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2CV Club Australia › Forums › 2CV Babble › 2CV Proto type ( How it all began )
Citroën 2CV Prototype ‘1939
The very first prototypes were bare chassis, with rudimentary controls, seating and roof, that needed test drivers to wear leather …flying suits, that were used in contemporary open biplanes. By the end of 1937 twenty TPV experimental prototypes had been built and tested.
At the end of 1937 Pierre Michelin was killed in a car crash. Boulanger became President of Citroën and Lefèbvre, responsible for engineering and design, though he wasn’t head of the department, he was more like a minister without portfolio; he didn’t have an official title.
By 1939 the TPV was deemed ready, after forty-seven technically different and progressively improved experimental prototypes had been built and rigorously tested. Those prototypes made use of aluminium and magnesium parts and had water-cooled flat twin engines with front-wheel drive. The seats were hammocks hung from the roof by wires. The suspension system used front leading arms and rear trailing arms, connected to eight torsion bars mounted beneath the rear seat: a bar for the front axle, one for the rear axle, an intermediate bar for each side, and an overload bar for each side. The front axle was connected to its torsion bars by cable. The overload bar only came into play when the car had three people on board, two in the front and one in the rear, to take account of the extra load of the fourth passenger and fifty kilos of luggage. It was designed by Alphonse Forceau
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She is not wearing a flying suit I reckon!
They would have been great in the 2CV cross, ie just a chassis and a steering wheel (and an engine I guess).