Karl Ludvigsen: His Excellence is Expected

By Pete Vack

June 1956, Sport Cars Illustrated, Very Sincerely Yours

“We can say without a doubt that [Ludvigsen's article on the Ferrari 750 Monza] is the most exhaustive piece of literature available on Enzo’s fantastic four barrel, and this includes Ferrari factory literature. We guarantee that [our new technical series] will delight even the most sharp-eyed reader.” With that short paragraph, John Christy launched the long and fascinating career of Karl Ludvigsen. Sports Cars Illustrated (later Car and Driver) itself had recently been purchased by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, intent on capturing the hobby magazine niche with a series of magazines such as Flying, Hi-Fi and Photograph.
Ziff-Davis, savvy enough to dispense with most of the old editorial staff, brought in Ken Purdy as Editorial Chairman. Ken in turn brought in John Christy as Managing Editor, Jesse Alexander as European Editor, Griff Borgeson as West Coast Editor and carried over Karl from the old regime as Technical Editor while the entertaining Dennis May charmed in from England. If ever there was an editorial dream team, this was it.

Immediately, MIT-trained Ludvigsen — then 22 — raised the bar on automotive technical journalism. He assumed his audience was just as intelligent as he was. He wanted to learn and report the details, the measurements, the materials, the makeup of the cars he at times seemed literally to dissect. He was obsessive, accurate, compulsive, amazingly lucid and asked more questions that anyone had ever dared ask before, and demanded answers. His technical knowledge and his ability to translate obscure details into layman’s terms were unsurpassed. His articles were often filled with graphs and diagrams and always photos of brakes and chassis and suspensions. Ludvigsen took a car from the head of the engine right down the amount of toe-in of the front and rear suspension. Every mechanical aspect was described in often excruciating depth. In the July issue, he tore into Candy Poole’s PBX. The Crosley engine was notable for its overhead camshaft and, as Ludvigsen wrote, “The cams attacked the inline vertical valves through long skirted thimble tappets and adjustment shims. Standard Crosley valve timing kicks the intake valve open five degrees before top center and closes it 50 degrees after bottom center, giving a duration of 235 degrees.” This in a magazine that had, only a few months earlier, been noted for presenting the latest in women’s sports car fashions.

Unlike many others, Karl not only understood engineering but was able to weave fascinating history into the same sentence, making the reader aware of the historical background as this, from the Monza article about the front suspension demonstrates: “Experimental Monza front suspensions also used transverse leaf springs, as was then current on the G.P. racecars. Barcelona in 1954 proved the superiority of a coil layout on the Squalo Ferrari, and a complete switch was made on all Modena models.”

In 40-odd words, Ludvigsen wrote of experimental cars, the traditional transverse leaf springs used in most early Ferraris, and revealed the fact that it was at Barcelona that Ferrari finally determined that coil springs were more effective, thus placing them on all Ferraris henceforth. Ludvigsen tossed off this information like a Miles Davis jazz riff and crowned the articles with catchy titles such as “Seven Hour Stormer”, a reference to the lifespan of the Monza engine, or “Tiny Tornadoes from Turin”, an article about Abarths.

His technical fluency did more than generate interest among sports car racers, historians and engineers. For some of us, growing up with Ludvigsen was an invitation to learn and deal with mathematics.

My father, who would bring the latest copy of SCI home every month to share with his ten-year-old son, was able use Karl’s articles as a means of teaching me how to figure out capacities, swept area, gear ratios, pound-feet of torque, and to do the figures in both Metric and U.S. measurements. Math may have been boring, but when applied to the understanding of Ferraris it became interesting and exciting. For the next few years SCI, eventually under the editorship of Ludvigsen himself, blossomed. Things changed when Karl left the magazine after renaming it “Car and Driver” and the new magazine lost its technical pre-eminence. He left, believe it or not, to be a PR man for General Motors. He later fielded executive posts at both Fiat and Ford, the latter taking him to England. Karl kept on writing, concentrating on books (four dozen to his credit), articles for Automobile Quarterly, and doing free-lance work for a number of other magazines.

His books–among them the acclaimed Porsche history, “Excellence was Expected”– earned him three Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot Awards from the Society of Automotive Historians and two Montagu Trophies awarded by the Guild of Motoring Writers. Along the way he founded the Ludvigsen Library in London, now in Suffolk, a post from which he still holds court. Check him out at www.karlludvigsen.com.

Almost thirty years after those days of learning math courtesy of my father and Karl Ludvigsen, I had the sheer audacity to suggest an article about Moretti to the editor of the new “Automobile Magazine.” Dave Davis, who was also the ex-editor of “Car and Driver”, having taken that position one editor removed from Karl Ludvigsen. Davis agreed and put me in contact with my mentor who owned the only restored Moretti 750 coupe around. Karl would call from London, and discussed the scope of the article and provided historical details while I scrambled on the other end somehow to record his words for posterity. I learned firsthand what I had realized before–that Karl was a perfectionist and demanded that every detail be accurate and complete. It was another lesson learned. The article thankfully, came out well.

Today, I am still learning from Karl. Reviewing his book, “Red Hot Rivals.” I discovered more than a few new bits of information. Karl presents the now-well known subjects of Maserati and Ferrari with detail and depth only a master such as Ludvigsen can handle. A good example is the chapter on the Ferrari 375 F1 versus the Osca V12. Ludvigsen, still the engineer, goes to the workshop where an engine is being restored and takes photos of the Osca’s components including its fork-and-blade connecting rods which allow two pistons to employ the same crank journal by using the fork rod as a journal itself. If not unique, the arrangement is highly unusual and a good example of the intuitive engineering skills of the Maserati brothers. Ludvigsen even arranges to weigh the parts and tells us why they were problematic.

That’s but one example that I found throughout the book which made it so enjoyable.Just when you think you know it all, there is Ludvigsen…thank God.

To read the review on “Red Hot Rivals”, click here.

To read the review on “Ferrari by Mailander”, click here.