Brutal clutch, heavy steering, brakes that pray for mercy — but unleash it, and the world bends before a chrome hurricane. Few machines have ever combined excess, genius, and myth so completely.
The world in 1932 was on its knees. Banks had collapsed, farmers starved, men queued for bread and soup. And just when the sensible thing to do might have been to build something cheap, modest, and perhaps useful, America did what America does best: it built something loud, shiny, terrifying, and utterly unnecessary. It built the Duesenberg SJ Speedster.
This was not a car for your daily commute to the butcher’s. It wasn’t even a car for rational millionaires. It was a car designed to make monarchs feel underdressed. With its 140-mph top speed, four chrome pipes blasting out of the bonnet, and a bonnet longer than most living rooms, it wasn’t transportation. It was a thunderclap.
The SJ arrived like a Broadway overture in the middle of a funeral. It shouldn’t have existed. And yet it did — and in doing so, it became legend.
Behind this spectacle were the Duesenberg brothers — Fred and Augie — German immigrants who had spent their youth tinkering with bicycles and engines. Fred was the genius, the dreamer, the man who believed an engine could never be too ambitious. Augie was the practical one, turning his brother’s wild ideas into something resembling mechanical reality.
By the 1920s, they were already famous for racing success, winning the Indianapolis 500 and establishing the name Duesenberg as America’s answer to Bugatti. But racing laurels don’t pay bills. Enter Errett Lobban Cord, an industrialist with a cigar the size of a flagpole and a taste for spectacle. He bought Duesenberg and told the brothers: “Build the best car in the world. I don’t care how ridiculous it is. Just make the Europeans choke on their tea.”
To give form to this lunacy, Cord hired Gordon Buehrig, a young designer who sketched cars like an opera composer writes arias. Together they would produce a machine so long, so dramatic, so theatrical that Hollywood itself seemed dull in comparison.
The heart of the SJ was its straight-eight engine. But not just any straight-eight. This was a 6.9-liter supercharged leviathan producing 320 horsepower at a time when most family cars had barely 40. A Cadillac V16 managed 165. A Rolls-Royce Phantom produced around 120. The SJ doubled them, laughed in their faces, and then shot off down the road like a cannonball.
Zero to sixty in eight seconds. In 1932. To put that in perspective, the Ford Model A needed about half a minute. The SJ wasn’t “fast for its time.” It was simply fast. Period.
Of course, you paid for this madness in fuel. It drank petrol like a sailor on shore leave. And at nearly two and a half tons, it required arms like a lumberjack just to steer. But none of that mattered, because when you pressed your foot down, the car roared with the fury of a hurricane and the scenery blurred like a bad watercolor.
The brakes were hydraulic — revolutionary then — and the chassis strong enough to support a cathedral. Everything about it was over-engineered, overbuilt, and overwhelming.
If the engine was Wagner, the body was Broadway. Gordon Buehrig gave the SJ a bonnet so long you could host a picnic on it. He swept the fenders into curves that looked like they were painted by an art deco brush. And then he added the pièce de résistance: four chrome exhaust pipes curling out of the bonnet like a brass band.
Where Rolls-Royce whispered, the SJ shouted. Where Bentley muttered about tradition, the SJ roared about the future. Its tall, upright grille sneered like an aristocrat who’d just inherited a country. Its headlights were searchlights. Its proportions made everything else look timid.
Inside, the cabin was a jewel box: polished aluminum, gleaming gauges, leather so thick it probably remembered the cow’s birthday. This wasn’t a dashboard. It was a cockpit for someone who thought Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing was a warm-up exercise.
The SJ didn’t just strut. It proved itself. Ab Jenkins, a man with nerves apparently made of piano wire, took one to the Bonneville Salt Flats and proceeded to set endurance records that made competitors weep. He averaged triple-digit speeds for twelve hours straight — twelve hours in a car with no air conditioning, no safety features, just speed and salt.
At Indianapolis, Duesenberg engines had already triumphed. On the road, the SJ carried that pedigree like a knight carries a sword. Competitors watched it thunder past and quietly reconsidered their careers.
Journalists, normally restrained in the 1930s, couldn’t help themselves. They described acceleration like “being launched from a catapult.” Others admitted they couldn’t focus on their notes because bystanders were too busy fainting at the sight of it.
Of course, a car this theatrical needed owners to match. Hollywood obliged. Clark Gable had one, grinning at the wheel like a man who knew he’d just won life. Gary Cooper had another, and rumor has it the two once drag-raced down Sunset Boulevard, the noise echoing across Los Angeles like Judgment Day.
Greta Garbo, famously private, chose an SJ — which was odd, since it announced her arrival three blocks away. Gangsters adored it, vanishing from botched deals with exhaust pipes glowing like hellfire. Maharajas imported them, parking them alongside elephants and Rolls-Royces, only to find the SJ drew more attention.
Owning one wasn’t about getting from A to B. It was about being the alphabet itself.
But brilliance is expensive. Each SJ cost around $14,000 — more than most houses, more than some factories. And this in the middle of the Great Depression, when the average American couldn’t afford a new hat.
Cord’s empire, built on bold ideas and even bolder accounting, couldn’t sustain the madness. Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg collapsed by 1937, leaving the SJ as both crown jewel and tombstone.
It was Shakespearean irony. The greatest car of its age, undone not by failure but by economics.
In Europe, they tried. Bugatti had the Royale, a 12.7-liter leviathan that looked grand outside a palace but was too heavy and too rare to matter. Rolls-Royce had the Phantom II, dignified but underpowered. Bentley had its 8-Litre, impressive but slower.
The SJ humbled them all. It was faster, brasher, and unapologetically American. For decades, Europeans mocked American cars as crude. The SJ made them choke on their mockery.
Few cars enter language itself. The Duesenberg did. “It’s a Duesy” became shorthand for excellence. Even today, people who couldn’t point to a carburetor know the phrase. That’s cultural penetration beyond Ferrari, beyond Porsche.
It also became Hollywood shorthand. A Duesenberg in a film meant success. A Duesenberg in a newspaper meant scandal. Writers used it as metaphor; musicians as inspiration. It became not just a car, but an adjective.
Today, the SJ is the crown jewel of Pebble Beach and Amelia Island. Auction houses whisper its name like a spell. Ten million dollars. Fifteen. Twenty. A single Duesenberg SJ can buy you an island — and collectors pay gladly, because to own one is to own the concept of greatness itself.
Restorers treat them like relics, polishing chrome until it blinds. Owners who dare to drive them are modern knights jousting against time. And when one rumbles past, even supercars look suddenly inadequate.
Behind the wheel, the SJ is no museum piece. It’s alive. The straight-eight coughs, roars, and then howls through its pipes. The clutch requires a gym membership. The gearbox demands precision. The brakes are more suggestion than command.
And yet, open the throttle and the world bends. Even today, the acceleration feels violent. Pedestrians stop. Children point. Cyclists nearly fall over.
Modern hypercars flatter you. The SJ does not. It demands respect, muscle, and nerve. Drive it badly and it will punish you. Drive it well and you’ll feel as if you’ve outwitted history itself.
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