Forgotten Classic: Matra——Maybe It Was Rocket Science

We interrupt our regular program to respond to readers who kindly asked about the recent fires in Boulder County.  Anyone wanting to contribute to the fire recovery fund should go to the County Wildfire Fund website.  Thanks to everyone for taking an interest. 

https://www.commfound.org/grants/get-grant/Boulder-County-Wildfire-Fund

I happened upon the treasure trove below in France just over 30 years ago in a museum where I seemed to be the only visitor. It's a lineup of history-making race cars from Matra, an aerospace firm run by Jean-Luc Lagardere, who decided in the mid-Sixties to put France back on the map in Formula 1 and endurance racing.  Heading up the line, we see an MS670 of the type that won Le Mans three years in a row, followed by an MS650, an MS630 coupe, and an earlier single-seater related to Jackie Stewart's Championship-winning car.  Matra had come a long way since I'd first heard of them...

Like any high school student studiously ignoring a pile of homework, I'd written to Matra Sports back in 1967 to find out about their new mid-engined road car, the Djet 6. To their credit, the company sent me two brochures, even though they would never get around to having a US importer for their cars... 

The Djet 6 was sort of familiar to a kid who studied Road & Track.  But there was this other car I hadn't seen, the M530, a new design with a wild mix of angles and curves, and resolutely eccentric proportions and details that could only be French.  What was this car, and why was an aerospace company making futurist mid-engined road cars?

Between 1962 and '64, René Bonnet* had built around 200 of his mid-engined Djet coupes, powered by Renault fours of just under 1,000 cc.  When Matra decided to offer road cars in addition to a planned run of Formula 2 cars, the aerospace firm took over the Bonnet operation.  The Matra version appeared with winding side windows and bumpers, unlike most of the Bonnet cars, which were aimed at weekend racers.

The Djet appeared to be an alternative to the Alpine A110*, also Renault-powered but a rear-engined design.  Between 1965 and 1967, Matra sold about 1,500 Djets, but did not develop the car as intensively as Alpine did with its A110...

This was because Matra was planning a car with more universal appeal. When Philippe Guédon's design appeared in 1967, it was clearly aimed not at weekend racers or rally drivers, but instead at people who wanted a practical car offering sharp handling, comfortable seating, and a good blend of performance and economy. The M530, named after an air-to-air missile from Matra's aerospace division, featured a longitudinal Ford Taunus V4 of 1.7 liters behind a cabin with 2 + 2 seating and a removable hard roof panel.  It was roomier and more distinctive than the Porsche 914 which would appear over 2 years later. The Ford transmission had the same relationship to the engine as it did in the front-drive Taunus, and it's likely that Ford was willing to supply engines in large quantity as Matra was using Ford-based engines in all its racing cars at this point.  Matra's bet on the M530 paid off, and over 9,600 were sold before production ended in 1973.

1967 turned out to be a busy year for Matra Sports.  They'd launched a Cosworth Ford powered F2 car two years earlier, and Belgian driver Jackie Ickx, shown here going airborne in Matra's MS7 at the Nurburgring while contesting an F1 race, won the '67 Formula 2 Championship for Matra...

The next year, Jackie Stewart won 3 GP races in the MS11 developed by Matra from that Formula 2 car, and finished 2nd in the Championship standings.  The new car, campaigned by Ken Tyrell for Matra, was powered by the Cosworth Ford DFV, the 32-valve V8 that would soon dominate Formula 1.  In 1969 Stewart and Matra would startle the GP fraternity by winning the Championship in the new MS80, still powered, like Matra's production cars, by Ford.

The rocket scientists at Matra were beginning to take an interest in endurance racing as well, and in 1966 they built a few of the MS620, the mid-engined coupe pictured below.  Body design was a mix of angled planes and curves, predicting the lines of the production M530, especially in the windshield and roofline.  The engine, however, was a BRM V-8 based upon their engine for the old 1.5 liter Formula 1, but punched out to around 2 liters...

