The Gee Bee R One, the Granville Brothers, and the Fat Little Racer Jimmy Doolittle Rode to the Thompson Trophy at Cleveland in Nineteen Thirty-Two

In 1932, aviation pioneer Jimmy Doolittle climbed into the Gee Bee R-1 - the fastest and most feared racing airplane in the world - and won the Thompson Trophy at Cleveland with an average speed of roughly 252 mph, days after setting a world landplane speed record of 296 mph in the same aircraft. The R-1 was built by five self-taught brothers from Springfield, Massachusetts, and had earned a reputation as a killer. Doolittle mastered it completely, then walked away from racing at the top - a decision that likely saved his life.

What Was the Gee Bee R-1?

The Gee Bee R-1 was a single-seat racing airplane built in 1932 by the Granville Brothers Aircraft company. Its design philosophy was brutally simple: take the most powerful engine available and build the smallest, slipperiest airframe possible around it.

The result was a stubby, barrel-shaped machine with a fat fuselage tapering to a needle tail. It carried a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine producing roughly 800 horsepower, wrapped in an airframe with a wingspan of only about 25 feet. Painted white on top and yellow below with black scalloped trim, it looked like an angry hornet sitting on the ramp.

That fat teardrop body wasn’t ugly for its own sake. The Granvilles shaped it in a wind tunnel - unusual for the era - and it was actually a clean, aerodynamically efficient form at high speed.

Who Were the Granville Brothers?

The Granville brothers were five siblings from Springfield, Massachusetts. They weren’t wealthy men or degreed engineers. The oldest, Zantford “Granny” Granville, was a mechanic and tinkerer who understood machines by hand rather than by slide rule.

They set up shop in an abandoned dance hall in Springfield and hung out a sign reading Granville Brothers Aircraft - shortened to “Gee Bee” for the initials G.B. They started by building sensible sport biplanes, but during the Great Depression few regular people were buying airplanes.

Racing, however, offered prize money, glory, and instant fame. So the Granvilles set out to build the fastest airplane in America. They teamed up with a young engineer named Robert Hall, and later got help from aerodynamicist Howell Miller, to create the big Model R “Super Sportsters” - the R-1 and R-2.

Why Was the Gee Bee So Dangerous to Fly?

The Gee Bee’s speed came at a severe cost to controllability. The Granvilles placed the cockpit far aft, right against the vertical fin, because the wind tunnel showed it helped the airplane. But it left the pilot unable to see straight ahead. With the fat nose rising high in front, a pilot had to fly the approach looking out the side - crabbing, leaning, and guessing on takeoff and landing.

The airplane was also short-coupled, meaning the distance from wing to tail was stubby. That made it twitchy and quick-reacting, responding instantly to every input, including the ones the pilot didn’t mean to make. It had no margin and no forgiveness.

Test pilots described flying it as like balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger - constant work, never a moment to relax.

The reputation was already grim before the R-1 flew. In 1931, pilot Lowell Bayles won the Thompson Trophy in an earlier Gee Bee racer. That December 1931, Bayles was killed attempting a world speed record when the same airplane came apart at better than 300 mph. The whispers began: the Gee Bee was a widow-maker.

Who Was Jimmy Doolittle in 1932?

By 1932, Jimmy Doolittle was arguably the most complete pilot alive - long before the famous 1942 Tokyo raid with sixteen B-25 bombers that most people remember him for.

Doolittle was a bold stunt pilot and racer, but he was also one of the only men in aviation holding a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He understood the mathematics of flight while his hands were flying the airplane.

In 1929, he had flown a complete flight - takeoff to landing - entirely on instruments with the cockpit covered, in a Consolidated trainer. That achievement effectively invented modern instrument flying. Every pilot flying an approach to minimums today owes him a debt. He was a thinking pilot, exactly the kind of man the Gee Bee demanded.

What Did Doolittle Accomplish at Cleveland in 1932?

Doolittle came to Cleveland in the late summer of 1932 for the National Air Races over Labor Day weekend, flying the Gee Bee R-1 before a crowd of a hundred thousand or more.

He won two of the era’s greatest prizes:

In the Shell Speed Dashes, a straight-line run over a measured course, Doolittle set a new world landplane speed record of 296 mph - making the stubby little racer the fastest thing on wheels in the sky anywhere on earth.
In the Thompson Trophy, a low-altitude closed-course pylon race, he won at an average speed of about 252 mph, threading the airplane through turbulent air and standing it on a wingtip at every pylon.

He flew it precisely and smoothly - like the engineer he was - taking exactly what the airplane had to give and not one bit more. He did the thing everyone said the Gee Bee wouldn’t let a man do: he mastered it.

Why Did Doolittle Quit Racing?

At the peak of his career, holding both the world speed record and the Thompson Trophy, Doolittle stepped away from air racing. He famously observed that he had yet to hear of anyone in that line of work dying of old age.

He understood the difference between skill and luck. The Gee Bee had given him everything it had, and he knew the man who kept returning to that well would eventually run out of luck - not ability.

He was right. The same R-1 he rode to glory was rebuilt, modified, flown again the next year, and crashed, killing its pilot. The R-2 crashed as well. Nearly every big Super Sportster came to a bad end. Zantford “Granny” Granville himself was killed in a crash of another company airplane in 1934, and the combination of the Depression and the tragedies finally closed Granville Brothers Aircraft.

Was the Gee Bee a Bad Airplane?

The Gee Bee wasn’t evil - it was honest. It was exactly what it was built to be: an airplane with no margin, wrapped around a huge engine, chasing pure speed at a time when nobody fully understood where the aerodynamic edges were.

The lessons it taught - about stability, control, and the safety margins an ordinary pilot needs - were written down in blood and built into the airplanes that followed. The gentle, forgiving trainers many pilots first soloed are stable partly because the Gee Bee showed the world what happens when an airplane isn’t.

Today, a superb flying reproduction of the R-2 tours the airshow circuit. Every time it thunders past a crowd - low, yellow, and mean - it brings the golden age of air racing roaring back to life.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee R-1, built in 1932 by the self-taught Granville brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, paired a ~800 hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine with a tiny ~25-foot airframe.
Jimmy Doolittle set a world landplane speed record of 296 mph and won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at about 252 mph in the R-1 at Cleveland.
The airplane was extraordinarily dangerous due to its far-aft cockpit, poor forward visibility, and twitchy short-coupled handling - earning a reputation as a “widow-maker.”
Doolittle, an MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who pioneered instrument flight in 1929, retired from racing at his peak, correctly judging the risk as a matter of luck running out.
Most Gee Bee Super Sportsters ended in fatal crashes, and the company closed after Zantford Granville was killed in 1934 - but the safety lessons shaped every aircraft that followed.