(first posted 10/31/2017) Sport & Specials was this year’s theme of the annually held DAF Museum Days in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In other words, DAF cars beyond grocery getter level. And some souped-up big brothers to boot.
1972 DAF 55 coupe. The 55, introduced in 1968, was powered by a 1.1 liter Renault engine. It was DAF’s first car model with a water-cooled four-cylinder engine.
In the early seventies, Mr. Harrie Geeris built a few of these convertibles. As far as is known this is the only one left.
The unique convertible (Buggy? Daffy?) is based on the DAF 66. The 66 was introduced in 1972, it had a De Dion axle instead of the swing axle the previous DAF models had.
In 1968 two DAF 55 rally cars drove the 16,500 km long London to Sydney Marathon. Above a 1993 replica, based on a 1970 DAF 55 Marathon sedan. Under its hood a tuned 1.4 liter Renault engine.
The DAF 55 certainly wasn’t fast. But throughout the years they did very well in endurance rallies all over the world, with great performance in the mountains and on muddy and slippery roads. On top of that, the simple Renault engines didn’t miss a beat.
Another 1.4 liter engine, good for 90 hp, in a 1975 DAF 66 sedan.
1975 DAF 66 1300 Marathon coupe, powered by a 1.3 liter Renault engine. A typical factory specs sporty DAF.
1971 DAF 55, Rallye du Maroc replica.
1966 DAF Daffodil (Type 32 S) with a 746 cc air-cooled two-cylinder boxer engine, a Group N rally car homologation model.
1969 DAF 55 Rally sedan.
1970 DAF 55 Marathon coupe.
Living rallycross and rally raid legend Jan de Rooy owns this DAF 66 coupe with “a lot of horsepower”. Two of these were built, both in Sweden.
A 1960 DAF 600 that has been around. It drove the Amsterdam to Moscow rally, Route 66 in the US, and the 1997 Peking to Paris endurance rally. The two-tone 600 got a full restoration a few years ago.
Here’s its 590 cc DAF engine.
1970 DAF 55 sedan with a Renault-Alpine turbo engine, maximum power output somewhere around 160 hp. It can only be a blast to drive.
1974 DAF 33 Rally.
A supporting role for this 1964 DAF Daffodil with the 746 cc engine.
And now for something completely different, let’s call it a DAF 33-hardly-a-V8.
From 2006 to 2015 rockband Peter Pan Speedrock organized rock festival Speedfest. Does the band’s logo look somewhat familiar?
Of course it does. Both the band and the multinational hail from Eindhoven, just like DAF.
This 1976 DAF FT2800 became a race truck after its career as a workhorse. The 2800 was well-known for its simplicity and longevity, many of them were exported to Africa or the Middle-East after their European job was done.
The most brutal of them all was a DAF CF race truck with a 980 hp 11.7 liter inline-six engine and water cooled brakes.
Since the early eighties numerous heavy-duty DAF trucks have participated in the Dakar Rally and other rally raids, both as rally trucks and as assistance vehicles. We’ll have a look at some of these all wheel drive diesel monsters in a next article.
Related reading:
CC Global: DAF 66: Four Decades Of Dutch Continuous Variability
Museum Classics: DAF Museum Eindhoven, Part Three – The Cars
Neat photos. I haven’t seen a DAF on the road for years. From the cowl back, models 55 & earlier always struck me as having a Trabi-like look to them.
A Dutch colleague was telling me that his wife recently purchased a Fiat 500 with a 2 cylinder engine. That combination isn’t available in America. Sounds like the modern day successor to the early DAFs.
I was thinking 60s, 70s Triumph 1300 / Toledo
back end
DAF Heaven! Love them all, especially the coupes.
Very nice Johannes! Orange racing stripes, I’d never thought of that but it’s perfect!
My Grandfather lived in Eindhoven and worked for Phillips in the 1930’s
Also, aren’t the remains of travel legend Alby Mangels’ DAF wagon in that museum?
Too bad it’s not in the museum, I found last year’s ad with his 1968 DAF 33 for sale.
http://www.justauto.com.au/justcars/cars-for-sale/1968-DAF-33-JCW3667238
Interesting, it doesnt seem to matter what innocent shopping trolley it is someone will build a faster version, sometimes in a factory more likely in the back yard.
I had a 55 Coupe back in the early 70’s – it was a great little car, but as there was no differential it had amazing grip in snowy conditions, the downside being that it used to devour rear tyres. One little known fact is that they would go as fast backwards as forwards which could be entertaining to say the least!
