The Etceterini Files Part 27: LMX Sirex——A Disappearing Dragon Anticipated Datsun's Z

Our survey of obscure makes, mostly Italian or at least Romance-language in origin, has so far included several badged with mythical beasts, including a winged lion*, a flying horse*, and a griffon*, but the LMX Sirex marks the first appearance of a dragon. It also marks the reappearance of designer Franco Scaglione*, famous for seductively curvy Alfa Romeos.  On the SIrex he finally caved in to the creased wedge and rectilinear themes established by Giorgetto Giugiaro in the second half of the Sixties.  Scaglione's design for the Sirex appeared at the Turin show in October '68, which means that the car, if it had succeeded, might have taken over from the OSI Ford* 20M TS which went out of production that year.  Both cars were powered by the German Ford Taunus 60 degree V6...

Etceterini buffs may object that nothing powered by Ford, rather than some Fiat variant (with added overhead cams, say) or unobtainable artisanal twin-cam lightweight made in handfuls, could rate inclusion in the etceterini category. But we'd point out that none other than DeTomaso preferred Ford power for his cars, and that if he hadn't succeeded in moving into the big leagues with his V8-powered Mangusta and later Pantera, he'd mostly be remembered for his mid-engined Vallelunga, which was certainly small enough (powered as it was by a 1.6 liter Ford four) and rare enough, with just 53 (some sources claim 58) built, to place it among the etceterini.  Here's that car, in case you've forgotten it...

An Italian manufacturer would try again with a mid-mounted Ford, this time a V6, with the Siva Sirio* a few years after this Vallelunga, but around the same time as that forgotten effort, the fledgling LMX (Linea Moderna Executive) firm launched their front-engined Scaglione design in coupe and roadster form with the Ford V6 in 2.3 liter form.  The lines were clean, and the proportions appealing, but the nose rode high enough to make one wonder about front-end lift at speed...

That fiberglass form was draped over a 90.6" wheelbase, forked backbone chassis with independent suspension front and rear.  Curb weight was just under 2,100 pounds, overall length 156" (like the first Miata) and the Ford V6 made 126 hp in this version.  This is all enough to make you think of the Datzun 240Z that went into production in autumn of 1969, isn't it? The Datsun and Sirex  wheelbases were the same, and the Datsun's 2.4 liter inline six made 25 more hp, but the car weighed 200 pounds more. The Sirex coupe's truncated fastback tail with hinged hatch  predicted the form of the soon-to-arrive 240Z as well...

And the molded shape of the Sirex dash with 2 hooded instruments fronting the wheel, and smaller gauges stretched across the width, also predicted the Z.  Production figures for the two cars, however, could not have been more different.  In the five years from 1968 to '73, LMX managed to make only 50 examples of their Sirex.  An outfit named SAMAS briefly took over production after LMX quit, and built another 20 cars. During the same period, Datsun exported over 130,000 specimens of their 240Z to the U.S. market alone.  It's enough to make you wonder what wouldve happened if LMX partners M. Liprandi and G. Mandrelli had approached Ford about getting Scaglione's design into real production.  They could've pointed out how well that strategy had worked for Alfa Romeo, for example.  But it was not to be; Ford would introduce its Capri, a more compact version of their Mustang formula, in 1969, and that was what their US dealers would soon offer to answer the Japanese challenge in the market for sports and sporty cars.

*Footnote:  For a look at the other cars mentioned in this post as well as other work by designer Franco Scaglione, you might want to visit the following posts from the blog archives...

Winged Lion:  "Forgotten Classic: Serenissima—The Winged Lion is the Rarest Beast of All".

March 20, 2019.

Flying Horse: "Forgotten Classic: Pegaso, Spain's Flying Horse", June 21, 2019.

Griffon: The Iso Grifo was featured in "Born From Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta", Sept. 20, 2018.

OSI-Ford 20M TS:  "The Etceterini Files Part 25"--- March 21, 2021.

Siva Sirio: "The Etceterini Files Part 26"—May 9, 2021.

"Unsung Genius Franco Scaglione: The Arc of Success"—December 20, 2017.

