Shooting Brake

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Is often referred to as the Snow White coffin: the Volvo P1800 ES
British Shooting Brake:
the Lotus Elite II

With the term Shooting Brake or Shooting Break special is called body variant of an automobile : A coupe with hatchback that with his tailgate more like a station wagon than a sedan similar. In contrast to the usual station wagon, a shooting brake is more sporty and elegant overall.

Origin of name

Break [ breɪk ] or identical Brake was called on English earlier carts that you had ready, untamed to the resistance horses to break ( to break ) and their desire to move to brake ( to brake ) to make them as workhorses were available. Because carts could easily be damaged in the process, none were used that were urgently needed for other purposes. At best, brakes were provided with light, often variable superstructures which, for example, only served to carry what was necessary for hunting . Such a vehicle , (Engl. To take you to shooting shooting ) went, they called Shooting Brake .

history

Motorized shooting brakes gained some popularity in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s , for example, where they were bought by rural residents whose lifestyles included hunting and golf , and then became almost forgotten.

The classic shooting brake is derived from the Aston Martin DB5 that David Brown had built for his personal hunting needs in 1963. Twelve copies of this version were made. There are only a few cars in this category. They are mostly one-offs or prototypes that belong to collectors today. Occasionally you can find them at an exhibition. A Reliant Scimitar , on the other hand, can also be encountered in traffic. The list of shooting brakes also includes prototypes such as the missing Pininfarina single pieces Riviera , Olgiata and Maremma .

One of the best selling models of this kind was the Reliant Scimitar GTE with a body made of glass fiber reinforced plastic and a Ford - six-cylinder - V engine with 3 liters of displacement and 140 hp (103 kW). Even members of the British royal family (including Prince Philip and Princess Anne ) owned and drove several Reliant Scimitar. Often, however, it was not a series vehicle, such as the "curved sword" Reliant, of which around 14,000 copies were built in at least five different versions between 1968 and 1986, but conversions of classy two-seater and sports cars.

An early manufacturer of such custom car shooting brakes was Albion Motors of Scotland . There are examples of conversions of the Bentley S2 , the Mercedes 300 S , the Ferrari 400 and the Aston Martin DBS to the Shooting Brake . The Jaguar E-Type , converted into a kind of hearse , which protagonist Harold in the cult film Harold and Maude lets fall from the cliff at the end, is also a shooting brake .

In the summer of 1971, Volvo launched the P1800, which had been in series production since 1961, as the Volvo P1800 ES (nickname Snow White's Coffin ) with a hatchback and a glass tailgate, which only rolled off the production line until the end of 1973. In the spring of 1986, the manufacturer launched another vehicle in this category, the Volvo 480 , which was built for almost ten years. The C30 , which was produced from 2006 to 2012, can be considered its successor .

Italy's representative of the shooting brakes was the Lancia Beta HPE (High Performance Estate, from 1982: High Performance Executive) built from spring 1975 to the end of 1984 . The floor pan came from the Beta Berlina (sedan), while the body was an extended version of the Beta Coupé. The front section up to the B-pillar and the engines were taken over from the coupé with the exception of small details.

In Germany , the companies Arden ( Jaguar XJS ) and Artz ( Audi quattro , Porsche 924 Carrera GT, Porsche 928 and VW Scirocco ) attracted attention with their one-off Shooting Brake products.

More recent examples

In the 1990s there were hardly any current shooting brakes. BMW ventured the BMW Z3 Coupé in 1998 , but with moderate success. Alfa Romeo quoted the classic Shooting Brake in the station wagon version of the 156 from 2000 . From the end of 2005 to mid-2010 there was a shooting brake version of the Spider in the form of the Alfa Romeo Brera .

At the Geneva Motor Show in March 2011, Ferrari presented the FF, an all-wheel-drive , four-seater shooting brake with a 6.3-liter, twelve-cylinder V engine.

Three-door compact cars such as the Volvo C30 from 2006 and the VW Scirocco offered from 2008 to 2017 are sometimes also referred to as shooting brakes , but they are not derived from sports cars.

See also

Web links

Commons : Shooting Brake  - collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ^ Body break. (No longer available online.) Carriage Association of America, archived from the original October 27, 2007 ; Retrieved March 14, 2010 .
  2. Prince Philip gets out of his Reliant Scimitar prototype
  3. The Jaguar E "hearse" from the film Harold and Maude