By 1967 Matra had developed their endurance racer into the MS630, with lower profile, sleeker nose and narrower cabin, designed to take the new 48-valve 3.0 liter V12 that was originally part of a contract with BRM, but later switched to French supply sources. The engine, when ready, would show some similarity to the BRM, but the MS630 was campaigned with a Ford 289 at Le Mans in 1967, showing up for '68 with the new V12.  Intrepid Henri Pescarolo raced the MS630 in the rain that night after the windshield wiper quit, finally stopping after a tire puncture and fire at the 22-hour mark.

In 1968 Matra commissioned Robert Choulet to design a low-drag, aerodynamic coupe on the same chassis as the open MS650 that was being developed at the same time.  The design, with its steeply curved roof, low profile, partly covered rear wheels, and canted stabilizing fins, resembles the CD Peugeot SP66* Le Mans coupe Choulet had designed earlier.

During a practice lap at Le Mans in April 1969, the car took off and crashed on the high-speed Mulsanne straight.  Driver Pescarolo escaped with his life, but serious burns, and suggested the front bodywork was flexing and causing lift.  Choulet's theory was that the door tops flexed and caused lift.  In any case, the 640 was abandoned as a team car.  Instead, Matra engineers focused on the lighter, less aerodynamic, but more predictable MS650 spider as their endurance racer.  It was ready before the MS640, and it brought Matra closer to success, taking 4th, 5th and 7th at Le Mans in '69, and winning the 1000 Km of Buenos Aires and the Tour de France Auto the next year. 

By the time Matra engineers developed the MS660 with its lower profile nose, the V12 was making 450 hp at 10,500 rpm.  Their strategy of using basing an endurance racer around a Formula 1 engine was beginning to show results.  Jack Brabham and Francois Cevert won the 1000 Km race at Paris in 1970, and another MS660 finished 4th.  When I drove around the Sarthe circuit at Le Mans in autumn 1970, the Matra team was doing tire tests, and the cars blasted past our Simca 1100 with that distinctive blaring V12 noise, flames shooting out the back.  Oh yes, we should mention Simca here.  By this time, Simca had signed a deal to sponsor the Matra team, so their name appeared on the cars.

It was with the MS670 that Matra cemented its reputation in endurance racing.  The lighter, more powerful cars took 1st and 2nd places at Le Mans in '72, 1st and 3rd the next year, and  1st and 3rd in 1974. Beyond Le Mans, Equipe Matra won enough races to win the World Championship for Makes in 1973 and '74, the year Matra retired from racing.  Recently the '72 Le Mans winner, Chassis 001 (below), was listed for auction by Lagardere Group in order to pay off the judgment of a successful lawsuit by 296 workers laid off when Matra quit producing cars in 2003.  Henri Pescarolo, co-winner of the '72 Le Mans with Graham Hill, protested the sale...

Luckily for Matra and Simca, their June '73 Le Mans victory coincided with the official launch of the Matra Simca Bagheera, the replacement for the 530 series named after a fictional black panther. The new design by Jean Toprieux and Jacques Nochet featured 3-abreast seating and transverse mid-mounted engines from the Simca 1100 four, from which the new car also borrowed gearbox and some suspension pieces.  Wheelbase was 93" and overall length 13 feet, so Bagheera was the same size as Mazda's first Miata, but a couple hundred pounds lighter. Engines were offered in 1294 and 1442 cc versions, and the car's blend of performance, fuel economy, handling and practicality powered the company through the fuel crisis that came in 1974...  

Styling reflected the wedge theme which had appeared on more expensive GT cars from Bertone and Ghia, and this helped sales, which ultimately amounted to more than 47,000 units. Matra engineers proposed a U8, below, configured with parallel inline fours making just under 170 hp, but this was doomed by the fuel crisis. Despite strong initial sales, the Bagheera image suffered as the car gained a reputation for early rust problems in the steel stampings that supported the fiberglass body.