Photo Credits:
Top (badge):  italiaonroad.it

2nd:  wikimedia

3rd:  the author

4th:  LMX factory brochure

5th:  Drive2.ru2.com

Bottom:  classicvirus.com

 

Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Road Racers at Second Creek, Colorado

In the midst of a long-delayed office cleanup, you find some old snapshots and negatives in a cardboard box.  It's  tempting to escape from cleaning up the office by having a look, and so you do. Soon enough, you find youself in the plains northeast of Denver on a warm, dry afternoon in a long-ago summer. The cars lined up on the track look at first like the usual suspects in the early days of vintage road racing: AC Ace Bristol* and Lotus Europa above. Like the photographer in Antonioni's Blow-Up, you puzzle over time, place and meaning, but unlike that pro, many of your images are blurry and not much help. Wait a minute, what's that sleek coupe heading up the line in the image below?  It looks like a silver car, but when you blow it up you realize it's unpainted, polished aluminum...

But when you blow it up it's too indistinct to tell much else, so you look for evidence in the other shots.  The Alfa Giulietta with non-standard wheels, that Ace Bristol again, and an Austin America (remember those hydrolastically-suspended, transverse-engined shoeboxes?) tell you these cars are running some kind of timed trials, as they'd never race in the same class.  The absence of roll bars puzzles you, because you remember roll bars at the Steamboat Springs vintage races*...

Maybe this was a year or two earlier, or at an event with different regulations.  Another clue was this Mercedes 300SL Gullwing mixing it up with bathtub Porsches, Austin Healeys and MGAs.  After the 1987 stock market crash, the explosion of classic vintage race-eligble cars catapulted the Gullwings into the price territory of collectible art, and people didn't race them so much.  Looking at this shot, you can't recall if this was one of the alloy-bodied Gullwings, but there's a good enough chance it was, with those Rudge knock-off wheels… 

That oil well in the background and the oil drums lining the track are a reminder that these cars were mostly built in the first twenty years after World War II, when cheap gas and postwar economic optimism fueled the sports car boom, and the amateur road racing boom, in the United States.  Finally, that oil well tells you that you were at Second Creek Raceway northeast of Denver, where Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing held events in the 1980s. Unless it's a 4-cam Carrera, the bathtub Porsche shown below hasn't much of a chance to catch that Gullwing...

This AC Ace roadster would've stayed ahead of that Porsche, though, especially if equipped with the Bristol D2 inline six, which made the lightweight, alloy-bodied AC a power in SCCA D-Production racing back in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

The Ace, it could be argued, had a better suspension set-up than either the Gullwing Mercedes or the Porsche 356, both of which used rear swing axles.  AC, on the other hand, had a fully independent layout front and rear, with transverse leaf springs.  Phil Remington would keep this feature when Carroll Shelby made the car into the 260 and 289 AC Cobras*, in the early Sixties…

But you probably didn't care about the suspension design, or the track competitiveness, of these cars if you were lucky enough to encounter one in your neighborhood as a child.  It was the simple, undecorated, hypnotic visual poetry of the thing that caught your imagination…and here it was again, maybe a decade and a half later.

This MGA catches your eye too. It has the knock-off disc wheels that were a standard feature on the Twin Cam.  As on the 300SL, the knock-offs are a clue to road racing intent.

After the MGA you find a picture of a house remodel you designed for a friend in the spring of 1983; you were both panicked because he was aiming to finish the remodel by his wedding on July 4th weekend.  So a shot of the completed house tells you this was summer of that year.  And here's that polished alloy car again, number 72.  Not a great shot, but good enough to tell you that this is an extremely rare car...

It's a Morgan SLR, one of a handful of SLRs bodied by Williams & Pritchard in an effort to make a Morgan competitive in road racing, and maybe to finally drag the Morgan firm into the second half of the 20th century.  You had no idea how this car happened to wind up in the suburbs of Denver, but you recall seeing an early, front-engined Lola throw a connecting rod at Second Creek, so there were old English club racers in the RMVR.

