Roadside Attraction: Carhenge----Stonehenge Rendered in Cars (Really)

Just under 4 miles north of the downtown center of Alliance, on Nebraska Route 87 (County Road 59) you will happen upon Carhenge.  And even if this place had another name, you'd probably think of Stonehenge right away.  None of this is a coincidence...

Jim Reinders used 39 cars to form his sculptural homage to his recently departed father and to the epic ruin on Salisbury Plain.  Family and friends helped out, and it took a team of nearly 3 dozen to complete the work, which opened in 1987.  The team painted all the cars in the same stoney shade of matte gray, a good move as it avoids the distractions of contrasting paint schemes and bright trim. It also focuses attention on form, something that's been lost at the earlier Cadillac Ranch in Texas, where graffiti and vandalism have blunted the impact of ten Fin Era Cadillacs buried nose down.  At Carhenge, you get to concentrate on mass, space and light...

For a comparison of the proportions and massing of Carhenge with the Sarcen Circle at Stonehenge, see the photo below.  The Sarcen Circle is a dozen feet larger in diameter than Carhenge, at 108 feet.  Seventeen of the original thirty upright "standing stones" remain after about 5,000 years of wear and tear...

As it turns out, choosing cars (at least, American cars) as his basic building block was another of the artist's good moves.  The vertical stones at Stonehenge are about 13 feet high and 7 feet wide.  To achieve the same height, Reinders buried "standard size" (that is, huge) cars of the Sixties up to 5 feet in the ground*.  Well, a '62 Buick Wildcat is 18 feet long; bury one 5 feet and you're left with 13 feet up to your horizontal "stone."  Perfect.  And Caddies, Chryslers and Lincolns of this era were around 80 inches wide, nearly the 7 feet of the standing stones.  Cars acting as beams span these verticals and are welded in place.  In the shot below, we see a Ford Fairlane of the '66-'67 period following a Chevelle from the same era, just as it did in so many suburban shopping center lots...

As with the original on the Salisbury Plain, some verticals are missing their horizontal attachments.  This enhances the overall ruin effect...

At Carhenge, cars play the roles of three trilithons within the circle, as well as heel stones, slaughter stone and two station stones.  We're nervous about that slaughter stone...

As a work of art, Carhenge resonates with all kinds of associations. One thinks of the transitory nature of material things, notices the welcome stillness after the highway's unending rush to somewhere (or nowhere), or maybe (if one is old enough) ponders how cool tail fins looked once when their bright metallic colors reflected the showroom lights...and how they seem kind of silly today. 

If you've spent a lot of time working under cars on a lift, you may be able to ID the supporting piers below.  As for the cars acting as lintels, we note an early 70s Ford Pinto leading a Fifties Willys Jeep pickup and an early 60s Plymouth Valiant...  

Below, a '55 Caddy dominates the foreground, with a Virgil Exner-designed 1960 Plymouth on the background pedestal, another of 3 trilithons within the circle.  Since the 1987 completion of Carhenge, the facility has opened an outdoor sculpture gallery called the Car Art Reserve.  A visitor center called the Pit Stop was added in 2007. Jim Reinders gifted the 10 acre Carhenge site to the Friends of Carhenge, who maintained it until 2013, when it was given to the City of Alliance.  It's open dawn to dusk.

Jim Reinders, who died in 2021, was born in Alliance in 1927, served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during World War 2, and graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1948. His work as an engineer for the oil industry took him to England eventually, and that was apparently a high point of his travels, because he was drawn to those mysterious stones, placed long before the druids or the Celts arrived on the Salisbury Plain...

Reinders liked talking about his art, and when asked why he'd spent so much effort on Carhenge, answered "Why not?"  In the poster below, he sits happily in a mid-Seventies Chevy Vega wagon, a car which was not usually known to delight its drivers.  

Carhenge, however, has delighted thousands of human and canine visitors over the decades. Our friend Pablo visited on a windy day, and looked ready to take off with the breeze, unlike the thoroughly grounded '68 Caddy behind him.  Visitor information is available at carhenge.com, and the Visitor Center phone is 308-762-5400.

 

*Footnote:  Background information on the creation of Carhenge, along with details of other art installations and tourist amenities on the site, are available at carhenge.com.  

