The Granville Brothers, the Gee Bee Super Sportster, and the Springfield Barrel That Made the Thompson Trophy Both Beautiful and Deadly

The Gee Bee Super Sportster was a rain barrel with wings - deliberately, ruthlessly so. Built by five brothers in a Springfield, Massachusetts hangar in the early 1930s, it was the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in the American sky, a closed-course speed record holder that killed more than one pilot and helped teach American engineers what high-performance flight actually looked like. The knowledge it generated, bought at significant cost, fed directly into the design of American military aviation a decade later.

The National Air Races and the World That Produced Them

The National Air Races of the late 1920s and 1930s were unlike anything American sport has produced before or since. Hundreds of thousands of spectators crowded fairgrounds and airport perimeters from Cleveland to Chicago to watch pilots push experimental machines around pylon courses at altitudes measured in feet, not thousands of feet. The Thompson Trophy was the centerpiece: a closed-course event, roughly ten miles per circuit, with pilots screaming around pylons at speeds the military couldn’t match.

The culture was insular and intense. Pilots competed fiercely against each other in September and argued fuel mixture settings in the same hangar the following spring. Roscoe Turner - three-time Thompson Trophy winner, former barnstormer, wearer of a self-designed military uniform with a waxed mustache to match - kept a lion cub named Gilmore that he occasionally flew as a passenger. He was the face of a world that understood exactly what it was risking and showed up anyway.

Who Were the Granville Brothers?

There were five of them: Zantford (universally called Granny), Thomas, Mark, Robert, and Edward. They came from a working-class New England household where you fixed things with your hands first and asked questions second. They opened their shop at Springfield Airport, Massachusetts in the late 1920s - no corporate backing, no government contracts, no wealthy patron. Five brothers with tools and a theory.

The theory was disarmingly simple: a racing airplane exists to do exactly one thing. Go fast. Everything else is compromise. And compromise, in Granny Granville’s thinking, was drag.

What Made the Gee Bee Super Sportster So Extreme?

The Granvilles built around that principle with something close to religious commitment. The fuselage should be as large as necessary to fit the most powerful engine available. The wings should be as small as structurally possible. The cockpit should be only as large as the pilot can physically tolerate. The pilot sits wherever the center of gravity demands. His comfort is entirely irrelevant.

The early Gee Bee racers earned a reputation - fast, demanding, unforgiving, but fast. Then the brothers built the Model Z Super Sportster in 1931, and the reputation acquired a sharper edge.

The Model Z’s fuselage dominated the airframe in a way that looked almost wrong on the ground. Nearly round in cross-section, swollen around the radial engine, tapering toward the tail surfaces. The wings were short, heavily tapered, optimized for speed at the expense of almost every other handling quality. The pilot sat well aft, close to the tail, placing the center of gravity on a knife’s edge. Get it right and the airplane wanted to fly fast. Get it wrong for a moment, and it began making its own decisions.

The Death of Lowell Bayles, December 1931

Lowell Bayles was a skilled, experienced pilot - not reckless, not underprepared. In December 1931, at an airport in Michigan, he was making straight-course speed runs in the Model Z, chasing a world record. At approximately 300 miles per hour, the aircraft rolled inverted and dove into the ground.

The inquiry could not establish a definitive cause. A fuel cap may have come loose and struck the windscreen. The airplane may have simply reached a flight regime beyond recovery. At 300 miles per hour, the margin between a story and a funeral is a fraction of a second.

The R One: 800 Horsepower in a Three-Thousand-Pound Airframe

A lesser group would have stopped there. The Granville Brothers went back to the drawing board.

For the 1932 season, they built two new aircraft: the R One and the R Two. The R One carried an 800-horsepower Pratt and Whitney Wasp Senior engine in an airframe that barely exceeded 3,000 pounds loaded. Front-line Army Air Corps pursuit aircraft of the era produced somewhere around 500 to 600 horsepower. The military’s best fighters would have been blown off the course.

The R One was not a fighter. It was, as more than one pilot observed after flying it, a guided missile that hadn’t fully committed to the guidance part.

Why Jimmy Doolittle Was the Only Pilot for This Airplane

Jimmy Doolittle arrived at the 1932 Thompson Trophy already carrying a legend. He had won the Schneider Trophy seaplane race in 1925. In September 1929, he had completed the first entirely instrument-based flight in aviation history - taking off, flying a course, and landing on instruments alone at Mitchel Field, New York. He held an engineering doctorate from MIT. He was arguably the finest pilot in America, a combination of physical skill and mathematical precision that was rare then and remains rare now.