Interested to know more about the following van and Imp-like Mini scale models at the DAF Museum, were they derived from existing DAF models or remnants of a stillborn project?
There also seems to be other scale models of future DAFs shown in the link below.
http://www.paul-wouters.nl/dafmuseum.htm
All scale model studies of future DAFs, but they never became reality.
Except the DAF 77, which evolved into the Volvo 343, introduced in 1976.
Scroll down here: http://www.paul-wouters.nl/daf.htm
Was the van and the Imp-like Mini scale model studies part of the P300 project or a separate project entirely below the P300? Also were they intended to be FWD or RWD and had they reached production, would both models have carried over the 750-850cc DAF Flat-Twin engine (possibly further enlarged), used an all-new in-house design or utilized engines from Renault or another carmaker?
Was also wondering if you could clear up any misunderstandings regarding the P300 and P500 projects and their relationships with other DAF / Volvo models and projects, beyond them both seemingly leading to the DAF P900 / DAF 77 aka future Volvo 343?
Am assuming the 2-door P300 was intended to replace the the DAF 33 with the 4-door P500 being a larger Renault-powered car that eventually became the Volvo 343, both AFAIK featuring a front-engined RWD layout and potentially using Renault engines mated to Variomatic transmission (though the P500 was apparently planned to be the first model featuring a manual gearbox).
While DAF was eventually acquired by Volvo and Renault supplied DAF with 4-cylinder engines, is it known what other carmakers DAF held exploratory talks with apart from BMW and Audi?
And lastly was the DAF P100 Coupe derived from the DAF 44 or another model?
Those are all questions for Don Andreina and/or Tatra87.
Just kidding.
You seem to know much more about all these prototypes than I do, to start with. I found this, too bad you can’t read Dutch (I assume):
https://www.autoblog.nl/nieuws/special-volvo-340-360-101780
In short: DAF wanted a bigger model. They teamed up with Michelotti, which resulted in the P200, P300, P400 and P500. The first 3 were a dead end, number 4 was sold to BL. According to the article that one became the Triumph Dolomite.
Next was the P900 project which resulted in the DAF 77 (a De Vries design) and the later Volvo 343.
Indeed, am not a Dutch speaker.
So it is possible the Imp-like Mini design study was known under either the P200 and P400 codenames?
Cannot really see a direct resemblance between the P500 and Triumph Toledo / Dolomite (for some reason the P500 reminds me of the NSU K70), it is interesting though that Volkswagen / Audi (prior to going for what became the Audi 50 / VW Polo), Chrysler and even BMW were interested (surprised BL was not in the running as a Variomatic Mini / etc would have been interesting) with the latter going as far as to adapt the P900 chassis for its own engines and transmissions, presumably to slot below the BMW E21 3-Series as a direct replacement for the BMW 02 (the M10 engine was apparently capable of displacements as low as 1300cc with earlier versions going as low as 900cc).
Though based on the Google translated article, it seems BMW could not promise they would build the P900 with its own engine and apparently pushed too hard during talks with DAF, prompting the latter to return to using Renault engines for the P900 when Volvo entered the picture.
BMW wanted to build their 2002 Touring in the Netherlands, and the Germans already modified DAF’s P900 platform for using BMW engines and transmissions. Not so fast though, DAF only wanted a BMW engine. The Bavarians pushed too hard, as you say.
So DAF turned to Renault again for the P900/DAF 77 engine.
(all this according to the Dutch article)
Understand, thanks for clearing things up.
Is is known whether the BMW engine DAF were interested in for the P900 / DAF 77 was the 1.5/1.6-litre M10 or some other version of the M10 engine?
…Something around 1.4 to 1.5 liter displacement, that’s what DAF wanted.
Meanwhile I found this, in English:
http://www.volvotips.com/index.php/340-360/history-340-360/
Thanks
Though the following is speculation on my part.
It seems DAF were interested in the 1.5 BMW M10 engine for the P900, however a possible reason why BMW could not provide the engine was either because they planned to discontinue the 1.5 M10 engine by the mid-1970s when the P900 finally appeared as the Volvo 343 or claimed to not have the spare production capacity to supply engines to other carmakers.
The latter was apparently a common experience by other marques who approached BMW during this period such as Jensen-Healey and maybe one or two others.
Either that or DAF were after a lower-displacement version of the to-be-discontinued 1.5 M10 engine that BMW could not justify developing given the expected volumes and BMW’s lack of need for such an engine within its own range.