Roadside archeologists, and those interested in sculptural landmarks made of objects never intended for that purpose, may be interested in "Roadside Attraction: Little Man and Big Dog in Denver", posted here on May 14, 2016.  Little Man Ice Cream is housed in a 28-foot high metal cream can, and the 20-foot high Big Dog sculpture is covered with 90,000 dog tags.  Hound About Town Pablo is a fan of Little Man, but harbors some doubts about Big Dog...

Photo Credits

All color shots of Carhenge (and loyal hound Pablo) were generously provided by Veronika Sprinkel; these include the shot of the Jim Reinders poster.

The monochrome shot of Stonehenge is from wikimedia, while the monochrome photo of Jim Reinders at age 21 is from carhenge.com.

Modern Housing Solutions Part 3 (or 4): The Case Study Era and the Lustron Adventure

This is Part 3 of a long, rambling series on innovative efforts to house people...Part 4 if you count the post on Bowlus and Airstream trailers* that kicked off the whole thing.  Those early streamlined trailers appeared during the Great Depression and were inspired by the forms of modern aircraft, but after World War II, architects and planners looked instead to the industrial production lines that made thousands of aircraft (and tanks and jeeps) for the war effort.  They reasoned that the same efficiencies and standardized parts could be applied to providing housing for the returning millions of US military veterans who had served overseas in the war.

Early after the war, this focus on using industrial processes and standardized parts took a couple of different directions.  In one, architects reasoned that houses reflecting the latest thinking on space and materials could be made of largely standard parts, but in a way that permitted a wide variety of different designs.  The modern preference for plans provided open living space with few internal divisions, as well as large glass areas opening onto the great outdoors, led to an architecture with floor-to-ceiling glazing, and long spans supported by steel trusses or beams...

This was the approach taken by Charles and Ray Eames, a husband and wife team of industrial designers, in their LA house and studio.  Their project was one of around two dozen houses featured in the Case Study program organized in the mid-Forties by publisher John Entenza and featured in his magazine, Arts & Architecture.  Also known as Case Study #8, the Eames house was one of five Case Study projects that were eventually sited on a bluff in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood.  The glassy, steel-framed rectangles of the elevations reflect the open simplicity of the plan, and the use of black framing to set off primary colors against larger zones of white plaster recalls the pre-war paintings of Piet Mondrian.

The interior view shows how the designers dissolved the visual barrier between the outdoors and interior space, and how they made use of low-cost commercial steel trusses and metal decking to support the roof.  Along with the use of "off-the-shelf" steel parts, the house provided a place to test the Eames duo's ideas about using new materials in furniture, including the molded plywood chairs that appeared the same year as their house and studio, 1949.  Their house and studio design appeared in the May 1949 issue of Arts & Architecture, and Charles and Ray moved in that December.  

Pierre Koenig designed the Bailey House (Case Study #21) for a young couple in 1959.  Sited on a small plot in the Hollywood Hills, Case Study #21 was intended to serve as a prototype for a steel-framed house that could be duplicated in a large series.  The street side elevation below shows how the largely blank facade provides privacy.  Shallow pools of water (empty on the street side view) were intended to provide a cooling effect...

The carport view below on the Bailey's north side shows how the house opens to the front and rear, with floor to ceiling glass and nearly transparent living space.  In this view the reflecting pool is filled, and provides emphasis to the adjacent entry path.  Despite the original goal of the Case Study program to provide affordable modernity to young families, the houses are now treated as prized artifacts with prices to match; one recently sold for over $3 million. In 2013, ten of the houses in the Case Study series were listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  

The era of these Case Study houses coincided with the explosive growth of Los Angeles and the phenomenon of suburban sprawl across the USA.  In what was understood at the time as an effort to provide a piece of the American Dream to Everyman on a small plot of land, developers took over agricultural land around major cities, and highways moved out to serve new "bedroom communities" (most with more bedrooms than community), along with gas stations and what would soon be called shopping centers.  Fast food entered our language not long after it entered our diets.  Few took time to ponder what the implications might be for energy consumption, wild land, or wildlife. The surge of postwar optimism was reflected in the Interstate Highway System, begun in 1956 when President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, and was echoed (not without a bit of irony) in artist Ed Ruscha's paintings of gas stations in the next decade...

The enameled steel panels that formed many of those gas stations had first appeared in the 1930s during the Streamline Moderne period, and in the Midwest, Carl Strandlund had developed a prefabricated version before the war that he thought might provide a format for housing after the war ended...  