He was exactly the kind of pilot the Gee Bee R One demanded.

Doolittle later described flying the R One as requiring complete, undivided attention from the moment the wheels broke ground until they touched back down. The pitch sensitivity was acute in a way other aircraft of the era simply weren’t. The center of gravity envelope was so narrow you could not rest your hands on the controls. You flew it continuously, actively, with constant small corrections on every axis. Any relaxation, any moment of complacency, and the machine began exploring flight regimes nobody had signed up for.

Doolittle’s Calculated Victory at Cleveland

Before the race, Doolittle made a decision that almost certainly saved his life.

He decided he was not going to push the R One to its absolute limits. He understood the machine well enough to know that hunting for the last two or three miles per hour would mean crossing a threshold from which there was no coming home. He had looked at the data, looked at the airplane, and made a precise engineering judgment about where the line was. Then he chose to stay on the correct side of it.

On September 3, 1932, Cleveland Municipal Airport was packed. Tens of thousands of spectators had driven from across Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. The sky was clear. The engines on the flight line were loud enough to feel in your chest from a quarter mile away.

Doolittle ran the throttle forward and went.

He flew the Thompson Trophy course at an average speed of 252 miles per hour - a new closed-course speed record. Then he taxied back in and walked away from air racing for good.

The reason he gave publicly was precise: the margins in that airplane were only as large as you chose to make them, and the sport was asking pilots to make those margins smaller and smaller to stay competitive. He was a statistical thinker, and the statistics of the Gee Bee program were not encouraging. He had other work to do - work that would eventually include leading a raid on Tokyo in 1942, but that is a different story.

What Happened After Doolittle Walked Away

The R One and R Two continued to race.

Russell Boardman, an accomplished long-distance pilot who had set a world record the year prior, took the R One into the 1933 season and was seriously injured when the aircraft ground-looped on landing at Indianapolis during qualifying. The R Two changed hands multiple times, accumulating modifications and incidents, building a history that was getting difficult to read without a sense of dread.

The end of the Granville Brothers’ story has a particular cruelty to it.

Granny Granville was killed in the spring of 1934. Not in a racer. Not in a high-speed record attempt. In a routine delivery flight in a small passenger aircraft, not far from the airport where he had built everything. The man who had designed the most extreme racing machines of his generation died doing something ordinary. The company folded later that year.

Five brothers from Springfield. A handful of machines. A few seasons of racing. Then it was over.

How the Gee Bee Shaped American Fighter Design

The story does not end in 1934.

When engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and at American aircraft manufacturers were designing the next generation of fighters in the late 1930s, the data from the Thompson Trophy racers was on the table. The streamlined fuselages. The powerful radial engines packed tightly behind carefully shaped cowlings to kill parasitic drag. The small, efficient wing planforms optimized for high-speed performance. The Granville Brothers had been running empirical aerodynamic research on every race day without calling it that.

The distance from the Gee Bee R One to the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt is shorter than it appears. The lessons extracted from chasing pylons around Cleveland made American fighters faster and harder to kill over Europe and the Pacific a decade later. That is engineering lineage, not metaphor.

A reproduction of the Gee Bee R Two still flies at airshows today. If you’ve never seen it in the air, find a show that has it on the schedule and go stand near the flight line. It is a bizarre and beautiful machine - a reminder of what five brothers from Massachusetts built when they decided that everything except speed was negotiable.

Key Takeaways

The Granville Brothers built the Gee Bee Super Sportster in Springfield, Massachusetts with no corporate backing - just five brothers applying an extreme aerodynamic philosophy: minimize everything except power and speed.
The Model Z Super Sportster (1931) killed experienced pilot Lowell Bayles at approximately 300 mph during a record attempt; the Granvilles responded by building the even more powerful R One and R Two for 1932.
Jimmy Doolittle won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252 mph - a closed-course world record - by making a deliberate engineering decision not to push the R One to its limits, then retired from air racing immediately after.
Zantford “Granny” Granville died in a routine delivery flight in spring 1934; the company folded the same year.
The aerodynamic data generated by the Thompson Trophy racers directly influenced the design of American WWII fighters, including the P-47 Thunderbolt, making the Gee Bee program a foundational chapter in military aviation history.