Dear Johannes,
Once again you have brought good things to this web site. For me, living in the USA, the DAF had a short-lived career here/ So, seeing them is a pleasure along with the explanations. I have viewed many current model DAF trucks on web sites. Unfortunately, the specifications are not included. That heavy with the water-cooled brakes; WOW! Are there any DAF autos that are larger than these small cars?
Thomas, DAF never built larger (series production) cars than the ones you see in the article.
Volvo took over DAF’s car division in the mid-seventies, after which the DAF 66 became the Volvo 66, see below.
DAFs were small, cheap, and thanks to the Variomatic utterly easy to drive. All in all, an ideal car for the elderly…which gave DAF cars an image-problem, so to say.
They get a lot of love now, and a well-deserved admiration. But things were quite different back in the sixties and seventies…
Were DAF cars ever imported officially to,the US? I’d like to think they were, but until the Federal safety and emissions regulations came into play in 1968 there were quite a few cars that seemed to be imported haphazardly by small outfits. In any case, I think I would see a 33 or two occasionally in my youth. A few years later, I found the rare pictures of rally DAFs fascinating … there’s something about the proportions of both sedan and coupe 55’s that’s very appealing. I had the same attraction to the NSU 1000 TTS, and the slightly less rare(in the US) Hillman Imp and it’s fastback Rootes siblings. Thanks for the great pictures!
Have a look here: http://www.dafclubofamerica.org/
Click on “DAF History”: DAFs were exported to the US.
And a superb collection of rally DAFs 55 right here:
http://www.rallydaf.nl/DAF%2055.html
The ’75 Marathon coupe is a really sweet looking thing.
Australia has a pretty big Dutch diaspora (somewhere around 300,000-odd claim ancestry, the bulk of it post-WW2) and I grew up in an area of Melbourne surrounded by “Dutchies”. The neighbours patriarch (just recently deceased at a grand age) made a Delft pottery business in his retirement and I absorbed plenty of Dutch food and tales from that family as a kid and from multiple others. Given all of which, it’s odd someone didn’t try and import or assemble DAFs here. (Mind you, all the families I knew were Catholic, and, with stupendous numbers of offspring, they all had to drive VW vans!)
Here’s a dumb question for you: when they make those fantastic hotted-up versions, do they continue using the belt transmission?
The rally cars etc. still have a Variomatic transmission. No Variomatic, no DAF…
The Vario can handle up to 100hp without trouble, over that, it is a gamble how long they will last.
No article about is complete without the mentioning of the infamous reverse-races as organized in the late 70’s. As commented already thanks to the Varionmatic the Day was able to drive in reverse the same speed as forward. A link to a short video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ipFApsFec
If you like the idea watch the longer ones. Especially in the later editions of the reverse-races things got a bit out of control with ramps to help Dukes of Hazard Style jumps….
The linked video is bloody funny! Always knew the Dutch were mad bastards. Love it.
We bumped into a Dutch couple hiking in Arizona a few days ago. My friend asked them where they were from. “Oh, a small town you probably haven’t heard of, Eindhoven”. “The home of DAF” I replied. He was surprised.
I dare anyone to click on the “Museum Classics:…Part 3” article linked at the end of the body of this post. There are four segments, all DAF, and if you are like me, you will be lost for hours. Fascinating stuff, well presented, with great photos. DAF is/was quite the enterprise, with a ton of original thinking and engineering, successfully executed. And the foursome contain no repeats of today’s post. Thanks, Johannes!
You’re welcome, Dutch!
The following link has the DAF P300 prototype’s wheelbase at 82.67 inches (or 2.10 meters) and length of 136.2 inches, which compared to the Daffodil was a 1.9 inch increase in wheelbase yet a 5.9 inch reduction in length.
https://robertdouw.nl/!autos/20191115_daf_p300_EN.html
Have seen some information claiming the DAF P500 prototype had a length of 4.3 meters or 169.2 inches, yet so far no information regarding its wheelbase or width and how they compare to what became the Volvo 300 Series.
Hello my name is Sven Koel and I saw the beautiful red Daf 55 coupe with gold 3-piece rims. Can you tell me the owner? So I ask my father restored and built this car and it would be a pleasure to show him this car in person. I would appreciate an answer.
Sorry Sven, I’ve got no idea who owns the car. According to its registration, the current owner has the DAF since July 2003.
Better contact the Dutch DAF club, maybe they can help you further:
https://www.dafclub.nl/
Good luck!
Thank you, then I’ll try my luck