The Car with the Cyclops Eye: How the 1942 Tatra T87 Saw the Future

At first glance, the 1942 Tatra T87 does not look like a car from the war years. It looks like a machine dropped from a future that arrived too early. Its body curves like a falling teardrop, its engine sits in the rear, and at its nose is a central headlamp staring out like a Cyclops’ eye. It gives the car an uncanny expression, as though it is staring past its own moment in history.

That feeling is hard to shake, because the T87 really did seem to come from somewhere else. Built in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, shaped by aerodynamic thinking influenced by Paul Jaray's work in the Zeppelin world, and powered by a rear-mounted air-cooled V8 with lightweight alloy components, it was one of the most advanced production cars of its time. It also carried more history inside its teardrop body than any single automobile should reasonably have to bear.

Hans Ledwinka, The Man Who Reinvented the Automobile

Hans Ledwinka arrived in Kopřivnice in 1897 as a young railway carriage designer, recruited to a factory that had been making horse-drawn wagons since 1850. Within months he was working on something else entirely: the factory's first automobile. He never really looked back.

Ledwinka was Austrian-born, credited over his career with more than 1,000 patents and described by historian David Ryan as one of the most respected automotive engineers in Europe. He was not interested in refining inherited ideas. He believed the modern automobile should be rebuilt from first principles: lighter, more efficient and shaped by engineering rather than by the lingering proportions of the horse-drawn carriage. That instinct put him at odds with almost everyone else in the industry, and he pursued it anyway.

He left Kopřivnice twice, once in 1902 and again in 1916, before returning for good in 1921, by which point the company had renamed itself Tatra after the mountain range on the Slovak border. With a relatively free hand and a high-quality team around him, he spent the next two decades building cars that nobody else would have built. Backbone chassis construction, independent suspension at all four wheels, rear-engine layouts, air-cooled engines: ideas that were far from accepted practice, developed and refined through the 1920s and into the 1930s while most manufacturers were still producing upright, boxy cars that pushed clumsily through the air. He built them anyway, and in doing so remade what a car could be.

Paul Jaray: The Zeppelin Engineer Who Gave Cars Their Shape

The T87's body did not emerge from a stylist's instinct. It was shaped by aerodynamic ideas closely associated with Paul Jaray, a Hungarian-born engineer born in 1889 whose earlier work with Zeppelin airships helped establish streamlining as a serious scientific approach to vehicle design.

Working in a wind tunnel that Zeppelin built for him in 1916, Jaray's research helped establish that a teardrop form was among the most aerodynamically efficient shapes for a vehicle moving through air: rounded at the front, tapering toward the rear, with its widest point roughly one-third back from the nose. His wind tunnel studies also helped establish that objects traveling close to the ground behave differently from those moving through open air, a phenomenon later known as ground effect.

When Germany was forbidden from building airships after the First World War, Jaray turned his research toward automobiles. He filed patents in Germany, Great Britain and the United States. By 1921, he had applied the same teardrop principles to an actual car body, built on the Ley chassis in Germany, which achieved a drag coefficient of just 0.29. That result caught the attention of Hans Ledwinka, who incorporated Jaray's thinking into his radical rear-engine Tatra designs. Jaray helped give the modern aerodynamic automobile its scientific foundation, even if the world took time to catch up.

Ledwinka drew on Jaray's aerodynamic proposals, and Tatra licensed his streamlined designs, body engineer Erich Übelacker, translating those ideas into the production car. The result of that collaboration was first the T77, and then its refined successor, the T87.

From the T77 to the T87: Refining the Idea

In 1934, Tatra introduced the T77, one of the first production cars in the world shaped primarily by aerodynamic thinking rather than convention. It had been preceded by Ledwinka's 1933 V570 prototype, the first expression of his rear-engine, rounded-body concept, which proved the idea was buildable. The T77 that followed featured a rear-mounted air-cooled engine, a backbone chassis, full independent suspension and a body shaped to Jaray's teardrop principles. It was a custom-finished car produced in very small numbers, with only 150 made, but it proved that Tatra was serious.

What the T77 also demonstrated was something more fundamental. Once Tatra committed to a truly aerodynamic shape, the entire concept of the car had to change with it. To create a lower, smoother front end and reduce drag, the engine had to move to the rear, where it could also benefit from direct cooling airflow through the side intakes. That decision was not a styling choice or an engineering eccentricity. It was a consequence of taking aerodynamics seriously all the way through.

The T87, introduced in 1936, refined the T77 with a lighter, more developed body and a more mature overall design. It replaced the T77's earlier wood-supported structure with an all-steel body and carried Tatra's aerodynamic ideas into a more usable and more fully resolved production car. The wheelbase was shortened for better handling balance and the engine was redesigned. Übelacker's work on the body gave the T87 its specific proportions and details, including the sweep of the roofline, the placement of the fin and the integration of the cooling intakes.

