ARIES CB-4 SPORT (1926)

By GERMÁN SOPEÑA

This is the story of an almost unknown car emerged from a radiator and some photos sent from France. From there the Aries-1926 began to take shape and original style.

It was 1984 and by then I stayed all year in Europe with the ungrateful mission of following the Grand Prix of Formula One step by step.

Returning to my Parisian home on one of those weekend trips -GP of Holland or GP of Austria if the memory does not fail-, I found a voluminous envelope of my friend Sánchez Ortega, who, from time to time, he compensated for his epistolary laziness with a shipment that included clippings, photos of the latest rallies of classic cars and news about his latest mechanical sales-purchases. As everyone knows, Sánchez Ortega is a notorious collector of antique irons of all origins but with a marked predisposition for French mechanics from the 20s to the 30s.

This time his great novelty was a strange finding produced in Uruguay. "I bought a very rare French car brand Aries -explained in his letter- transformed into a chatita to the Uruguayan (where everything can be transformed into a van to pay less taxes), but that retains a very nice radiator."

Knowing Sanchez, one could immediately conclude that he had bought the car by the radiator and that in his mind the idea of rebuilding all the rest at the cost of strenuous efforts took shape. To make matters worse, the Aries did not even have the original engine because some previous owner had changed it to a simple and conventional four-cylinder Rugby.

Aries, Aries ...? The name told me something, but it was not well recorded in the memory. I looked for some loose photos in the file that always waits for the moment to be ordered and I found luckily the data that was in the nebula. Seeing the photos I had taken myself two years before I remembered where I had seen an Aries in person. It had been by visiting the personal museum of the collector Serge Pozzoli, in the Normandy, once we got there with the friend Rodolfo Iriarte in a visit to different sanctuaries of the car.

A very beautiful car, the Aries of Pozzoli. A design exclusively thinking for Le Mans at the time when it was mandatory to present cars with four seats, which forced rather large chassis. It was the golden age of the great "race trucks", that is, the Bentleys that dominated in Le Mans. Despite the regulation letter, Aries had achieved an elegant run version finished in a pointed tail that left no doubt about his aerodynamic intentions. The curious thing is that so much aerodynamic concern in the back was widely contradicted with the immense radiator perfectly perpendicular to the floor and that resembles a wall advancing against the wind. But those are details. Progress progresses little by little and, in any case, the characteristic Aries radiator was a nice example of the frontal designs of the moment.

Exactly the same radiator is the one that had attracted the interest of Sánchez Ortega in the distant Uruguayan lands. How an Aries had come to the Rio de la Plata is a mystery. Or double the mystery actually, because the unusual luck of Sanchez Ortega wanted that a few days after having bought the Aries chassis with Rugby motor, another select iron finder, Buby Rivero, gave him the data that was almost a miracle: "In a disarmadero de Vedia (Province of Buenos Aires) I saw an Aries engine ". They went and there was the Aries engine, waiting for who knows when. A four-cylinder 1100 (1085 cms3 to be exact) with overhead camshaft.

To close the circle completely, it was necessary to know what type of body was the one that had to be built to return the Aries to its presumed original condition. There the role played then the photos and information that I started sending from Europe to my friend Sanchez.

It was not difficult to find out in France details about the forgotten Aries brand. Encyclopedias abound about life and miracle of the hundreds of small builders who flourished in the world at the beginning of the century. And as if several extraordinary coincidences had not already been added, it happens that in the magazine Fanauto directed by Serge Pozzoli himself and that I bought regularly, a complete "History of the Aries of career" began to appear in August 1984, in the which Pozzoli describes to the smallest details the evolution of the brand installed in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie.

Aries was one of the many small French factories that emerged with the automobile boom. She was born in 1903 as a builder of small urban transport vans, strange but it seemed to pursue the Aries appeared in Uruguay in the form of the improvised chatita of cast. During the First World War, however, the facilities of the Aries factory were dedicated, as was logical, to the war production and an agreement was established to build there aviation engines under license from Hispano-Suiza that could not cope with the production of one's own.

