The Gee Bee R-One, Jimmy Doolittle, and the Flying Beer Barrel That Won the Thompson Trophy and Scared Its Own Pilots

In September 1932 at Cleveland, Jimmy Doolittle won the Thompson Trophy flying the Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster, one of the most dangerous racing aircraft ever built. He averaged better than 252 mph around the closed pylon course and, earlier that same week, set a world landplane speed record of over 296 mph in the same airplane. Then, at the peak of his success, he quit air racing for good - a decision he considered the smartest flying he ever did.

What Was the Gee Bee R-1?

The Gee Bee was the product of the Granville Brothers Aircraft company, founded by five brothers named Granville in Springfield, Massachusetts. The name “Gee Bee” was simply the family initials - G, B - spoken aloud. These were mechanically gifted farm boys who built airplanes on almost no money during the depths of the Great Depression.

Their design philosophy for the Model R-1 was radical and simple: take the biggest engine available, then build the smallest possible airplane around it. The result looked like nothing else in the sky.

Where most racers of the era were long, sleek, and graceful, the Gee Bee was a flying barrel - a fat teardrop shape, deepest right behind the engine, tapering fast to a tiny tail. Its wings were stubby stumps. The cockpit was pushed far aft, right up against the tail, so far back that the pilot could barely see over the mountain of engine in front of him.

Why Was the Gee Bee Shaped Like a Barrel?

The unusual shape wasn’t a styling accident - it was aerodynamics. An engineer running wind-tunnel tests at New York University found that the fat teardrop fuselage produced less drag than intuition suggested. The roundest, fattest section of the airplane was actually doing the least aerodynamic harm.

Convinced by the numbers, the Granvilles hung a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine - producing roughly 800 horsepower - on an airframe that weighed almost nothing. The performance was staggering for 1932. The little yellow-and-black barrel could reach 260 to 270 mph in normal racing, faster than most military fighters of its day.

Why Was the Gee Bee So Dangerous?

Physics extracted a brutal price for that speed. All that weight and engine power packed into a tiny, short body made the Gee Bee twitchy and violently unforgiving. The center of gravity sat in a poor position, and the aircraft had almost no natural stability - it did not want to fly straight and level on its own. It wanted to wander and depart, and a moment’s inattention could be fatal.

Pilots compared flying it to balancing a needle on a fingertip while someone screamed in their ear at 300 mph. Landing was worse: with the nose raised, the huge engine rose up and blotted out the entire view of the runway. Pilots brought it down by feel, at landing speeds that would alarm any modern aviator.

The reputation was earned in blood. Over the life of these racers, pilot after pilot died in Gee Bees. They were fast, famous, and lethal - and the name still raises eyebrows among old aviators to this day.

Who Was Jimmy Doolittle in 1932?

Long before his legendary 1942 raid on Tokyo, Jimmy Doolittle was already one of the finest all-around pilots alive. He held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, a rare credential for a flier of that era.

He was a pioneer of instrument flying, understanding that a pilot could fly blind in cloud by trusting the gauges rather than the senses. He performed one of the first true blind flights - taking off, circling, and landing entirely under a hood on instruments alone - a contribution that has since saved countless lives. Every pilot who has flown an approach down to minimums owes something to that work.

He was also a barnstormer, a racer, and a scrapper who once broke both ankles showing off in South America and flew on with his legs in casts. In the fall of 1932, he brought all of that skill to Cleveland to fly the Gee Bee R-1 in the Thompson Trophy.

How Did Doolittle Win the Thompson Trophy?

The Thompson Trophy was a closed-course race flown around pylons - tall poles the pilots had to round as tightly as they dared. The race was won and lost in the turns, where a pilot hauled the screaming airplane up on a wingtip and pulled it around the pole under heavy g-loads. Cut the turn too close and you risked clipping the pylon or stalling into the ground; go too wide and you lost the race.

Doolittle didn’t fight the Gee Bee - he anticipated it. He flew with a surgeon’s precision: smooth, exact, no wasted motion, and no showboating. He treated the airplane like a loaded gun, respecting it completely, every second.

Lap after lap, low and flat and howling, he carved the pylon turns cleaner and faster than anyone else on the field. When it was over, he had won the Thompson Trophy at an average of better than 252 mph. Earlier that same week, in the same aircraft, he had set a new world landplane speed record of more than 296 mph in a straight dash. He had beaten the most dangerous airplane in the world at its own game and walked away clean.

Why Did Doolittle Quit Racing?

At the very top - world speed record in hand, Thompson Trophy won, the crowd chanting his name - Doolittle quit air racing, essentially on the spot. He famously observed afterward that he had yet to hear of anyone in that line of work dying of old age.

His reasoning was clear-eyed rather than fearful. He understood that talent runs out, luck runs out, and the airplane doesn’t care how skilled the pilot is. The only way to win that particular game permanently was to stop playing while he still could. Far from cowardice, walking away was the highest form of airmanship: knowing the difference between brave and foolish.

That judgment mattered. Ten years later, his country would need him for the Tokyo raid - and he was still alive to answer.

What Happened to the Gee Bee and the Granvilles?

The story does not end happily. The R-1 and its sister ship came to bad ends, as Gee Bees almost always did, and the type killed more good pilots. The Granville Brothers company, like so many others, was swallowed by the Great Depression and gone before the decade was out.

But the brothers left behind proof of something powerful. With five siblings, a wind tunnel, and almost no money, they built the fastest thing in the sky and put American backyard ingenuity on the front page of every newspaper. In the middle of the nation’s worst hard times, a little yellow airplane reminded hundreds of thousands of struggling people that human beings could still do something magnificent.

That legacy lives on in modern unlimited air racing, including the races held at Reno, which trace directly back through the Golden Age to the Granville boys. A full-scale flying reproduction of the R-1 exists today, built decades later by dedicated enthusiasts - and by all accounts it remains every bit as much of a handful as the original, exactly as the Granvilles intended.

Key Takeaways

Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy in Cleveland flying the Gee Bee R-1, averaging better than 252 mph around the closed pylon course.
Earlier that same week he set a world landplane speed record exceeding 296 mph in the same aircraft.
The Gee Bee R-1, built by the five Granville Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, paired an ~800 hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp with a tiny, barrel-shaped airframe - making it extraordinarily fast and notoriously deadly.
Doolittle quit air racing at his peak, reasoning he had never heard of anyone in that work dying of old age - an act of airmanship, not fear.
The Gee Bee’s legacy endures in modern unlimited air racing and a flying full-scale reproduction of the R-1.