The Gee Bee Super Sportster, the Granville Brothers' Flying Engine, and the Barrel-Chested Racer That Terrified a Generation and Came Roaring Back at Oshkosh

The Gee Bee Super Sportster was a 1932 air racer built by the Granville Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, designed around a single ruthless idea: wrap the smallest possible airframe around the biggest possible engine. It won the Thompson Trophy and set a world landplane speed record of over 296 mph in the hands of Jimmy Doolittle, yet it killed enough pilots to earn a reputation as a flying coffin. Decades later, replica builder Delmar Benjamin proved the truth was more nuanced: the Gee Bee was never evil, only unforgiving.

Who Built the Gee Bee, and Where Did the Name Come From?

There were five Granville brothers, and the one who mattered most was Zantford Granville, known to everyone as “Granny.” He was not a college-trained engineer. He was a mechanic and a tinkerer who understood airplanes by feel and by long hours with his hands.

The brothers set up shop as Granville Brothers Aircraft. Take the first two letters of that name - G.B. - and you get Gee Bee.

In the beginning they built sensible little sport biplanes. Honest airplanes that nobody remembers. What made them famous was what came next.

Why Was Air Racing Such a Big Deal in the 1930s?

In the golden age, air racing was the biggest show in America. When the National Air Races came to town, a hundred thousand people packed the grandstands, and the top pilots were household names on the front page of the paper, the way ballplayers were.

Two trophies mattered above all others:

The Bendix Trophy - a flat-out cross-country dash from coast to coast.
The Thompson Trophy - a closed-course pylon race, ten airplanes screaming around a set of towers at rooftop height, wingtip to wingtip, pulling turns hard enough to gray out the pilots.

The Thompson was the one that stopped your heart, and it was the prize the Granvilles built the Gee Bee to win.

What Made the Gee Bee Super Sportster So Unusual?

Most designers start with the wing - with lift, stability, and how the airplane behaves when the weather turns ugly and the pilot is tired. The Granvilles didn’t care about any of that. They started with a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine - a big fourteen-cylinder, and later a nine-cylinder producing over 700 horsepower - and asked a different question entirely: how little airplane can we get away with wrapping around this monster?

The answer was the Model R Super Sportster, and there has never been anything else quite like it.

The fuselage was shaped like a fat, barrel-chested teardrop, all engine up front and tapering to almost nothing at the tail. The cockpit was jammed far aft, right up against the vertical fin, so the pilot could barely see over the enormous cowling. The wings were tiny, stubby things that looked a size too small, and the whole airplane stood up on long, spatted landing gear like a bulldog on its toes.

By any honest measure, it was an engine with a seat behind it.

The brothers built two for the 1932 season - the R-1 and the R-2 - painted in an unforgettable black-and-white scheme with scalloped lines like a circus wagon, carrying the numbers 7 and later 11.

The Price Was Already Being Paid: Lowell Bayles and the Model Z

You can’t understand the Gee Bee without understanding the cost that came before it. In 1931, the Granvilles fielded a smaller racer, the Model Z, named the City of Springfield. A young pilot named Lowell Bayles flew it to victory in the Thompson, beating everyone.

Then he went out to set a world landplane speed record. On one of those blistering low passes, something let go - some accounts say a fuel cap tore loose and cracked the windscreen. The airplane pitched up, came apart in the air, and Lowell Bayles was killed. There is film of it, and it is hard to watch.

The brothers knew their airplanes lived right on the edge of the possible, and that the edge had teeth.

What Did Jimmy Doolittle Say About the Gee Bee?

For 1932, the Granvilles needed a pilot with the skill and nerve to take the R-1 to Cleveland for the Thompson. They got the best there was: James “Jimmy” Doolittle.

Set aside everything Doolittle did later. In 1932 he was simply the finest, most scientific pilot in America - a man with a doctorate in aeronautics and ice water in his veins. He didn’t just fly the Gee Bee. He studied it, tested it, and learned exactly where the edge was before he ever went racing.

On the course he was untouchable. He won the 1932 Thompson Trophy, and in a separate run he pushed the Super Sportster to a new world landplane speed record of better than 296 mph - faster than anything on wheels had ever gone.

But it’s what he said afterward that matters most. Doolittle called the Gee Bee “the sweetest ship I’ve ever flown” and, in the same breath, “a killer.” He compared flying her to balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger: any inattention, any distraction, and she would bite. The best pilot in the country flew that airplane to a record and a trophy, then looked at it clear-eyed and told the truth about it.

Was the Gee Bee Really a “Death Trap”?

The airplanes did keep killing people. Russell Boardman died in an R-1 at Indianapolis in 1933, and other pilots came to grief in Gee Bees and their derivatives. So the legend calcified. The Gee Bee became the boogeyman - the flying coffin, a design so flawed it was practically homicidal. That’s the story in half the books.

And it was only half true.

The difference the legend missed is the difference between evil and demanding. The Gee Bee had almost no natural stability. It was short-coupled, twitchy, and enormously powerful, and it would not tolerate a lazy pilot or a distracted moment. But if you respected it and stayed ahead of it every single second, it did exactly what you asked.

How Did Delmar Benjamin Prove the Legend Wrong?

In the early 1990s, pilot Delmar Benjamin and craftsman Steve Wolf decided to build a flying replica of the Gee Bee R-2 - not a museum piece hung from a ceiling, but a real, honest, flying reproduction. Everyone told them the same thing: don’t, it will kill you the way it killed the others.

Benjamin didn’t believe everyone. He and Wolf went back to the original engineering and concluded that the airplane wasn’t evil - it was simply intolerant of anything less than a fully present pilot.

Then Benjamin did what nobody had dared in sixty years. He flew the Gee Bee in airshows - loops, rolls, hammerheads, the full aerobatic routine - in the airplane with a widow-maker reputation. And he brought it to Oshkosh (AirVenture), carving that fat, snarling black-and-white teardrop down the showline in front of hundreds of thousands of people who had only ever seen the Gee Bee in old photos and grainy crash footage.

He made it look, if not easy, then at least possible - and proved the golden-age legend had been half myth all along. The airplane was not a murderer. It simply refused to carry anyone who wasn’t fully there.

Why the Gee Bee Still Matters

The Gee Bee doesn’t care how good you used to be. It cares how good you are right now, this second, this turn. That’s a deeply pilot lesson.

Strip away the goggles and scarves and romance, and the golden age was a group of mechanics and dreamers with more courage than data, building airplanes at the ragged edge of the possible and learning the hard truths the only way anyone did back then - in the air, sometimes at a terrible cost. Every forgiving, docile airplane we fly today sits on top of lessons those people paid for.

So the next time someone tells you the Gee Bee was nothing but a death trap, tell them about Doolittle, who called it the sweetest ship he ever flew, and about Delmar Benjamin, who built one and flew it down the line at Oshkosh. The airplane was never the villain. It was just honest - it gave you exactly what you brought to it.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee was built by the Granville Brothers (G.B.) of Springfield, Massachusetts, using a single design philosophy: the smallest airframe around the largest engine.
Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy and set a world landplane speed record of over 296 mph in the Super Sportster, while famously calling it both “the sweetest ship I’ve ever flown” and “a killer.”
The Gee Bee’s deadly reputation came from real losses, including Lowell Bayles (1931) and Russell Boardman (1933), but the airplane was demanding, not fundamentally flawed.
In the 1990s, Delmar Benjamin and Steve Wolf built a flying R-2 replica and performed aerobatics at Oshkosh, proving the design could be flown safely by a fully attentive pilot.
The Gee Bee’s real lesson is timeless for aviators: an unforgiving machine rewards total presence and punishes distraction.