This link with Hispano-Suiza served to "ennoble" the mechanical pretensions of the Aries factory. After the war, the return to the manufacture of cars was now oriented to the sale of sports cars, developed for the belle èpoque sports clientele and destined without a doubt to appear in races and, particularly, in the great annual classic that were the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The most successful Aries of all those who ran in the 20s immediately won an unglorious nickname: it was christened La Punaise, literally, "the bug". It is not difficult to imagine the origin of that nickname. Its elongated shape and a tail that seemed to crawl on the ground resembled the unfriendly field animal. Another commentary of the time, particularly contemptuous, indicated that La Punaise was "a car fallen from the legs and remarkably slow". It was not fair, however. Although the Aries could never win at Le Mans, they managed to make good against the Bentleys, even getting lap records at the La Sarthe circuit and with maximum speeds of 160 km / h on the Les Hunaudieres straight, which was perfectly worthy for 1926. In many other minor races, the Aries played well and won their place as sports cars of good performance.

Last coincidence perfectly staggered in time. In the month of September of 1984, a great exhibition was organized in the Grand Palais, in Paris, commemorating the Centennial of the Automobile according to the French version. As is well known, while German historians maintain that the first car was the Daimler Benz of 1886, the French claim that the first vehicle worthy of being called a car was the Delamare-Debouteville of 1884. For that reason, in 1984 that magnificent car was organized exhibition that brought together the main examples of one hundred years of French industry.

Going around the stands, I find myself with the indicated car: La Punaise Aries of 1926, impeccably restored, with its spare wheel encased in the tail of "chinche" that gave it an undeniable personality.

It was the occasion to resolve from Paris the unknowns of Sánchez Ortega in Buenos Aires. I took pictures from all angles, I completed the magazines with periodical photos and from there the necessary plans were drawn up to face the construction of an entirely new body that would make the Uruguayan Aries reborn from its ashes. Or, to be more exact, from its radiator and its chassis that, miraculously, had kept the original condition.

In the design of the drawings to build the body, the expert finger of architect Rodolfo Iriarte, builder of a number of his own cars (see Windshield of last month), while an ingenious Uruguayan blacksmith of Maldonado - Mr. Guinis Guerra, intervened - He was in charge of giving definitive shape to what was seen in photos and plans.

The final result could be seen last summer in Uruguay. I walked in the Aries "drinking the winds" at about 80 km / h, enough speed to appreciate the benefits of a suspension more than remarkable for cars of the 20s. A good chassis, low weight, four-speed box and good bells of brakes served as the basis to resuscitate this strange unique specimen in these parts.

More than one French historian will be pleasantly surprised to hear about this resurrection. The originality of the brand deserved it. Two years of work and the will of Sánchez Ortega from a radiator achieved the goal. Well worth a congratulation.

Find and Resurrection of the Aries

By ENRIQUE SÁNCHEZ ORTEGA

Curious story that I had to live years ago. It started on a cold January night, too cold for January and in this part of the world. However, it was cold; I looked at the calendar: it was January. Dark night, I would say dark. So full of fog and omens that forced the frail mind to fly through sordid nooks and crannies. Just the slightest glow left by the foam of one of those huge waves breaking and the dying fire of the fireplace managed to illuminate that fearsome and maritime sensation. Surrounded by reports monsters beating relentlessly against the rocks in front of the huge window of the living room of that house.

Then it was when my friend Rodolfo-impeccable in his dress, as always-this time wrapped in a fumoir of golden reflections, he turned and looked towards the armchair where I was leaning. What's more, he gave me his investigative look. Without stopping to look at me, he served the tenth cup of the delicious brandy, which, as was logical, turned full on the silky Persian carpet.

Drilled my brain and as breaking a strange, mythical plot, whispered to me: "Here there is a disarmament where they have thrown an Aries three liters." (N. del A .: "Here" was the populous beach resort of Punta del Este, named after being just east of Java.)

I did not leave my astonishment. Mainly because I had no idea what an Aries was. And much less an Aries three liters.

In the absence of a good Abbot Ponfert by hand, I consulted with the groped Complete Encyclopaedia of Motorcars that I had just within my reach on a small table next to the sofa. There I was able to read (in spite of the absolute lack of light already described): "Aries (France, 1903-1938) SA Aries, Courbevoie."

