The Gee Bee Super Sportster, the Granville Brothers' Flying Barrel, and the Thompson Trophy That Doolittle Won and Nobody Else Could Keep Alive

The Gee Bee Super Sportster R-1 set a closed-course world speed record of 252.686 miles per hour at the 1932 National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio. Only one pilot ever mastered it at that level: Jimmy Doolittle. Every other serious attempt to race the aircraft ended in tragedy.

The Granville Brothers and the Machine They Built to Win

The Granville Brothers Aircraft Company was founded in 1925 by five brothers - Zantford, Tom, Mark, Bob, and Edward - working out of a converted dance hall at the Springfield, Massachusetts airport. Zantford, known as “Granny,” was a machinist by trade who believed an airplane was simply a problem waiting to be solved. He and his brothers built sport planes for New England buyers throughout the late 1920s, earning a reputation for fast, well-made aircraft.

By the early 1930s, Granny had a larger target: the Thompson Trophy.

What the Thompson Trophy Meant in 1932

The National Air Races at Cleveland drew a quarter million spectators in the 1930s. The Thompson Trophy - a closed-course pylon race - was the era’s equivalent of the Super Bowl and the Indianapolis 500 combined. Winning pilots became national celebrities. Their faces appeared on newspaper front pages across the country, and sponsors paid real money to be associated with the winner.

Granny Granville decided he was going to build an airplane that could only do one thing - go fast - and do it better than anything flying.

The Design: A Barrel with an Engine

The R-1 and R-2 were built for the 1932 racing season. The fuselage was a fat, stubby barrel: 17.5 feet long with a 25-foot wingspan. For comparison, a Cessna 172 is roughly 40 feet long with a 36-foot wingspan. The Gee Bee made a Cessna look like a stretch limousine.

Up front sat a Pratt & Whitney Wasp Senior producing 800 horsepower - nearly twice what the competition was running. The cowling alone accounted for roughly a third of the airplane’s total length. The cockpit was pushed so far back toward the tail that the pilot had almost no forward visibility on the ground.

The iconic paint scheme - white fuselage, black tail, wide black racing stripe down the middle - made it look like a bumblebee. It looked fast even sitting still.

Why the Gee Bee Was So Difficult to Fly

The engineering decisions that made the Gee Bee fast also made it extraordinarily demanding. The center of gravity sat right at the edge of acceptable limits. The tail surfaces were deliberately undersized - small tails create less drag, but these were so small that control inputs produced instant, total responses with no margin for hesitation.

One inch of rudder pedal and the airplane was in a turn. One inch of back pressure and it was climbing. The Gee Bee had the aerodynamic stability of a dart thrown backwards.

A skilled pilot with deep feel for the machine could manage it. A pilot who was even slightly behind the airplane could not.

Lowell Bayles and the First Tragedy

Before the R-1 and R-2 were complete, the Granvilles had already suffered a devastating loss. In December 1931, pilot Lowell Bayles was attempting to set a land speed record at Detroit in the earlier Gee Bee Model Z Super Sportster. He was past 260 miles per hour when a fuel cap came loose on the cowling, struck the propeller, and sent the airplane inverted into the ground.

Lowell Bayles was 29 years old. The Granvilles were devastated, but the 1932 season was coming and the R-1 and R-2 were nearly finished. They pressed on.

Doolittle at Cleveland: September 3, 1932

Jimmy Doolittle agreed to fly the R-1 in the 1932 Thompson Trophy race at Cleveland Municipal Airport. By that point he was already a recognized figure in aviation: he held multiple speed records, had completed the first full instrument flight using only cockpit gauges at Mitchell Field in 1929, and held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT. He understood airplanes the way a surgeon understands anatomy.

He could feel what a machine was doing before the instruments told him.

On September 3, 1932, Doolittle ran ten laps around the roughly six-mile closed course and won at an average speed of 252.686 miles per hour - a new world record for closed-course racing that would stand for more than a decade. Four miles per minute, sustained for the full race.

Afterward, he told reporters the Gee Bee was a very fine racing aircraft that required a great deal of attention. What he said privately to other pilots was reportedly considerably less diplomatic.

The Walk Away

Doolittle never flew the Gee Bee in competition again. He retired from air racing that winter to focus on his military career - a career that would culminate a decade later when he led 16 North American B-25 Mitchells off the deck of the carrier Hornet in the first American air strike on Tokyo in 1942.

He left the R-1 behind like a man who had looked hard at something and made the right call.

What Happened After Doolittle Left

The R-1 went through several hands after 1932. In the summer of 1933, pilot Roy Minor was flying it at an event in Indianapolis when the airplane went out of control during a low pass over the field. Minor died on impact.

The R-2 went through repeated accidents and rebuilds, each time emerging heavier, slower, and more compromised. The performance envelope that had made it a trophy contender was gradually buried under modifications and repairs. By the mid-1930s, both original aircraft were gone.

Zantford Granville himself was killed in April 1934 while flying a biplane on a charter run in Connecticut. He was 33 years old. The Granville Brothers Aircraft Company filed for bankruptcy the same year.

The Gee Bee in the Larger Context of the Golden Age

The golden age of aviation is often remembered through its records and trophies. What gets less attention is the casualty rate. Between 1920 and 1940, the loss rate among air racers and record-attempt pilots was extraordinary by any modern measure - not because those pilots were reckless, but because they were working at the absolute edge of what was known, flying machines that had never been fully understood.

The Gee Bee sits at the center of all of it. The R-1 was fast in a way the aviation world had not seen before. In the right hands on the right day, it was extraordinary - Doolittle proved that beyond argument. But the same machine was simply more than most pilots of the era could manage, not because they lacked skill, but because the airplane was unforgiving in ways that skill and instinct could not fully compensate for when the margins ran out.

The Replicas Flying Today

Replicas of the Gee Bee fly today at Reno, Oshkosh, and major airshow circuits. The most well-documented work with a flying replica was done by airshow pilot Delmar Benjamin, who studied the original accident records and handling notes over many years. His conclusion aligned closely with what Doolittle had communicated quietly in 1932: the airplane could be flown safely, but it required absolute concentration, complete discipline, and no assumption that the machine would help you out.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee Super Sportster R-1 won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252.686 mph - a closed-course world record that stood for more than a decade
Designer Zantford “Granny” Granville deliberately sacrificed stability for speed; the undersized tail surfaces and extreme center-of-gravity placement made the airplane extraordinarily sensitive and completely unforgiving
Jimmy Doolittle won the race, recognized the machine’s limits, and never raced it again - widely regarded by aviation historians as the defining correct decision of the aircraft’s short life
Every serious attempt to race the Gee Bee after Doolittle ended in the death of the pilot, the destruction of the aircraft, or both
The Granville Brothers Aircraft Company was gone by 1934; Granny Granville died that same year at age 33, having built what may be the most consequential single-season racing airplane in American aviation history