The Murena which replaced it in 1981 adopted a galvanized steel chassis to address the rust problem, and offered a 1.6 liter mid-mounted transverse pushrod four as well as a new 2.2 liter overhead cam four.  Designer Antonis Volanis kept the three-across seating as well as the fiberglass body construction, tempering the angularity of the wedge with front fenders that curved into the A-pillar.  Unlike the Bagheera, the Murena (Italian for moray) offered a 5-speed gearbox.

Matra's design had begun before Peugeot bought Simca from Chrysler, essentially taking on Simca's debt (but also its dealer network) for $1.  Simca had bought the Talbot* name in the late Fifties, and PSA Peugeot Citroen decided to revive Talbot, gluing the name onto the Murena.  Why this effort to badge-engineer a sporting heritage was needed is a mystery, as Matra had already encoded its racing successes into the memory banks of a younger generation.  In any case, PSA's Talbot strategy failed when their boxy Talbot Tagora sedan flopped, Matra sold just under 10,700 of the famously sweet-handling GT before production ended with the 1984 model year.  Around that time, Lagardere Group, the aerospace firm, bought Matra back from PSA and contracted with Renault to produce the new Espace minivan.  While the Espace succeeded, the Avantime, a "monospace" that attempted to be all cars in one (GT, luxury cruiser, minivan), built from 2001-'03 to Patrick Le Quement's design, found few buyers, much like the later Nissan Murano SUV convertible.  The Matra design studios would produce more prototypes for Renault, which formed an alliance with Nissan in  1999, but the Renault Matra Avantime would be its last production car.

*Footnote:   Deutsch Bonnet, DB, CD, and Rene Bonnet sports racers are surveyed in our post from Feb. 29, 2020, "The Path of Least Resistance."  We took a look at Alpine Renault road cars, the A110 and A310, in "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310" on Jan. 9, 2021. Talbot-Lago cars were given a retrospective, with a trove of previously unpublished photos, in "Talbot-Lago:  Darracq by Another Name", in these posts for May 22, 2020.

Photo Credits:
Top: the author
2nd & 3rd: Matra Sports

3rd & 4th:  bonhams.com

8th (MS7 in flight):  twitter.com
10th (MS620):  autopuzzles.com 
11th (MS630):  slotforum.com 
15th: (MS660): autotortenelem-blog.hu

16th (MS670):  goodwood.com

18th (Bagheera rear):  youtube.com

All other photos:  Wikimedia

Cars and Trains and Planes: Essential Movie Chase Scenes

When did a chase scene in a movie capture your imagination, and why?  Was it in a thriller, a road movie, or a comedy?  In what way was the chase essential?  Did it seem to grow out of the plot or the needs of the protagonists, or did it just seem to be an excuse to keep you interested by staging crashes and blowing stuff up?  Maybe your favorite chase scene was essential in another way, in that it pioneered a plot twist or an effect that hadn't been tried before. That, along with technical acuity, was one of the criteria that led to our 7 favorites.  And we've listed another 5 also-rans after our faves, so that you can watch a different chase on each of the 12 Days of Christmas...

Bullitt (1968, directed by Peter Yates, USA) integrates its chase scene into a plot in which a mob witness under protection by police lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) has been gunned down by some hitmen.  When two guys with guns show up in a Dodge Charger 440 behind Bullitt's '68 Mustang 390 on the streets of San Francisco, the race is on to see whether the predators will become the prey. The chase was filmed on North Beach streets, with McQueen sharing driving duties with Bud Ekins, a Hollywood stunt driver.  Solar Productions obtained permission from the mayor's office before filming, and hired extras from under-served neighborhoods at union scale.  When Warner Brothers protested this approach and tried to save money by moving the filming to the studio lot, McQueen refused, and Warner cancelled a contract involving 5 more films.  The box-office success of Bullitt probably made them regret this move.  British director Peter Yates, of Robbery (about the Great Train Robbery) chase fame, mounted multiple compact cameras in the cars to provide enhanced immediacy. Unlike later filmed chases involving special effects or computer-generated images, it still feels fresh and real.

