The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster and the five brothers from Springfield who built the fastest death trap in the sky

The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster was a radical racing airplane built by five self-taught brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts, that became the fastest — and most deadly — aircraft of the early 1930s. Designed around a single audacious principle of wrapping the smallest possible airframe around the most powerful available engine, the R-1 rewrote speed records while killing or injuring nearly every pilot who flew it. Its brief, violent career remains one of aviation’s most compelling stories of ambition, brilliance, and risk.

Who Were the Granville Brothers?

Zantford, Thomas, Robert, Mark, and Edward Granville founded the Granville Brothers Aircraft Company in 1929, just as the Great Depression began. They weren’t MIT-trained engineers or corporate-backed designers. They were working men who loved speed and believed they could build something faster than anything coming out of Curtiss or Boeing.

The company name was universally shortened to its initials: Gee Bee (G-B). They started with modest designs — a biplane called the Model A, followed by a series of sportsman racers. Competent airplanes, but the brothers had bigger ambitions. They wanted to win the Thompson Trophy.

What Was the Thompson Trophy?

The Thompson Trophy race at the Cleveland National Air Races was the premier aviation event of the 1930s. Tens of thousands of spectators filled the grandstands. Newsreel cameras broadcast the action nationwide. Pilots became instant celebrities, and the prize money — substantial even by today’s standards — could keep a small aircraft company solvent for another year.

For the Granville brothers, the Thompson wasn’t just prestige. It was survival.

What Made the Gee Bee Design So Radical?

The Granville brothers’ theory was simple and extreme: take the biggest, most powerful engine available, wrap the smallest possible airframe around it, keep the wings short, and minimize drag at all costs. The fuselage would be round and tight — essentially a barrel with a propeller bolted to the front.

The costs of this philosophy included the pilot’s ability to see forward on the ground, the airplane’s willingness to fly straight, and virtually any margin of safety.

The Model Z: First Blood at Cleveland

In 1931, the brothers entered two airplanes at Cleveland. The Model Z, a stubby white-and-red racer, was flown by barnstormer Lowell Bayles. He won the Thompson Trophy at an average speed of 236 miles per hour — a staggering figure for a homebuilt airplane from a small Massachusetts shop.

The victory was short-lived. Weeks later, Bayles took the Model Z up for a speed record attempt over Springfield. A component — most investigators believe the fuel cap — separated in flight and struck the wing or tail. The airplane disintegrated. Bayles was killed instantly.

Rather than retreat, the Granville brothers pushed forward. They built the R-1.

How Fast Was the Gee Bee R-1?

The R-1 Super Sportster’s specifications were staggering for its era:

• Engine: Pratt & Whitney Wasp Senior, a nine-cylinder radial producing 800 horsepower
• Fuselage diameter: 7.5 feet, essentially a perfect cylinder built around the engine
• Weight: Under 3,000 pounds
• Wingspan: Only 25 feet (a Cessna 150, at roughly one-third the weight, spans 33 feet)
• Top speed: 296 miles per hour (world landplane speed record, 1932)

The power-to-weight ratio was absurd. Contemporary military fighters had less power in heavier airframes.

Why Was the R-1 So Dangerous to Fly?

The R-1’s design created a cascade of handling nightmares. The enormous engine pushed the center of gravity far forward, causing a constant nose-down pitch tendency. The stubby wings provided almost no roll damping, meaning any yaw instantly triggered a snap roll so fast most pilots couldn’t react. The airplane was aerodynamically unstable in nearly every axis.

The cockpit sat far aft on the fuselage, just ahead of the vertical stabilizer, perched atop the massive cylindrical body. Forward visibility was nearly nonexistent. On the ground, pilots S-turned their way to the runway, essentially taxiing blind. In the air, they flew behind a wall of engine and cowling, navigating by side views and instruments.

The R-1 demanded perfection. Slow down, and the enormous wing loading meant the airplane fell out of the sky. Turn too tightly, and it snapped. There was no recovery margin.