So this Morgan was, compared to all the cars at Second Creek that day, even compared to the Gullwing Mercedes, a truly rare car, a mysterious visitor from the history books to a minor league car club event on a lazy summer afternoon.  How the Morgan SLR came to be, and why it turned out to be the only Morgan that ever looked at home in the 2nd half of the 20th century, is a story for another day.

*Footnote:   For a look at other vintage racers that showed up during this era in Steamboat Springs, see "Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Racing in Steamboat Springs", posted January 31, 2019.  Anyone wanting to know more about the pretty (and pretty effective) AC Ace and Ace Bristol cars, and their relatives, might want to check out our 4-part series of photo essays, posted on 12-24-16, 12-25-16, 1-9-17, and finishing with "The Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow" on 8-20-17.

Photo credits:  All photos are by the author.  

The Etceterini Files Part 26: Siva Sirio——Italian Style, Mid-Mounted Ford Power, Oblivion Anyway

Are these ladies running toward the Siva Sirio because they need to get somwhere in a hurry, or because they've never seen one before?  If this example didn't belong to one of them, there's a good chance they hadn't seen one, because only a handful of Sirios were built...

If, on the other hand, our friends were in a rush to get somewhere, the Sirio just might have done the job. Achille Candido, a car dealer in Southern Italy, hatched the idea of a modern sports car using Ford components; his Siva concern (Society Italiana Vendita Automobili) already offered Ford products. The engine was the 60-degree German Ford V6 that had appeared earlier in the OSI-Ford 20M TS*, another Italian GT from this period.  But unlike the front-engined, rear-drive OSI-Ford, the Sirio is mid-engined, with the V6 making up to 130 hp sitting right behind the cabin ahead of the 4-speed gearbox.  This had production advantages in that the power unit from the front-drive Taunus production car could simply be moved to the rear, much as Ford had done in its V4, mid-engined Mustang I* prototype five years earlier. Virgilio Conrero* laid out the tubular steel chassis design with 4-wheel independent suspension. Giovanni Michelotti's original sketch for the Siva showed a long tapered snout with hidden headlights, with straight fender and window sill lines flanking the thick B-pillar...

By the time Siva produced 3 prototypes for the 1967 Turin Show, Candido had commissioned a redesign from Stile Italia. The bodies were built by Carbondio in Turin, and featured recessed headlights with bubble covers, fenders dipping in a smooth curve below the window sills, a subtle crease along the flanks connecting the wheel centers, and an abrupt chop with recessed panel at the tail.  The thick B-pillar roll bar remained from the MIchelotti design...

The Sirio, named for the brightest star in the night sky, turned out to have been born under a bad sign.  Profit margins for a mid-priced sports car left less room for miscalculation than in the stratospheric price range occupied by makers of Italy's exotic cars. Financial woes had already caused Bizzarrini to abandon its Opel-based 1900 GT Europa, a car of similar size which may have inspired Candido and Conrero in their conception for the Sirio. Real production never materialized...

Siva's stated plan was to build 300 cars for the 1969 model year, and another 500 for 1970.  Owing to difficulty in obtaining financing, and Ford's disinclination to assist with production, only 3 prototypes escaped from the SIva workshops, with an undetermined handful of "production" specimens built before shutting down in 1970. Ford's of Britain's in-house GT70 project didn't do much better, and the only mid-engined Ford-powered cars to emerge from Italy during this period turned out to be the V8-powered De Tomaso Mangusta and Pantera. There would be another Italian GT powered by the Ford V6, but that's a story for another day.

*Footnote:  The mid-engined Mustang prototype was the subject of "The First Mustang: Ford's Forgotten Mustang I", posted here way back on August 26, 2015.  For a look at a front-engined Italian GT that actually made it into production with Ford power, see "The Etceterini Files Part 25: OSI-Ford 20M TS—The Anti-Fiat from a Fiat Ally", posted here on March 21, 2021.  Finally, other automotive projects by Virgilio Conrero were featured in "The Etceterini Files Part 12", posted on November 28, 2017.

Photo Credits:
Top, 3rd & 4th from top:  Siva on flickr.com

2nd:  Giovanni Michelotti, on epocauto.it

Bottom: allcarindex.com