The Granville Brothers Gee Bee Model R, the Thompson Trophy Races, and the Most Dangerous Airplane That Ever Won a Race at Cleveland

The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster was the fastest piston aircraft in the world in 1932, capable of nearly 290 mph in level flight - faster than any military fighter in the U.S. inventory at the time. It won the Thompson Trophy at Cleveland that September, piloted by Jimmy Doolittle, who immediately retired from racing the moment the race was over. Both facts tell you everything you need to know about this airplane.

The Granville Brothers and Their Racing Ambition

Springfield, Massachusetts, 1931. Five brothers - Zantford “Granny” Granville, Robert, Mark, Tom, and Edward - were running a small aircraft company out of a converted car dealership on the edge of town. They had been building production aircraft for several years: biplanes, cabin monoplanes, the kinds of machines reasonable people would buy.

Granny Granville had an idea that was not reasonable.

The air racing circuit in early 1930s America was a national phenomenon. The Cleveland National Air Races drew crowds in the hundreds of thousands, with newsreel cameras, radio coverage, and front-page newspaper treatment across the country. Prize money could change the fortunes of a small aviation company. Fame lasted decades.

The centerpiece was the Thompson Trophy - a closed-circuit pylon race, low and fast, with judges stationed at each pylon watching for cut turns. The winner was not simply fastest on the straightaways. The winner was fastest everywhere: through the turns, across the chop and turbulence, hands full, straps tight, the ground close enough to read the shadows of the pylons.

The Granvilles decided they were going to win it.

How the Gee Bee Was Built

Their design philosophy was direct: maximum power, minimum airplane. Eliminate everything that creates drag. What cannot be eliminated, shape to slip through the air like a bullet.

The solution was a nine-cylinder Pratt & Whitney radial engine producing approximately 800 horsepower, wrapped in the smallest possible airframe. The fuselage was essentially a teardrop - fat, round, nearly circular in cross-section. The cockpit sat so far aft that the pilot was nearly at the trailing edge of the wing. The canopy was barely a blister above the fuselage skin. The landing gear was fixed, two wide-panted legs spaced just far enough apart to keep the aircraft upright on the ground and not one inch wider.

The tail surfaces appeared small enough to have been borrowed from a model kit. The engine packed into the nose looked like a cork jammed into a bottle.

The Model R-2, built for the 1931 season, was already fast enough to draw serious attention. The Model R-1, refined for 1932, brought top speed in level flight to approximately 290 mph - exceeding the best front-line pursuit fighters in the U.S. Army Air Corps. A privately built racing airplane coming out of a converted car dealership in Massachusetts was faster than anything wearing a military roundel in the United States.

Why the Gee Bee Was Dangerous to Fly

The Gee Bee’s stability picture was, to put it diplomatically, challenging. The center of gravity sat far aft. The tail surfaces were genuinely small relative to the mass of that engine packed into the nose. The airplane was constantly trying to swap ends.

A small correction overshot. Correcting the overshoot overshot again. One pilot described it as flying a ball on the end of a string - the ball always wanting to go somewhere the string was not pointing. Ground handling added its own hazards: torque from the big radial at full power wanted to yaw the aircraft off the runway before it reached flying speed.

Controls were heavy in some axes and twitchy in others. The cockpit offered roughly as much room as a telephone booth. Visibility over that enormous nose was severely limited.

Several experienced pilots flew the Gee Bee racers over the course of their careers and came away with opinions ranging from unsettled to genuinely alarmed. One described the sensation that the airplane was tolerating him rather than obeying him.

Jimmy Doolittle and the 1932 Thompson Trophy

James Harold Doolittle was not simply a racing pilot. He held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1929, at Mitchel Field on Long Island, he had completed the first fully blind flight in history - taking off, flying a course, and landing entirely under a hood using only cockpit instruments, with no external visual reference. That flight established the practical foundation for instrument flying and changed aviation.

Doolittle understood aircraft behavior the way a master chess player reads a board. He had studied the Gee Bee. He had spoken with pilots who had flown it. He understood exactly what he was getting into.

He chose to fly it anyway.

Race day at Cleveland in September 1932 was everything the golden age of aviation looked like from the outside. Grandstands packed shoulder to shoulder, an announcer calling the race over the public address, the crowd straining to follow machines as they came around the pylons low and screaming.

Doolittle flew the Model R-1 at full power, low enough to read the numbers painted on the pylon bases, pulling four to five times his bodyweight in the turns, lap after lap around the course. The crowd heard him coming before they could see him - that nine-cylinder radial wide open, all 800 horsepower, the prop blast flattening everything nearby.

His average speed for the race: 252 mph on a closed pylon circuit, with turns, with competitors, with an airplane that wanted to trade ends.

He won the Thompson Trophy.

Then he retired from racing. Immediately. He announced he would not return to competitive air racing. He had a family. The risk was not proportionate to the reward. The man who had just won the world’s most celebrated air race decided one circuit around the trophy was sufficient.

That decision reflects as much about the Gee Bee as it does about Doolittle’s judgment.

The Human Cost of the Gee Bee Program

The airplane did not stop being dangerous after Doolittle walked away.

Russell Boardman, one of the most accomplished racing pilots of the era, crashed the Model R-2 at Cleveland during that same 1932 season and suffered serious injuries. Subsequent seasons brought more accidents and more wreckage. In 1935, a heavily rebuilt descendant of the original racers crashed at Springfield, killing the pilot.

Every person who climbed into a Gee Bee knew the machine’s reputation. They climbed in anyway. That is the air racing culture of the golden age: genuinely dangerous, genuinely glamorous, and genuinely important - all three at once, inseparable from each other.

Zantford Granville died in 1934, in a crash during a demonstration flight in one of the company’s production cabin aircraft - not a racer. He was 32 years old. His brothers scattered. The company dissolved. The dream that had produced the fastest machine in America ended on a general aviation flight that barely made the news.

Why Air Racing Mattered Beyond the Trophies

The technology developed on those race courses fed directly into the aircraft that fought World War II and the airliners that followed. Engine refinements, cowling design, propeller efficiency, high-speed aerodynamic behavior at sustained full power - none of that knowledge came from slow, careful committee research.

The Pratt & Whitney engine families that powered the Grumman Hellcat and the Douglas airliners of the postwar era trace their development lineage directly through the race course at Cleveland. That connection is not metaphorical. The engineers who built those engines knew what the racing circuit demanded and designed accordingly.

What remains of the Gee Bee today are replicas - several of them flying at airshows, faithful recreations carrying the aircraft’s distinctive shape. A full-scale replica of the Model R-1 is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

Stand in front of it. Look at that stubby fuselage, that enormous nose, those tiny tail surfaces, and consider that Doolittle sat in there at 252 mph, perfectly calm, perfectly committed - a scientist and a pilot who understood exactly what he was asking the machine to give him.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee Model R-1, built by the Granville Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts, reached approximately 290 mph in 1932 - faster than any U.S. military fighter in the American inventory at the time.
Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at an average speed of 252 mph on a closed pylon course, then immediately announced his retirement from competitive air racing.
Doolittle’s single-race exit was not modesty - it was a calibrated assessment from a man who had studied the machine and knew precisely what the odds looked like.
The air racing circuit of the 1930s was the primary driver of piston engine and aerodynamic development that carried directly into World War II aircraft design.
Zantford “Granny” Granville, the driving force behind the program, died in 1934 at age 32. The company that built the fastest private aircraft in America was gone within a few years of its greatest triumph.