The Italian Job (1969, directed by Peter Collinson, UK): Who says a chase scene cannot be funny?  In this British heist comedy, Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) leads a gang of ex-cons aiming to seize $4 million in gold bars by subverting the computer controls on Rome's traffic lights.  They do this by switching out reels of magnetic tape (after all, it's 1969).  After making off with the gold, the thieves escape in a fleet of 3 cheeky little Mini Coopers. Stunt drivers put the cars through their paces, zooming through gallerias full of restaurants and shoppers, plunging down stairs, and scooting onto a concrete hyperbolic paraboloid roof in what may be a spoof of modern architecture.  After evading police cars and motorcycles, the Minis drive up ramps lowered by the master thieves from a moving bus on its way into the Alps, and unload the gold bars.  Spoiler alert:  Things may not turn out as planned for the robbers (or as we'd hoped for their plucky little cars), but the final scene is, like the film, a classic...

Duel (1971, directed by Steven Spielberg, USA) was originally made for TV, and as a result may be the director's tightest and most economical movie; he added 16 minutes before the film's theatrical release.  The Richard Matheson story places salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) on a lonely Western highway in his Plymouth Valiant.  After he passes a rusty oil tanker, it becomes frighteningly clear that the unseen driver owes him ill will.  The truck itself becomes a sort of character, a symbol of some kind of unreasoning evil, in a film that is, in essence, one long chase with few moments of refuge, and no moments of relief from the steadily building tension, in an unforgiving desert that requires our isolated protagonist to find resources in himself that will insure his survival. 

The French Connection (1971, directed by William Friedkin, USA):  Director Friedkin's fictionalized account of the NYPD's efforts to nab French heroin smuggler Alain Charnier starred Gene Hackman as detective Popeye Doyle, and an eye-popping chase scene involving Doyle commandeering a Pontiac to apprehend a hood who has escaped onto an elevated train.  Though the film won multiple awards (Oscars for Best Film, Director, Editing, Adapted Screenplay, and for Hackman as Best Actor), it would not have won any awards from the New York Police or city government when it was filmed, because Friedkin never cleared it with them, though he'd hired 2 police advisors who'd been involved with the original case.  Filming in Brooklyn under the B Train which is now the D Train, Friedkin sat in the back of the Pontiac to capture the chase, reasoning that his cameramen were all married with children, while he was single at the time. He also sped up the film to enhance that careening effect.

 For that reason, the collision between Popeye Doyle's '71 Pontiac Le Mans and a white Ford Fairlane looks cringingly real.  But then again, it is real, a complete accident, and Friedkin decided to keep it in the film to heighten the realism. The uninjured Ford driver was compensated for damage by the production company.  This approach to filming  might not work so well today…

Diva (1981, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, France) was an early example of the style that young French directors conceived as an alternative to the work by aging New Wave directors. Later called cinéma du look, the new style showed up fully-formed in Philippe Rousselot's  moody, punk-flavored cinematography in March 1981 and also in Beineix's romantic, nonconformist characters, 5 months before the first MTV music videos offered their own stylized view of punk. The plot centers on Jules (Frédéric Andréi) a young moped-riding postman obsessed with opera diva Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez).  Jules opens the door to trouble by making a forbidden cassette recording of Cynthia with a hidden professional tape recorder, and doesn't realize he's in more trouble when a dying would-be police informant tucks another cassette into his mail pouch; it's a recording implicating a police commissioner in a drug and prostitution ring.  Soon, the clueless Jules is being chased by two honest police officers who want the tape, two thugs working for the commissioner who want to destroy the tape (and maybe Jules), and two Taiwanese music producers who want to make a bootleg record of the Hawkins tape.  When the police officers give chase in their Renault 16, Jules heads down into the Metro, onto stairways and escalators, making for an unforgettable chase sequence…

Throughout the film, things (even bad things) happen in fine style, including the sequence when our hero and his Vietnamese admirer Alba (Thuy An Luu) are hidden away in a lighthouse  by eccentric philosopher Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), who drives them in his '54 Citroen 11 Normale*.  The symmetry of the shot, the lighting and dense color, and even the style of the car are a reference to the Art Deco period.  

