The Gee Bee Racers, the Granville Brothers of Springfield, and the Flying Barrel That Could Win the Thompson Trophy and Break Your Heart on the Same Afternoon

The Gee Bee R-1 won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at an average speed of 252.686 miles per hour - a figure that no production military fighter would match for another seven or eight years. Built by five brothers in a converted Springfield, Massachusetts dance hall, it was the fastest closed-course racer of its era and one of the most dangerous machines ever to leave the ground.

What Made the Gee Bee So Fast - and So Lethal

The Granville Brothers Aircraft Company operated from a converted dance hall near Bowles Agawam Airport outside Springfield, Massachusetts. Zantford “Granny” Granville, the oldest of five brothers, led the operation alongside Tom, Mark, Bob, and Edward. They were not formally trained engineers. They were mechanics and craftsmen who understood airframes the way a skilled woodworker understands grain - through direct experience with the material, not a textbook.

Their design philosophy was brutally simple: find the biggest available engine, build the smallest airframe it would fit inside, attach only as much wing as required to stay airborne, and push the pilot toward the tail to make room. Everything else was excess weight and drag.

The R-1 was powered by a Pratt & Whitney Wasp Senior radial producing close to 800 horsepower. It weighed less than 1,900 pounds empty. The wingspan was 25 feet - roughly what you find on a Cessna 152. The fuselage was nearly circular in cross-section. That is where the nickname came from: the flying barrel.

The cockpit sat far aft, near the tail, because the engine consumed everything forward. The view over that massive radial cowling was essentially nonexistent. Pilots landed by feel and by knowing where the runway was supposed to be.

From a handling standpoint, the numbers told a sobering story. The center of gravity sat almost directly over the main landing gear. The tail surfaces were at the end of a very short moment arm, making the airplane sensitive to inputs in ways that ranged from twitchy to lethal depending on speed and conditions. At low speeds, the controls could be heavy and slow - and then suddenly light and immediate - sometimes within the same approach to landing.

Pilots who flew Gee Bees struggled to describe the experience without arriving at the word dangerous. One compared it to riding a cannonball. Another said it was like flying a safe with a control stick installed.

The Thompson Trophy and the National Air Races

The National Air Races at Cleveland Municipal Airport were the defining spectacle of American aviation in the early 1930s. Each September, the airport transformed into something between a county fair and a Roman arena, drawing crowds measured in the tens of thousands. Military demonstrations, exhibition flights, and aerobatics led to the weekend headline events - most importantly, the Thompson Trophy.

The Thompson Trophy was a closed-course pylon race flown entirely over the airport, visible from the infield grass. The course ran roughly 10 miles around, marked by pylons that competitors had to pass on the inside or take a time penalty. You flew as fast as the machine would go at 50 feet off the ground, in a steep bank around each pylon, lap after lap until someone won.

No tactics. No strategy. You flew faster than the other man, and you won.

The Granville Brothers’ first major result came in 1931, when Lowell Bayles flew the Gee Bee Model Z to a Thompson Trophy win at 236 miles per hour - the fastest closed-course pylon race in history to that date. Three months later, in December 1931, Bayles took the Model Z over Detroit for a speed record attempt. A fuel cap worked loose in flight and struck the windscreen. At high speed and very low altitude, the airplane departed controlled flight. Lowell Bayles was 33 years old.

The Granville Brothers went back to the dance hall. They built the R series for 1932.

Jimmy Doolittle and the Race That Defined an Era

Jimmy Doolittle arrived at Cleveland in 1932 with a reputation already well established. His blind flying research with the Guggenheim laboratory had become the foundation of modern instrument flight. His aerobatic demonstrations left experienced pilots standing with their mouths open. He was what his contemporaries called a scientific pilot - someone who understood the machines he flew at a level most people around him simply did not.

He had no illusions about what the Gee Bee was asking of him.

On September 3, 1932, before a crowd of 30,000 people at Cleveland Municipal Airport, Doolittle flew the R-1 - painted purple and white - to a course record and a Thompson Trophy at 252.686 miles per hour. For context, that speed would not be matched by a production military fighter for another seven or eight years. Doolittle had just flown past the future.

He climbed out of the cockpit, spoke to the press, and said he was done with air racing. The Gee Bee was too much machine. He had won, and he was smart enough to know when to pocket the winnings and walk away.

Jimmy Doolittle died peacefully at 96 years old in 1993.

The Cost: A Catalog of Loss

The Gee Bee went on collecting names.

In 1933, Russell Boardman attempted to race the R-1 at Indianapolis. The landing went wrong. Boardman survived, badly injured. That same year, in September 1933, Florence Klingensmith - one of the most gifted women racing pilots of the era - entered a Gee Bee in the Philips Trophy race at Chicago. She was deep into the race when the airplane shed part of its wing structure and became uncontrollable. Florence Klingensmith was 28 years old.

Cecil Allen campaigned a machine rebuilt from parts of the R-1 and R-2 through the 1934 and 1935 racing seasons. At the Springfield Air Meet in September 1935, the airplane went into the ground. Cecil Allen was killed.

The Granville Brothers Aircraft Company declared bankruptcy in 1934. Granny Granville never saw it. He was killed in the summer of that year delivering a small biplane to a customer - not a racer, a routine flight. He was 32 years old, close to the same age as several of the people who had died flying his airplanes.

The entire arc of the company, from the first airplane built in that Springfield dance hall to the last Gee Bee to round a pylon, fits inside roughly six years.

Why the Gee Bee Still Matters to Aviation

Walk into any serious museum of golden age aviation and the Gee Bee is there. Not because it had a long production run, or powered commercial routes, or saw military service. It is there because it represents something genuinely hard to look away from: the absolute distillation of a specific moment in American history when the frontier of speed was unknown and human beings were willing to go find out where it was.

The air races of the 1920s and 1930s were the engine that drove aviation technology forward. Supercharged engines, variable-pitch propellers, retractable landing gear, flush riveting, cleaner airframes - all of it flowed out of the racing programs and into the airliners and fighters that defined the 1940s. You cannot draw a straight line from the biplanes of World War I to the aircraft of World War II without passing through the pylon courses at Cleveland. The Gee Bee was part of that path.

The Gee Bee is also a reminder that the path had a cost. The golden age was genuinely golden. It was also genuinely costly. Those two things belong together.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee R-1’s 252.686 mph Thompson Trophy win on September 3, 1932 represented a speed that production military fighters wouldn’t match for another seven to eight years
The Granville Brothers’ design philosophy was radical in its simplicity: fit the largest available engine into the smallest possible airframe, with just enough wing to stay airborne
Jimmy Doolittle won the Thompson Trophy and immediately retired from air racing, recognizing the Gee Bee as too dangerous to fly a second time - a judgment that likely saved his life
The company lost multiple pilots connected to its machines - including Lowell Bayles, Florence Klingensmith, Cecil Allen, and Granny Granville himself - before declaring bankruptcy in 1934
The racing programs of the 1930s directly advanced the technology behind World War II-era aircraft, making events like the Thompson Trophy a critical part of aviation’s developmental history