PastImperfect: Spyker - tenacious in spiritThe arrival of the Dutch luxury sports car manufacturer Spyker amongst the ranks of the Formula 1 teams in the coming season will be viewed by many as just another rich patron indulging his wish to be part of motor racing's most glamorous circles.
But such a judgment is unfair to this Dutch firm for its history contains a number of significant 'firsts', even if they failed to set the automotive world on fire at the time.
The Spyker motto is Nulla Ternaci Invia Est Via - 'No way is barred to the tenacious in spirit' and this is appropriate to a firm going back to 1880 when the Spijker brothers began business as coachbuilders in Hilversum. Due to an interest in exporting, the name was anglicised to 'Spyker'.
From their early coachbuilding days Spyker's major success was the construction of the Gold Coach of the House of Orange, but in 1895 Hendrik and Jacobus Spijker began importing Benz cars from Germany and five years later produced their own design, a front-engined voiturette , to be built at a newly constructed factory at Trompenburg. It wasn't a success, and the brothers hired a 21-year-old Walloon called Joseph Valentin Laviolette to design their next car. His first design for Spyker was unveiled at the 1903 Paris Salon and was a 'Double-Driving Six-Cylinder car'.
Although not the world's first four-wheel car - there had already been four-wheel-drive electric and petrol-electric cars - the Spyker was the first to combine four-wheel-drive with other new concepts including front-wheel-braking, a dual-range gearbox and a six-cylinder engine.
The Spyker six-cylinder engine was arguably the world's first, and although Napier would also claim this first, work on the Spyker Six had certainly commenced before Napier. The Spyker had dual-ratio transmission giving a total of six forward speeds and two reverse as well as four-wheel brakes. The 'all-wheel-drive' was permanently engaged and was conceived as a means of ensuring that as much of the power produced by the engine would reach the road as was possible. The six-cylinder Spyker remained a one-off and re-appeared in various guises over the next few years. It also appeared at a number of motor sport events including the Speed Trials at Bexhill in southern England but failed to distinguish itself at any of them.
When the original Spyker Company was liquidated in 1925, the remains of the six-cylinder car were found lying forgotten on an upper floor of the factory. Mijnheer Springer, a former director of the company acquired it and had it restored to its original specification. Today, this interesting pioneering failure still survives in the National Dutch Automobile Museum.