He hired two Chicago architects, Roy Burton Blass and Morris Beckman, and they came up with 3 models of small ranch house designs with up to 3 bedrooms.  The houses were structured in steel, with prefabricated steel stud walls that were shipped to construction sites on special trucks. Interior as well as exterior wall finishes were enameled metal; with enameled metal tile roofs the new houses would be fireproof and largely maintenance free. Strandlund obtained a $12.5 million loan from a Federal agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corp., and his Lustron Corporation began production of the houses in 1948 at a repurposed Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory in Columbus, Ohio.

Lustron houses featured lots of built-in features like storage shelves and cabinets, easily-cleaned enameled metal bathroom surfaces, and radiant heating at the ceiling level. The latter might have worked a bit better as a floor-mounted system.  Also, because Lustron began production before insulated glazing had become widely available, there were some complaints about window performance. Those who took delivery of a Lustron were generally happy, though...

The angled, truss-shaped porch support shown below was a distinctive Lustron feature, and included a built-in downspout for drainage... 

The houses sold for $8,500 to $9,500, and though they were a bit more pricey than conventional construction, orders piled up at the 234 franchised Lustron dealers.  Strandlund had aimed to manufacture 100 houses per day, and identified the break-even point at 50 houses.  Production peaked, however, at just 26 houses a day, and at that rate Lustron was losing money, customers were facing long waits for deliveries, and Reconstruction Finance was getting nervous about repayment of that big loan...

Because of the lag in getting production up to speed, and also because of pressure placed on politicians by the building interests and unions representing conventional construction, the government moved quickly to foreclose on Lustron's loan, and the company folded after a year in manufacturing.  In that time, though, Lustron produced and delivered 2,680 houses, of which about 1,000 remain in use. In the realm of all-steel construction, only multi-family efforts delivered more housing, and not so soon after the war. During this same period, French architect Jean Prouvé traveled an intriguingly similar path, producing a prototype prefab gas station design...

...as well as several prototypes of steel-structured houses intended for large-scale production.  Sadly, Prouvé's own house, which incorporated many of his ideas on using steel, aluminum and open glazed spaces, was only built in 1954, after his housing design and construction workshops closed. Prouvé's efforts formed a kind of link between the Lustron mass-production concept and the more adventurous and open design ideas of the Case Study houses, and will be the subject of a future story. 

These early initiatives might have had more success had society framed the shortage of housing as the kind of crisis that it now presents in many 21st century American cities, and adopted the same level of commitment and dedication that the US applied to winning World War II.  As it turned out, the Case Study and Lustron projects, and their French equivalents by Jean Prouvé, attracted attention to the housing problem, but ran into obstacles presented by business as usual, politics as usual, and a kind of "not invented here" mindset...

*Footnotes:  We found an informative essay on the Lustron housing effort, in "Lustron, The All Steel House" with photos and drawings, from Sept. 4, 2015, at www.handeyesupply.com.

Part 3 of this series, entitled "Kit Houses: A Solution to Overpriced Housing?", appeared here on Jan. 15, 2023, with a look at a 1920s Sears kit house and some modern Scandinavian equivalents. For Part 2 of this long-interrupted series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017. In that post, we visited modular and prefab housing exhibits in Chicago and New York, reported on an innovative reconfiguring of a mobile home by CU students here in Boulder, and also showed a factory-built house in Finland.  And we looked at mobile homes in "When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile: Bowlus and Airstream", posted July 30, 2017.  

Photo Credits

Top photo, plan drawings + 2nd & 4th photo:  eamesfoundation.org 

3rd photo:  Wikimedia

5th photo (Case Study #21):  Niels Wouter

6th photo:  Wikimedia

Standard Station:  Artist: Ed Ruscha; featured on Los Angles County Museum of Art website

Gulf Station Photo:  pinterest.com

9th photo thru 12th (Lustron houses in Iowa):  Dr. Marcus Nashelsky.

13th (Prouvé gas station):  Wikimedia

14th & 15th (Prouvé house:):  wikiarquitectura.com

Bottom (Lustron house in Kansas):  Dr. Marcus Nashelsky; we want to thank him for his Lustron research.