Thelma and Louise (1991, directed by Ridley Scott, USA):  Music video producer and screenwriter Callie Khouri scripted a work that would've been called a buddy picture if the two central characters had been men. Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are good friends who head for the mountains in a '66 Thunderbird to escape their home lives in Arkansas, which revolve around Thelma's domineering husband and Louise's waitress job and frequently absent boyfriend.  Plot developments in this pioneering women's liberation road movie involve Louise shooting a would-be rapist, the friends escaping into the wild lands of the west, Thelma locking a state trooper in his patrol car's trunk, the duo robbing a convenience store after being robbed themselves, and blowing up a gas tanker piloted by a rude trucker, on the way to the Grand Canyon.

 The chase scene involves over half a dozen  police cars streaking through the dust, with Louise outsmarting and out-driving them, as in the comic moment when she guns the T-Bird through an underpass, quickly calculating that the taller police cruiser won't make it.  Sarandon and Davis took driving and shooting lessons to prepare for their roles.  The chase scene, like the film itself, belongs to the two women, who bind to each other in a cross-country gesture of  defiance at powers that be, a gesture well-summarized in the aerial shot of their pursuit.

 

North by Northwest (1959, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, USA) showcases Cary  Grant's dramatic and comedic range in a suspenseful yarn that spoofs spy thrillers. Playing advertising man Roger O.Thornhill, he's mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan after witnesses see an apparent knifing at the UN Building.  Thornhill, chased by shadowy men who may be government agents, boards a cross-country train where he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) who hides him from police and eventually sets up a meeting with the real Kaplan at a bus stop in the middle of desolate Midwestern farmland.  The lone man Roger sees waiting at the stop turns out not to be Kaplan, but comments on the strangeness of the distant crop-dusting plane "dusting where there ain't no crops" and then boards a bus, leaving Thornhill alone and exposed.  We soon find out why the crop duster is there, and Thornhill is running to hide in a cornfield from a plane with a machine gun.  As with Spielberg's truck driver, we never see the plane's pilot.  Cinematography, editing and a natural soundtrack ratchet up the tension.  Music by Bernard Herrmann comments only after the sequence's climax.  While providing suspense, Hitchcock takes a sly look at the alienation of the corporate organization man; when Eve Kendall asks Thornhill what that "O" after Roger stands for, he admits it stands for nothing...

Ronin (1998, directed by John Frankenheimer, USA) enjoys a reputation for its chase scene that is not shared by its plot, something involving a mysterious briefcase, IRA weapons deals, the Russian Mafia, and an ex-CIA mercenary named Sam (Robert De Niro).  This writer begs to disagree with the exalted status of that chase. Filmed in Paris, it is a masterpiece of technique; it calls for De Niro's Peugeot to chase the bad guys in a BMW M5, with both going the wrong way on the multi-lane Autoroute.  No wonder it took a crew of 300 to film.  But it makes no logical sense; if you wanted to escape pursuit, you'd be making a bad bet hurling your car into the face of oncoming traffic moving at over 100 kmh.  Also, if you're trying to hide from a pursuer, it makes more sense to conceal your car by moving in the same direction as dozens of others; hide behind something that looks just like you.  Finally, the interior shots don't always clarify which car we're driving.

Speed (1994, directed by Jan De Bont, USA) became a popular and critical favorite despite the implausibility of its plot.  A mad bomber (Dennis Hopper) rigs a bus to explode if its speed falls below 50 mph. Needless to say, this threat causes real tension as the crowded bus encounters traffic on the LA freeways.  Key scenes involve LAPD officer Jack (Keanu Reeves) boarding the bus from a Jaguar XJS, and then figuring out how to fool the bomber's on-board surveillance system. The jump scene demanded a real jump by the bus (but not over a real chasm), required the stunt driver to sit in a special sling to avoid injury, and caused structural damage to the bus. Nothing like the damage to credibility prompted by that convoluted plot, though…

Taxi (1998, directed by Gérard Pires, France) takes a different approach to the "jump the gap" scenario, with cab driver Daniel (Samy Naceri) and police inspector Emilien (Frédéric Diefenthal) taunting a gang of Mercedes-driving robbers into a race which concludes on an unfinished highway. The plot twist here is that our heroes manage to stop their hot rod Peugeot cab in time to avoid doom...

