Cars
From Russia with passion
This article tells the story of Alexei Nikitin, a young scholar of aerodynamics in Soviet Russia during the 1930s, who built a magnificent and aerodynamically functional car using a GAZ-A as his starting point.
It is very hard, nowadays, to imagine what Soviet Russia must have been like in the 1930s. The regime’s five-year plans for economic development were designed to boost its industrial strength with the aim of turning it into a solid military, as well as ideological, power.
This is the 1930 GAZ-A that Alexei Nikitin turned into the intriguing GAZ Aero.
The automobile had no place in this scenario. Communism did not allow private ownership along Western lines, and the few vehicles on the roads were reserved for the authorities, or, like taxis, had to serve a practical purpose. In this setting, Alexei Nikitin, a young man little over 30 years old and a scholar of aerodynamics at the Russian Military Academy, developed a passionate interest in the functional as well as formal analysis of racing cars from all over the world, studying their efficiency in a small self-built wind tunnel. He was so convinced of the value of his research that he decided to build a car truly capable of exploiting his findings. He took a GAZ-A (an awkward, USSR-built model similar to the old Ford Type A) as his starting point.
