The Granville Brothers Gee Bee Super Sportster, Jimmy Doolittle's Thompson Trophy Run, and the Fastest and Most Dangerous Racer of the Golden Age

The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster remains the most iconic and most lethal racing aircraft of the golden age of American aviation. At the 1932 National Air Races in Cleveland, Jimmy Doolittle averaged 252.686 miles per hour over ten laps to claim the Thompson Trophy and set a world closed-course speed record - then retired from racing the same afternoon. The story of how that airplane came to exist, and what happened when it kept flying without him, defines an era.

Who Were the Granville Brothers?

The Granville Brothers were not credentialed aerospace engineers. Zantford “Granny” Granville, the oldest of five brothers, ran a small aircraft shop in Springfield, Massachusetts alongside Robert, Tom, Mark, and Edward. None held formal degrees from major universities or apprenticeships inside established manufacturers like Curtiss or Douglas.

What they had was deep practical knowledge, genuine mechanical talent, and a design philosophy reducible to four words: speed above all else. They built modest sportsters first, won regional races, and gained a reputation throughout the racing community. With each successive design, the philosophy pushed harder toward its logical extreme.

Their workshop was a low wooden structure on a grass strip - minimal staff, minimal resources, timelines that would alarm any modern aircraft development program. The R-1 was designed, built, and readied for competition in months, not years.

How the Gee Bee’s Short-Coupled Design Created Speed - and Killed Pilots

The Granvilles understood that aerodynamic drag comes primarily from fuselage wetted area and frontal cross-section. Their solution was to make the fuselage as short as physically possible - not marginally shorter than the competition, but shockingly, dramatically shorter.

The result was a fuselage so abbreviated that the cockpit sat nearly above the tailwheel. The engine was almost in the pilot’s lap. From the side, the fuselage was nearly circular in cross-section - deep, round, barrel-shaped. From the front, it was dominated by a massive engine cowling, with the pilot’s canopy a small afterthought tucked behind it. Journalists called it a Coca-Cola bottle, a beer keg, a flying oil drum with a Pratt and Whitney attached. None of those descriptions were entirely wrong.

“Short-coupled” is an engineering term that understates what it means in the cockpit. When the tail control surfaces sit close to the aircraft’s center of gravity, the moment arm is short. A short moment arm means controls produce less corrective effect per degree of deflection - the margins narrow, and the window between a routine maneuver and an unrecoverable departure closes fast. At over 250 miles per hour with a pylon filling the windscreen and the ground sliding past underneath, that window closes faster than almost any pilot could manage.

The Model Z and Lowell Bayles: The First Entry in the Ledger

Before the R-1 ever flew, the Granvilles proved their concept - and its costs - with the Model Z.

Lowell Bayles was an experienced, widely respected racing pilot. In November 1931 at Albuquerque, New Mexico, he flew the Model Z to 267 miles per hour - an unofficial world speed record for a land airplane, set on his first pass.

On a subsequent run, the engine cowling failed at speed. The Model Z went in. Bayles was killed.

One record. One pilot dead. The ledger was established before the R-1 had ever left the ground. The Granvilles continued anyway. Death was part of the accounting in 1930s air racing - accepted by pilots, sponsors, and the hundreds of thousands of fans in the grandstands. The question was never whether the aircraft were dangerous. It was whether the performance justified the price.

What the Granvilles Built for the 1932 Season

For 1932, the brothers built two new machines.

The R-1 carried a Pratt and Whitney Wasp Senior - a twin-row, 14-cylinder radial producing approximately 800 horsepower. For context: the Curtiss P-6E, the finest pursuit aircraft in the U.S. Army Air Corps at the time, produced around 600 horsepower. The R-1 outpowered the military’s fastest fighter and packed that power into an airframe weighing under 3,000 pounds fully loaded.

The R-2 used a smaller Pratt and Whitney Wasp Junior producing 550 horsepower - still remarkable for an aircraft of its size. Both machines kept the signature short-coupled design.

Several experienced pilots evaluated the R-1 and declined. They looked at the design, felt the margins, and decided the aircraft asked more than they were willing to give. One was reported to have stood on the ramp studying it in silence, then said he’d rather be flying next year.