...while the crooks jump the gap...

...only to discover they're marooned in space.  This film spawned a series of sequels and became a franchise in France.  The  2004 American re-make, with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon, did not.

Vanishing Point (1971, directed by Richard Sarafian, USA) became a cult favorite in an America troubled by the Vietnam war and racial injustice. The plot glues these themes together when Vietnam vet and motorcycle racer Kowalski (Barry Newman) picks up a white Dodge Challenger in Denver late on Friday night and bets he can deliver it to the owner in San Francisco by 3 on Sunday afternoon, counting on some benzedrine pills to keep him awake.  Along the route west, another thing that keeps Kowalski awake is black radio disc jockey Super Soul (Cleavon Little) who cheers on our antihero as he evades police and gets into a race with a Jaguar driver who ends up in the river.  Despite becoming a favorite with directors like Spielberg and Tarantino, Vanishing Point is not available streaming or as a DVD. After watching the race scene, this viewer found it hard to forgive the director for wrecking a scruffy but roadworthy Jag...

Swordfish (2001, directed by Dominic Sena, USA) features (or strands, depending upon your point of view) John Travolta, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry in a plot of bewildering complications involving a master hacker, government agents, mistaken or obscured identity, and a scheme to heist a lot of money.  Critics agreed that it lacked clarity and humor, and these aspects are missing as well from the chase scene, which substitutes things that go bang for things that make sense. The object of the chase, a British TVR Tuscan Speed Six, might have stressed out the stunt drivers more than the audience, with three times the power of a Miata in a package of similar size and weight, but lacking antilock braking, traction control or air bags. It prompted at least one viewer to ask about the car after giving up on the plot.  A Speed Six might look nice under your Christmas tree, especially in Reflex Green...

*Footnote:  We examined "Weekend", a 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard featuring lots of highway mayhem, on November 19, 2021 in "Epic Traffic Jam or the End of Civilization."  We spent some time with Godard's first film, a groundbreaker that also featured a lot of cars (mostly stolen), on December 27, 2020, with "Stolen Cars and Stolen Kisses in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless'."  And classic cars featured in classic thrillers, including the Citroen 11 Traction Avant, are pictured in "Speeding Into Darkness: The Cars of Film Noir", posted March 21, 2020.

Photo Credits:   

Bullitt:  Solar Productions   

The Italian Job:  Oakhurst Productions  

Duel:  Universal Pictures

The French Connection:  20th Century Fox

Diva:  Les Films Galaxie

Thelma and Louise:  Pathé Entertainment, Scott Free Productions

North by Northwest:  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Ronin:  United Artists, FGM Entertainment

Speed:  Mark Gordon Company

Taxi:  Le Studio Canal +

Vanishing Point:  Cupid Productions

Swordfish:  Village Roadshow Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Forgotten Classic: Gordon-Keeble—Sign of the Turtle

A sharp-eyed reader* captured the two cars below at a rainy vintage car gathering at Lime Rock this autumn.  He'd never seen an example of the blue car in the foreground.  Though the turtle insignia on the nose seemed a mystery, it appears whoever determined the parking order knew something about it, because they placed the mystery car next to another car by the same Italian body designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro. 

The turtle emblem on the car's nose gives little clue as  to  the car's origins, and certainly no clue of its performance potential. But one thing this silver-blue Grodon-Keeble GK-1 shares with that bronze Mangusta beyond its body designer is American power. The 1960 Bertone-bodied GK-1 prototype ran with a Chevy 283, while the Ghia-built Mangusta designed half a dozen years later featured a midship-mounted Ford 289.  What was the Gordon-Keeble, and what's that turtle doing on its prow?