The result was not a concept car. It was a production automobile available for purchase, and its rivals had no convincing answer to it.

Why the T87 Was So Advanced

The engineering of the 1942 Tatra T87 still sounds unusual today.

Its rear-mounted, air-cooled V8 displaced 2,960 cc and used lightweight magnesium and aluminium alloy components. Output was approximately 75 horsepower at 3,500 rpm in standard trim, later revised to around 85 hp. Those numbers sound modest. The performance they produced did not.

Because of its aerodynamic body, the T87 could reach approximately 160 kilometres per hour, close to 100 miles per hour, a figure that placed it among the fastest production luxury cars of its era. That performance came not from displacement but from efficiency. When Volkswagen tested the T87 in a full-scale wind tunnel in 1979, it recorded a drag coefficient of 0.36, an extraordinary result for a car designed in the mid-1930s. To understand what that number means in context: the Chrysler Airflow, launched the same year as the T87 and considered one of the most aerodynamically advanced American cars of its time, had a Cd of 0.546 at launch. A Kamm-designed car from 1939, itself regarded as progressive, managed only 0.39. The T87 was more aerodynamically efficient than virtually any production rival of its decade.

It is worth being precise about that figure. Period promotional materials sometimes quoted numbers as low as 0.212, but those came from one-to-five scale model testing, which was standard pre-war practice and which consistently produced more optimistic results than full-size cars. The 0.36 from the 1979 full-scale test is the most reliable measurement available. It remains a remarkable achievement for a vehicle designed in 1936.

The engineering details matched that ambition at every point. Cooling air entered through scoops set into the bodywork behind the rear doors, feeding directly to the engine, where twin belt-driven cooling blowers circulated that air across the cylinders. A dorsal fin ran down the rear of the body, not as decoration but as a functional stabiliser preventing the long tapered tail from yawing dangerously in crosswinds at high speed. The car featured independent suspension at all four wheels, four-wheel hydraulic brakes and rack and pinion steering. Up front, the Cyclops light, a static central fog lamp fixed in place on the 1942 production car and positioned between the two main headlamps, gave the T87 its unforgettable face.

Every element served a purpose. That is what made the car feel, then and now, like something designed by people who had already seen what came next.

Built Under Occupation

By 1939, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist as a political entity. Germany annexed the Sudetenland in September 1938. In March 1939, German troops occupied Bohemia and Moravia, declaring it a Protectorate of the Reich. The Tatra factory at Kopřivnice was absorbed into the German war economy.

The consequences were immediate and specific. Ledwinka’s smaller four-cylinder companion car, the T97, which bore uncomfortable similarities to the forthcoming Volkswagen, was cancelled by German industrial order. The T87 continued. It was too fast, too refined and too useful to be discontinued. Fritz Todt, the designer of the Autobahn network and himself a Tatra owner, reportedly declared it the Autobahn car.

The T87 became popular with German officers during the occupation, admired for its speed and smooth Autobahn manners. Yet that performance came with a sharper edge. Its rear-mounted engine and swing-axle layout made it behave very differently from the front-engined cars most drivers knew, especially at high speed and stories later spread that German officers crashed Tatras so often that the car earned a reputation as an unofficial Czech “secret weapon.”

After the war, the Tatra factory was nationalized by the Soviet-backed Czechoslovak government. While the T87 remained in production until 1950, it increasingly became a car of officials and state authority. Tatra then moved on to the T600 Tatraplan, which kept the company’s aerodynamic, rear-engine philosophy alive with an air-cooled flat-four, followed by the later T603, which revived the rear-mounted air-cooled V8 tradition during the Cold War. Although Tatra ended passenger car production in 1999, elements of its engineering philosophy, especially the backbone chassis, lived on in the company’s heavy-duty off-road trucks.

See the 1942 Tatra T87 at Tampa Bay Automobile Museum

The Tampa Bay Automobile Museum's 1942 Tatra T87 is one of fewer than 250 surviving examples worldwide. Standing before it in person reveals what photographs cannot fully capture: the unbroken curve of the teardrop body, the purposeful rise of the dorsal fin, the rear-engine proportions and the Cyclops light staring back at you from the front.

Sources: "The Tatra T87: Aerodynamic Elegance" by David Ryan, Modernism Magazine; "Winds of Change" by Delwyn Mallett, The Automobile, July 2015, photographs by Nick Clements; original Tatra T87 technical specification document, Ringhoffer-Tatra-Werke AG (French language); "Hans Ledwinka" by Jim Donnelly, Hemmings; "Paul Jaray" by Jim Donnelly, Hemmings