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This 1.5 litre supercharged Delage was originally built in 1924, and over the next few years had considerable success on the race circuits.

During the early 1930’s the car was bought by racing legend Dick Seaman, and it was he who made his own modifications to the car and went on to totally outclass all who came up against him.


Seaman on his way to another victory.

Rear view of the Seaman Car.

His opponents were familiar with this view !!!

After Seaman decided to race for Mercedes, the Delage was eventually sold, and remained in various private hands thereafter, in the 1960’s the original body was destroyed in a fire, the car then received a new body, but this new body was nothing like the one in the above pictures.

 

After changing ownership a few more times, the car eventually ended up as part of a large private collection, it was this new owner who decided that there was only one body style that befitted this car.

 

Bodylines was commissioned to recreate the Seaman body, every detail was to be exact.

It was very difficult to find much useful information about the Seaman body modifications, but after many hours of searching through old photographs and books, we decided to make a start on the body frame.

 

This body frame consisted of lightweight aluminium angle, all this angle had to be machined to a particular wavy edge design, the details of this design being obtained from a piece of original Delage body tub, kindly lent to us by Delage Historian, Alan Burnard.

The aluminium body tub was then fabricated and fitted to this lightweight frame, and bolted to the chassis, the whole edge of the cockpit had to then be finished with a copper section.

 

The tail section, which was also one great big fuel tank, was then fabricated in steel and fitted to the rest of the body.

Finally the bonnet and radiator cowl were made and fitted, the louver design on the bonnet sides, was again obtained from and old original piece of Delage bodywork.

 

The whole job from start to finish taking around 1200 hours !!!

Delage with bonnet open to show the original engine, an engineering masterpiece !!!

This rear end shot shows the integral steel fuel tank.


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