The Monica is a French luxury automobile produced in the commune of Balbigny in the department of Loire from 1972 to 1974, of which just 40 cars were reported to have been made. The Monica 560 V8 is considered part of the French luxury GT lineage, similar to the earlier Facel Vega HK500 V8 GT.
Background
The Monica was a project of Jean Tastevin, a graduate engineer of the École Centrale Paris. In 1930, his father Arnaud bought the Ateliers et Chantiers de Balbigny, a manufacturer of mining and railway equipment. In 1955, Jean succeeded his father, becoming Chairman and Managing Director. He renamed the company to Compagnie française de produits métallurgiques, or CFPM, and began to specialize in the manufacturing and rental of railroad tank cars. The factory where the rolling stock was manufactured operated under a different name, being Compagnie Française de Matériels Ferroviaires (CFMF). The company grew, eventually having 400 employees.
Tastevin was an automobile enthusiast who personally owned cars from Aston Martin and Facel Vega. After Facel Vega shut down in 1964 he bought a Jaguar, but regretted not being able to buy a French-made car of that class.
In pursuit of both his interest in cars and finding a way to diversify his railway business, Tastevin began making plans to launch his own brand of automobile in 1966. He made his long-time assistant, Henri Szykowksi, the project manager. He also set aside a portion of his factory in Balgigny so that the cars could be made specifically in France.
The car was named in honour of Tastevin's wife, Monique Tastevin.
Development history and prototypes
Automotive engineer and racing driver Chris Lawrence's company LawrenceTune Engines had developed a 2.6-litre version of the Standard engine used in the Triumph TR4. Lawrence's version used a crossflow cylinder head of his own design and a Tecalemit-Jackson fuel injection to, according to claims, produce . Automotive journalist Gérard "Jabby" Crombac had seen the engine at the 1966 Racing Show at Olympia West Hall in London. The article he wrote about it caught Tastevin's eye. Tastevin wrote to Lawrence about having LawrenceTune supply 250 engines per year for his new car. Upon learning that the car was not yet developed, Lawrence offered the services of his company. Crombac, who was familiar with Lawrence's racing history, vouched for Lawrence, so Tastevin entrusted the development of the Monica to LawrenceTune.
The first chassis and the jig to produce it were built together. Lawrence laid out a chassis with a central tunnel made of four square-section, 18 gauge steel tubes with extensive cross-bracing. Two long steel boxes with triangular cross-sections were made of 16 gauge steel and attached to the chassis in the door sill area. These stiffened the chassis and were also to serve as the car's fuel tanks. 16 gauge aluminum formed the front and rear bulkheads and floors, and was used on both sides of the central tunnel to stiffen the car further. Voids in the tunnel were filled with expanded polyurethane foam to add even more stiffness and deaden sound.
The front suspension used very tall uprights with the wheel spindles on one side and a short, inward-extending stub axle on the other. Springing comes from vertically mounted coil-over-damper units mounted inboard and operated through rocker-style upper arms. The lower arms were conventional wide-based wishbones made of a one-piece wishbone and a long radius arm running back towards the bulkhead. Steering was a high-mounted rack-and-pinion positioned at the same level as the upper wishbone.
The rear suspension was a De Dion system with coil springs, two parallel leading links on each side, and a Panhard rod. The differential came from the Rover P6B, (also known as the Rover 3500) with a crown-and-pinion made by Hewland, but with an additional nose-piece that gave the option of two rear-axle ratios; a high-numeric ratio for in town and a low-numeric ratio for high-speed cruising. A lever in the cockpit allowed the ratio to be changed while in motion.
Braking was provided by a dual-circuit power supply assisted Lockheed and Girling system with 12-inch vented disks in front and 10-inch solid disk brakes in the rear. The rear brakes were mounted inboard and the front brakes were mounted upright to the stub-axle on the front, which brought them out of the wheels and into the air-stream for cooling.
As the prototype chassis was nearing completion, Lawrence began to have second thoughts about using the LawrenceTune/Standard-Triumph engine. Lawrence knew that the Triumph engine was to be phased out of production by 1967. He also felt that this relatively heavy, rough, and noisy engine was not appropriate for a new luxury car.
Lawrence put Tastevin in touch with Edward C. "Ted" Martin, who had designed an engine that Lawrence thought would work well in the Monica. After evaluating the engine, Tastevin bought the design, rights, and existing tooling for Ted Martin's engine. The agreement included four complete 3.0-litre engines.
The Martin engine was an all-alloy V8 with a single overhead camshaft (SOHC) per bank driven by a toothed-belt (originally Gilmer belt - see also Timing belt). Designed for the new 3-litre limit announced for the 1966 Formula One season, it weighed with ancillaries and produced at 7000 rpm. An unusual feature of the Martin V8 was that four of the connecting rods were forked at the big end, much like those on the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. The connecting rod for the opposing cylinder borefit into the gap of the forked rod. This meant that the cylinder banks were not offset on the crank-line, reducing the overall engine length. The engine was used in the Pearce-Martin F1 car, as well as the Lucas-Martin—a modified Lotus 35 Formula 2 frame that was run briefly in Formula One. It also appeared in 2.8-litre form in some specials, including some of Lawrence's own Deep Sanderson sports and racing cars.