Well, it started with the Peerless, a coupe with a tubular space frame chassis, De Dion tube rear suspension and Triumph TR3 engine.  The design by Bernie Rodgers for partners John Gordon and James Byrnes was built in an old tank factory operated in World War I by the namesake American Peerless car company.  After the alloy-paneled prototype, Peerless built around 325 fiberglass-bodied GTs from 1957 through 1960.  

After Peerless ran out of funding, designer Rodgers managed to build another 40 Warwick GT cars from 1960-62, including 2 with the aluminum Buick V8 that appeared a few years later in Rovers. At the same time, a guy named Jim Keeble (who'd also tried the Buick in his Peerless) went into partnership with John Gordon, with a plan to make a V8-powered GT based on the Peerless chassis, but with a new body design.

Gordon and Keeble apparently felt that styling of the Peerless and Warwick (2 examples above) was somewhat lacking in any strong theme. They had more confidence in the Peerless chassis design, and re-used all the basic elements, adding rear disc brakes to join the ones at the front, and moving the twin fuel tanks from their risky and space-robbing position below the Peerless doors. For styling, they approached Bertone in 1959...   

The Giugiaro-designed GK-1 prototype wowed crowds when it appeared at the 1960 Geneva Show. Tightly contoured around the space frame and with a glassy cabin, it was the picture of modernity; the E-Type Jaguar was 13 months in the future.  The prototype impressed GM execs enough that they promised to supply Chevrolet V8s for the production cars…327s instead of the 283 in the prototype they tested.  In those fiberglass-bodied production cars, 0 to 60 came up in under 6 seconds, with a top speed around 140 mph.  As with many largely handbuilt cars, detail differences between examples show up…for example, the more circular wheel openings on the dark blue car below, compared with the ovoid openings on our silver-blue mystery car.  They all got the turtle emblem though, because a pet turtle had wandered into a photo shoot of that first GK-1. It was adopted as a good luck mascot...

But the partners' luck didn't hold.  For one thing, they'd underestimated how long it would take to get the new car into production. The first production GK-1 emerged from their plant in 1964, nearly 4 years after the first showing. As we shall see, this allowed some competitors (even some with American V8 engines) to beat them to the market.  Gordon and Keeble had also underestimated production costs.  By the time production ended in 1967, they'd sold 99 cars; one more was assembled from stock after the closure.  A later effort by De Bruyne with an uninspired restyle resulted in one completed car.  The problem with the GK-1 was, after all, not lack of styling; it was lack of a cost accountant.

Even though the Gordon-Keeble team failed in their mission of filling thousands of garages in America and the Mother Country with sort-of-affordable American-powered, Italian-tailored, British-built GTs, they may have provided what we'd call "proof of concept" to Milanese industrialist Renzo Rivolta, who commissioned Bertone to come up with a 2+2 GT car not long after the Gordon-Keeble first appeared.  Designer Giugiaro applied similar proportions and greenhouse design to the steel-bodied, Chevy 327-powered Iso Rivolta GT* that went into production in 1962.  This example was parked not far from the GK-1.  Over 8 years of production, 8 times as many of this Iso were produced as of the Gordon-Keeble, partly reflecting the penalty imposed by the 4-year delay in getting Gordon's GT into production. Eight years after Gordon-Keeble folded its tent, Iso Rivolta was bankrupted by slow sales prompted by the 1973 fuel crisis. Both stories demonstrate that a good way of getting rid of all your money during this era was to manufacture exotic cars...

*Footnote:  Giugiaro's De Tomaso Mangusta design was pictured and analyzed in "The Italian Line: Ghia Part 2—From Custom to Corporate", posted October 31, 2020.  We surveyed Iso Rivolta history in "Born From Refrigerators: Iso Rivolta", posted September 20, 2018.

Photo Credits:   

*Top & bottom photos:  LCDR Jonathan D. Asbury, USN.   

2nd, 3rd & 6th:  Wikimedia  

4th:  en.wheelsage.org

5th:  gordtonkeeble.org.uk

7th:  pinterest.com