Jimmy Doolittle and the Thompson Trophy

One pilot accepted the assignment.

In September 1932, Jimmy Doolittle was 35 years old and already a legend. He held a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from MIT, one of the first pilots to earn one. He had set transcontinental speed records, executed the first complete outside loop, and made the first flight in history conducted entirely by instruments with no external visual reference whatsoever.

When Doolittle evaluated the R-1, he understood exactly what it was and exactly what it demanded. He later said the aircraft required precision and respect, but he had found it manageable. Not easy. Manageable. He knew precisely the difference between those two words.

On September 3, 1932, Doolittle lined up at Cleveland and flew ten laps around a 30-mile closed circuit - 300 miles total. The aircraft was barely visible between pylons: a flash of red and white, the roar arriving a half-second behind, sound perpetually chasing the machine. Every tight banking turn was a potential catastrophe that kept resolving, somehow, into level flight and another burst of speed down the next straight.

He averaged 252.686 miles per hour for the full distance - a world closed-course speed record. Nobody had ever gone that fast around pylons. When the R-1 taxied in, mechanics were on it immediately: engine mounts, control surface hinges, every point in the structure that had flexed through ten laps at full power. The heat radiating off the Wasp engine was felt from twenty feet away.

The airplane had held together.

Doolittle accepted the Thompson Trophy, told reporters it had been an extraordinary machine, and announced his retirement from air racing. He had accepted a position with Shell Oil and was moving on. He had come to Cleveland, done what he came to do, and he understood that the aircraft’s margins were finite. Testing them further wasn’t a bet he was prepared to make.

He was right to walk away.

What Happened After Doolittle Left

The Gee Bee’s story continued without him, and it got darker.

In 1933, the R-2 was entered in the races at Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition. The pilot was Florence Klingensmith - an accomplished racing competitor who had built her reputation by winning, trusted with one of the most demanding aircraft in the country because she had earned that trust through years of results.

During the race, at speed in a tight pylon turn, the fabric on one of the ailerons failed. A piece of control surface simply let go at the worst possible moment. The aircraft entered a departure it could not recover from. Florence Klingensmith was killed.

That same year, Russell Boardman suffered serious injuries in the R-1. The Granville Brothers Aircraft Company filed for bankruptcy in 1933. The machines continued flying in the hands of subsequent owners - modified, rebuilt - and the accidents continued in the years that followed.

Why the Gee Bee Still Matters to Aviation

It would be easy to read this as a story about reckless people who knew the risks and pushed anyway. That reading misses something real.

The aeronautical knowledge produced by this era was not trivial. Cowling designs, landing gear fairings, propeller pitch research, high-speed structural data gathered on closed courses at Cleveland and Chicago - all of it fed directly into the generation of aircraft that followed. The P-38 Lightning. The F4U Corsair. The machines that went to war in the early 1940s were built on engineering lessons the racing community paid for, with a currency documented in accident reports alongside trophy records.

Doolittle made this point explicitly in later years: the racing had been real development work. Not spectacle. Not publicity. Real advancement of the state of the art, accomplished the only way it ever advances - by going to the edge and finding out what is actually there.

The Gee Bee R-1 lives today as a series of highly accurate flying replicas. Watch one lift off. Watch it come around in a turn - that short, round fuselage, the massive cowling, the way it sits slightly nose-heavy, always leaning toward the speed it was built for. It doesn’t look like it should fly. That was always the point.

Key Takeaways

The Gee Bee R-1’s radical short-coupled fuselage maximized speed by shrinking the moment arm between the cockpit and tail surfaces, which also compressed pilot margins to near-zero at racing speeds
Jimmy Doolittle averaged 252.686 mph over 300 miles at Cleveland on September 3, 1932, setting a world closed-course speed record and winning the Thompson Trophy
The Granville Brothers’ Model Z had already killed Lowell Bayles at 267 mph in November 1931 before the R-1 flew a single race lap
Multiple experienced pilots refused to fly the R-1; Doolittle accepted because his MIT engineering doctorate gave him a precise understanding of what the aircraft required - and when to stop
High-speed aerodynamic and structural data from 1930s closed-course racing contributed directly to the design of WWII combat aircraft, including the P-38 Lightning and F4U Corsair