This initial prototype first ran at Silverstone in 1968 without bodywork. The drivetrain for the car was a 3-litre Martin V8 driving through a Triumph TR4 gearbox with overdrive. The car weighed 1070 kg. Its overall performance was good but the testing uncovered problems with the engine and its lack of road-car ancillaries.
Bodywork for the first prototype was fabricated by Maurice Gomm. This car was very different in appearance from the subsequent prototypes and the production models and has been compared to an oversized Panhard CD. Neither Tastevin nor his wife were happy with the appearance of the first prototype.
A second prototype chassis was built and sent to Williams & Pritchard, who produced a body for it in aluminum. The style of this body was much more angular than the first. Tastevin personally requested some last-minute changes to the shape which would be undone in later prototypes, but in general, prototype #2 set the general direction for subsequent bodies. This second car was registered as a Deep Sanderson and given registration number 2 ARX. After its use as a development mule, prototype #2 was used as a personal car by team member Colin James, after which it was acquired by Peter Dodds, another member of the Monica team.
In 1969, prototype chassis #3, the first to receive a ZF 5-speed manual transmission, was built. At this time the Tastevins introduced Tudor (Tony) Rascanu, a Romanian exile and former shop manager for Vignale in Italy, to the project. Rascanu was given the job of completely restyling the bodywork for the third prototype, but was not allowed to make any modifications to Lawrence's chassis, which was to be sent to French coach-builder Henri Chapron in Paris. Chapron was to build a full-sized maquette, or body-form, of the revised car under Rascanu's oversight. Rascanu and Chapron's work met with Tastevin's approval. With hidden headlamps, a sloping, aerodynamic nose, and wide horizontal taillights it was seen as more appealing than the previous two attempts. The maquette was then sent to Carrozzeria Alfredo Vignale in Turin to be used as a base for Vignale to produce a body in steel.
Before delivering the maquette to Vignale, Tastevin asked Lawrence to first deliver prototype #2 to the workshops of Virgilio Conrero, also in Turin. Conrero was to do a detailed assessment of the Martin engine and evaluation of the car's performance. Conrero was critical of almost every aspect of the Martin engine and was skeptical of the power curves provided by Lawrence. He told the factory “this engine is a trap that will never work under normal traffic conditions”. Conrero insisted on a flying-kilometre test of the prototype, after which he would run his 2-litre Giulietta on the same course for comparison. Lawrence suspected that Conrero was trying to discredit both the Martin engine and LawrenceTune in an attempt to take Lawrence's place on the Monica project. He examined the times recorded for the Monica's run and discovered an irregularity in the numbers. When Tastevin confronted Conrero with this information, the testing was halted and Conrero's involvement in the project ended.
Lawrence delivered chassis #3 to Vignale's carrozzeria, and they completed the body in steel. While prototype #3 was a significant improvement, the Tastevins were not yet entirely satisfied with its appearance. Performance of this car was also disappointing due to it being between and overweight. By way of explanation, Lawrence drilled a hole into the scuttle. The drill penetrated of lead. Vignale, in the meantime, sold his company to DeTomaso in December 1969 and died three days later in an automobile accident.
During the May 1968 protests in France, Tastevin decamped the entire staff of CFPM to Geneva and tasked Lawrence to keep the Monica project going. Tastevin provided Lawrence with funding to find sub-contractors to build cars in England. Lawrence approached Jensen Motors, who he knew were already building cars for Sunbeam, Volvo and Austin-Healey as well as their own C-V8s and Interceptors. Jensen was not set up production of the body panels though, as panels for their other assembly contracts came from outside of the company. Lawrence took prototype #3 and went looking for someone to provide the panels. He found a company named Airflow Streamline in Luton that specialized in producing aluminum cabs for trucks. Airflow only asked for a complete set of engineering drawings, a chassis and the number of body panels that Lawrence would require. Chassis #4 and #6 were delivered to Airflow Streamline and Rascanu was installed there to supervise the production of the necessary drawings.
Lawrence also needed another sub-contractor for suppling the engines. One option was Coventry Victor, and the other was Rolls-Royce. Lawrence had heard that Rolls-Royce had recently idled one of their production facilities due to the loss of a contract and might be interested in taking on the Martin V8 project. Lawrence met with representatives from Rolls-Royce, who were fascinated by the small size of the Martin V8 and intrigued by the forked connecting rods so reminiscent of those in Rolls-Royce's own Merlin. Rolls-Royce subsequently won another defense contract which would reactivate the previously idled plant and bowed out of negotiations, so Lawrence went to Coventry Victor.
In the intervening time, things had settled down in Paris, and Tastevin wanted to move the project along quickly. Chassis #5 was sent to the factory in Balbigny while Lawrence established a machine shop at LawrenceTune Engines that would be able to produce the engines as well. Problems with castings coming from their aluminium manufacturer, Birmingham Alloys, prompted Lawrence to have Tastevin search his contacts in the French aluminum industry for an alternative supplier, settling on a company called Montupet.