The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster, the Granville Brothers' Flying Fuel Tank, and Jimmy Doolittle's Terrifying Ride to the Thompson Trophy

The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster was a barrel-shaped 1930s air racer built by the Granville brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, designed entirely around the fattest engine they could bolt to the front. In 1932, Jimmy Doolittle flew it to victory in the Thompson Trophy at the National Air Races in Cleveland and set a world landplane speed record of more than 300 mph - in an airplane he later called the most dangerous he ever flew.

Who Built the Gee Bee?

In the early 1920s, five brothers named Granville were working in Springfield, Massachusetts. The oldest, Zantford “Granny” Granville, had a gift for turning steel tubing, spruce, and fabric into something that would fly.

He started by repairing airplanes, then building them, and by the end of the decade he had pulled his brothers into the business. They named the company Granville Brothers Aircraft - “Gee Bee,” for the initials G.B.

They built pretty little sport planes at first. But this was the golden age of the air race, and the air race was where the money and the glory lived. Every fall the country turned its eyes to Cleveland for the National Air Races, whose crown jewel was the Thompson Trophy.

What Was the Thompson Trophy Race?

The Thompson was not a race around a distant course. It was closed-course pylon racing - towers set up on the field, with airplanes tearing around them like horses around a track, low and screaming, right in front of the grandstand.

Ten laps. Wingtips nearly dragging in the turns. The crowd could see every second of it.

To win the Thompson you needed one thing above all: raw straight-line speed. The Granville brothers decided they would build the fastest airplane in America to go get it.

Why Does the Gee Bee Look So Strange?

Most racers of the day tried to be sleek - long, tapered, graceful. The Granvilles went the opposite direction, and the reason came out of a wind tunnel at New York University.

The most powerful engine they could bolt on the front was a Pratt & Whitney Wasp, a big radial putting out roughly 800 horsepower. The wind-tunnel data told them not to fight that fat, round shape - but to build the entire airplane around it.

So the Model R looks like someone took the widest part of that engine and just kept going. The fuselage is a barrel, a teardrop that bulges out to swallow the Wasp and then tapers to a tiny tail. The wings are stubby little things mounted low, almost an afterthought.

And the cockpit sits far, far aft - shoved right up against the tail, so the pilot is practically sitting on the rudder.

Why Is the Cockpit So Far Back?

Because everything in front of the pilot was fuel and engine. He wasn’t the point of the airplane - he was the last thing they fit in. He rode behind a firewall and a barrel of gasoline, looking down a fuselage as wide as a rain barrel.

The result: he could not see straight ahead on the ground. Taxiing meant S-turning constantly just to know what was in front of the nose.

Painted in the racing colors of the day - red and white, and later a striking scalloped black-and-yellow scheme - the airplane sat on the ramp squat and mean. People walked up and laughed, calling it a flying beer keg. Then someone started the engine, and the laughing stopped.

Who Was Jimmy Doolittle Before the Famous Raid?

Many people hear James “Jimmy” Doolittle and think of the World War II raid on Japan. Set that aside - that came a full decade later.

In 1932, Doolittle was simply one of the finest pilots in the world. He stood 5 feet 4 inches tall and had been a boxer as a young man. He also held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, making him one of the first pilots who could fly an airplane and understand the mathematics of why it flew at the same time.

A few years earlier he had done something no one had ever done: he climbed into a cockpit covered over so he could see nothing but instruments, then took off, flew a pattern, and landed blind, on instruments alone. He proved a pilot could fly through cloud and fog and come out alive - the foundation of every instrument approach flown since.

How Did Doolittle Win the 1932 Thompson Trophy?

Doolittle knew exactly what the Gee Bee was. He said it was the most dangerous airplane he had ever flown - one that would spin out from under a careless pilot in an instant. He respected it the way you respect a loaded gun with a hair trigger. But he also knew it was fast.

The scene was Labor Day weekend, 1932, at Cleveland’s lakefront airport. Estimates of the crowd ranged from a quarter of a million to half a million people packed along the field - hats and shirtsleeves, kids on their fathers’ shoulders, the smell of hot dogs, cigarette smoke, and burned castor oil on the lake breeze.

Doolittle taxied out S-turning because he could not see forward, lined up, ran the Wasp up until the whole airplane shook, and let her go. The tail came up fast, and the Gee Bee accelerated like nothing the crowd had ever witnessed.

The pylon game was cruel and simple: cut each turn as tight as you dared and hold your speed through it - which meant banking 60, 70, 80 degrees, hauling back on the stick, and pulling enough g to gray out your vision. Ten times. Flat out on the straights, then standing the airplane on a wingtip at the pylon.

Doolittle was the master of it. When it was over, he had won the Thompson Trophy and set a world landplane speed record of more than 300 mph in a machine most pilots could not have kept upright for a single lap.

Why Did Doolittle Quit Racing at the Top?

Because he did the arithmetic. World’s fastest man, trophy in hand, Doolittle looked at what he had just ridden and decided he had used up about all the luck a pilot is owed.

He famously noted that he had yet to hear of anyone dying of old age while flying the Gee Bee - and he walked away from air racing for good. It was one of the smartest decisions of his career, because the Gee Bee was not finished collecting.

What Happened to the Gee Bees and the Granville Brothers?

The story does not have a soft ending. The sister ship to Doolittle’s racer kept flying, and it kept taking a toll.

In 1933, pilot Russell Boardman was killed when a heavily loaded Model R got away from him on takeoff at a race in the South.
Other Gee Bees crashed, and the airplanes earned a grim reputation - widowmaker, killer - beautiful and lethal in the same breath.

The Granville family fared no better. The Depression dried up the money, and air racing was a rich man’s sport in a poor man’s decade. In 1934, Zantford “Granny” Granville - the oldest brother, whose hands had shaped every one of those airplanes - was killed in a crash of one of his own light planes in Virginia while trying to keep the business alive. The company that built the fastest airplane in America folded and was gone.

Can You Still See a Gee Bee Fly Today?

For decades, no Gee Bee flew. The originals were wrecked or scrapped, surviving only in grainy photographs. Many people said good riddance to a death trap.

Then a pilot named Delmar Benjamin saw the most beautiful airplane ever built. In the 1990s, working from the original drawings, he and a partner built a faithful new Gee Bee Model R-2 - the barrel fuselage, the stubby wings, the cockpit shoved all the way aft.

Everyone told him it would kill him the way it killed the others. Instead, Benjamin flew it at airshows for years - loops, rolls, the full aerobatic routine, right in front of the crowd. He proved the Gee Bee was not a cursed machine that hunted its pilots. It was an honest, brutally demanding airplane that simply did not forgive a careless hand. Flown with respect and skill, it flew beautifully.

Faithful replicas and museum examples survive today. Stand beneath that fat little fuselage and picture a 5-foot-4 pilot with an MIT doctorate carving a pylon at 300 mph, blind over the nose, pulling until he nearly blacked out - and winning.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster was built by the Granville brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, and deliberately shaped around a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial of roughly 800 horsepower.
Jimmy Doolittle flew it to win the Thompson Trophy at Cleveland in 1932 and set a world landplane speed record of more than 300 mph.
The rear-mounted cockpit left the pilot blind over the nose on the ground, forcing constant S-turns while taxiing.
The Gee Bees earned a deadly reputation: Russell Boardman died flying one in 1933, and Zantford Granville was killed in a crash in 1934, after which the company folded.
Pilot Delmar Benjamin built and flew a faithful replica in the 1990s, proving the design was demanding but not cursed.