded incredibly (when it did start) but there was a big problem. My father was 1.90 mts tall and the car was almost the size of a toy. The only way he found to get in it was by removing the seats, and doing strange movements with his big belly he slowly managed to squeeze in. Getting out of there was a problem. He participated with this car in some of the Club de Automóviles Sport [Sports Car Club] races with no big accomplishments or satisfactions. This resulted in his selling the car and the C6 was sent back to France after 60 years. This was the last model in the country.
So the doubts are: Did Macoco bring two C6 to Argentina? Was one of those a C0? Which one belonged to Chuzo González? Was it the Macoco's replica or the one in Montevideo? Was it one that Macoco brought afterwards and didn't remember? Did Raúl Chiesa bring one for his agency? Was my father's car one of them with the other one's engine? So all in all, how many 6-cylinder Amilcar were there on these shores?

Evidence suggests that my father's was the one that belonged to Chuzo González, mainly because of some bodywork characteristics. So which one was exported? The one in Uruguay? Was the second one owned by Macoco exported and my father's was the one from Uruguay? Or is it that none of them was ever exported in the 60s? I'm going crazy!
My father also owned a CGSs that he used for many years and several other 4-cylinder model projects. Most of them were taken back to Europe and I am sure they have a more precise history tracking. Maybe our friends from the Amilcar Register can help me with this mystery around the 6-cylinder Amilcar that set foot in Argentina and once and for all I will be able to sleep in peace.

Santiago E. Sánchez Ortega