Jimmy Doolittle and the 1932 Thompson Trophy

In September 1932, Jimmy Doolittle strapped into the R-1 at Cleveland. Doolittle was already one of the most accomplished pilots alive — he had performed the first instrument-only flight in 1929 and held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT.

Even Doolittle was afraid of the Gee Bee. He later called the R-1 the most dangerous airplane he ever flew — a remarkable statement from a man who would go on to lead the famous Tokyo bombing raid from an aircraft carrier, fly combat in North Africa, and command the Eighth Air Force over Europe.

Doolittle flew the R-1 with absolute precision. He described it as “balancing on a ball” — the instant concentration lapsed, the airplane rolled out from under you. Every control input had to be deliberate. No casual corrections. No wasted movement.

He won the Thompson Trophy at an average speed of 252 miles per hour around the pylons and set a world landplane speed record of 296 mph. Then he walked away and never flew the Gee Bee again. He reportedly said he had used up all his luck in one flight and wasn’t going back for seconds.

What Happened to the R-1 After Doolittle?

The airplane was sold to Russell Boardman, a well-known distance pilot, for the 1933 racing season. During practice at Springfield, the R-1 got away from Boardman. He crashed, suffered severe injuries, and died weeks later from complications.

The airplane was rebuilt — as it always was. The Granville brothers kept reassembling it like a cursed phoenix. After Boardman’s crash, the R-1 was repaired and eventually merged with parts from its sister ship, the R-2, creating a hybrid racer. Different pilots flew it. Most had close calls. Some didn’t survive.

Zantford Granville was killed in an airplane crash in 1934 — not in a Gee Bee, but in another aircraft. The company, already battered by the Depression, collapsed. The surviving brothers went their separate ways.

The Granville brothers built five Model R variants in total, plus several other racing and sportsman airplanes. Every single R model was eventually destroyed in crashes. Every one.

Where Can You See a Gee Bee R-1 Today?

A full-scale replica is displayed at the New England Air Museum in Connecticut, near the Granville brothers’ original shop. In person, the proportions are even more alarming than in photographs — the fuselage so fat, so dominated by the enormous cowling, that it seems impossible anyone would climb on top of it and fly at 300 mph three feet off the ground.

A flying replica was built by Delmar Benjamin, who flew it on the airshow circuit throughout the 1990s, performing aerobatics in an airplane that had killed or injured nearly every original pilot who sat in it. Benjamin said the secret was understanding what the airplane wanted to do and never fighting it — treating it, as he put it, the way you’d treat a rattlesnake you were carrying in your shirt pocket.

The Gee Bee’s Legacy in Aviation

Despite their lethal reputation, the Gee Bee racers made lasting contributions to aircraft design. They proved that speed was fundamentally about minimizing drag, not just adding power. Their philosophy of tightly cowled engines and minimal frontal area influenced racing aircraft design for decades.

The R-1 stands as a pure expression of early aviation’s willingness to trade safety for performance. The Granville brothers had no wind tunnels, no computer simulations, no computational fluid dynamics. They had intuition, slide rules, and an almost reckless determination to push past every known limit.

Key Takeaways

• The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster, built by five self-taught brothers in Springfield, Massachusetts, was the fastest racing airplane of the early 1930s, reaching 296 mph in 1932.
• Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy in the R-1 at 252 mph, then never flew the airplane again, calling it the most dangerous he ever piloted.
• The airplane’s extreme design — 800 hp in a sub-3,000-pound airframe with a 25-foot wingspan — made it aerodynamically unstable and nearly impossible to fly safely.
• Every Model R variant the Granville brothers built was destroyed in crashes, and the company collapsed after Zantford Granville’s death in 1934.
• The Gee Bee’s legacy endures as proof that early aviation progress was purchased with extraordinary risk, and that minimizing drag was the true key to speed.