Now I already had the picture much clearer. "I continued, if the brandy allows you," I begged my dear friend. With his tongue already somewhat pasty, although mumbling still intelligible phrases, he continued: "For years I have been frequenting the ungorgement of Gordo Guadagna, an ancient stronghold of illustrious remains of glories gone. It is in front of the tennis courts, you can go by Las Delicias. There is the Aries. With enormous Perrot type brakes, aluminum bells and the very Hispano type engine, heir also of the aeronautical designs of the Great War. He's been there for so many years ... Go and buy it. "

Generous the gesture of my friend, pity that he had kept so many summers the secret. So many that, at dawn the next day, when I appeared at the doors of the Gordo Guadagna, I do not know if it was him or his nephew who, between amazed and surplus, spit at me in his curious jargon: "Vó, that cachila years ago we cut it with the blowtorch! "

From that moment a sort of sickly challenge took hold of me: in the meantime I had already reported for example that my old Encyclopedia of Georgano was lying like crazy, because Aries always gave, or at least during the years We are interested, legal address in Asnieres (Seine). In the second place, I knew that the three liters had driven the English into madness at Le Mans and knew how to break the Bentley's hegemony towards the end of the twenties. Which is a lot to say.

To fulfill my incomprehensible purposes, I first came to know Pablo, a great friend, owner of -obviously- a car dealership in Maldonado, a town next to the popular spa town of Este. From there I got a very valuable information: an Aries had been seen loitering around the area almost ghostly.

Labyrinthic situation. Who to turn to? Where to go? What time is it? At the same time I received two pieces of information: one came from Horacio Molina, a friend of Iriarte, who, although profane in the field, had seen a mural on the entrance sign of the apartment where he lived in Punta del Este, which was nothing less than a Aries wandering around La Mansa in those times. Data that I could not confirm simply because I do not know Horacio Molina and never knew, therefore, in what building he lived.

The other assumed that the phantom Aries came from San Carlos, a neighboring town of Maldonado. A huge town that, more than a town, is a small city. With an ejido of dimensions that made it difficult, to be sincere, to search for any type of inanimate spirit. Ergo, the first two data were stupid.

Not everything was lost. Pablo manages to find out that the Aries was in the hands of a man nicknamed Golden Droplets (sic). There the thing began to be simplified. How I got the tip of the skein, has already been lost among the few intricacies of my mind. The case is that I came to Don Gotitas de Oro, who, as it corresponds, responded to the role physique that I had imagined: a cheerful but rogue fat, clean but always devoid of shirt or other element that covered his torso, married with a Masseur, well disposed but committed by So, from the hand of Golden Droplets, we reach the suburbs of the suburbs of San Carlos, a conventillazo of great materialists, those whose upper limbs seem to have suffered a deformation in the form of thermos, either the left or the right. Well, one of these light bulbs, I think Carranza by the last name, was nothing more or less who had bought the Aries the fat shirtless.

The Aries rested on the door of the tenement itself. "Do you sell it?" Was the trivial question that prevailed at the time. Carranza answered yes, almost amazed that anyone could be interested in that. Arriving at the price issue, Carranza established his pretensions: he needed to buy a motor-driven delivery tricycle to carry the distribution of bottles of bleach from one place to another, a task that Aries was no longer able to assume. That scooter of his dreams cost about $ 200. That was the agreed price and the next day I went looking for it. From the back of the conventillo came witnesses who could not believe the fate of Fat Carranza. When we said goodbye, people began to applaud and I have the feeling that they celebrated him and not me. Previously, as if to show me the performance of the Aries, Carranza was forced to make a few tiraditas down the street, in whose rattles the windshield fell to the tired unit.

I took it. Then the engine was found. Sopeña sent me the photos from Europe. Iriarte drew the plans from those photos. I "sold" the project to a Maldonado blacksmith and the body began to take shape little by little.

Today is over. As befits the end of a story, let others judge it.

ARTICLES OF VOLUME III

Aries CB-4
Cisitalia 202