Lotus Eleven: Breakaway Moment for Lotus Cars

Wandering through a well-hidden treasure trove of classic sports and racing cars in the Pacific Northwest a decade ago, we encountered this dusty Lotus Mk. XI, more commonly spelled out (for reasons we'll reveal later) as Lotus Eleven.  You might think this is going to lead to another in our Forgotten Classics series, but actually, the Lotus Eleven was such a successful car that Colin Chapman's workshops produced 270 of them from 1956 through 1958.  That's a lot for a car focused on racing, and the Eleven was never really forgotten by car enthusiasts.  In fact, it was so well-remembered that in the Eighties, England's Westfield Sportscars began offering fiberglass-bodied replicas of the cars. In the Lotus spirit (one is tempted to say "esprit"), Westfield also offered these as kits. What was so special about the Eleven that, as with the Shelby AC Cobra, replicas outnumber originals?

Well, my dusty copy of the Road & Track 1958 Road Test Annual tells the performance story, as it features a test of the top-line Climax 1100 FWA-engined, 4-wheel disc-braked, independently suspended (De Dion rear) Lotus Eleven Le Mans, as well as what would be today called the "entry level" Lotus Sport, with Ford 1.2 liter side-valve four, drum brakes and live rear axle.  The test Eleven Le Mans weighed 1,000 pounds dry (with oil and water but no fuel) and 1,360 lb. as tested. The test crew noted the quick steering, 1.75 turns lock to lock.  As no "5th wheel" could be attached for recording data, and as removing the alloy passenger seat tonneau would have also deleted the windshield and cockpit fairing, acceleration times were recorded with  R & T's editor huddled beneath the tonneau and leaning over to observe the tachometer. There was no speedometer; this was dictated by Chapman's logic that in a racing car, you're always going as fast as you can.  In this case "as fast as you can" meant a top speed of 132 mph, with 0 to 60 coming up in 9 seconds, and the quarter mile in 16.  Not bad for a car with 83 hp from the 1098cc single overhead cam inline four, a lightweight aluminum unit that was famously designed as a fire pump engine.  Price-wise, the Eleven Le Mans was a deal at only $5,467, at a time when a competing OSCA, which the Lotus was already beating on the track, cost $9,500. Competition success for Team Lotus included winning the 1,100cc class at Le Mans in 1956 and again in 1957, and winning  that class at the 1957 Sebring 12 hours. The 40 hp. Lotus Sports from Jay Chamberlains's LA dealership also looked like a bargain at $3,690, topping out at 99 mph and making the 0 to 60 run in 14.2 seconds, but the editors pointed out that it would have been swamped in the under 1500cc racing class because of its 1.2 liter, side-valve, pushrod engine, and its lack of ground clearance and 42-foot turning circle made it impractical for use on the street.

A major factor in the appeal of the Eleven was the visual character of the thing. The entire Eleven line shared a fetchingly aerodynamic body design by Frank Costin, contoured in aluminum to fit over the lightweight tubular chassis by Williams & Pritchard.  The form, with its low wheel cutouts and diagonal creases emphasizing (and perhaps stiffening) the ovoid fenders, gave new meaning to the phase "fully enveloping" and was an instant classic. Along with the car's competition success, the distinctive curves and low profile insured that lots of weekend racers wanted one, despite impractical features like narrow seats, optional and sketchy weather protection, downward-opening doors hinged at the sills, and fuel tanks mounted at the front, next to the engine and opposite the driver.  A wide-cockpit version was made to comply with dimensional regulations laid down by the FIA, which sanctioned endurance racing.  

The Eleven was such a success that in 1958 Chapman's team introduced an improved version with Lotus-designed double wishbone independent front suspension replacing the Allard-style front swing axles of the earlier cars (Chapman had used a low pivot on these). The steel tubular space frame chassis was also strengthened, along with drivetrain improvements.  The suspension improvements came from the Lotus 12 single-seater, and while some racers referred to the new, improved Eleven as the Lotus 13, Colin Chapman never did.  The factory designated the car as the Eleven Series 2; perhaps Chapman and crew were a bit superstitious.  About 120 of the 270 Elevens built were of this Series 2 variety.  By the early Eighties, when Westfield Sportscars got around to making a replica of the well-loved Eleven, they'd switched to fiberglass for bonnet, fenders and doors, and made left-hand drive, as on the car below, an option.  These were initially available as kits or as factory-built cars.  Engines fitted into the factory-built cars were often the BMC 1275, but there were also examples of the short-stroke Ford 105E.  As compared with the original Eleven, the Westfield had a bit longer wheelbase (90 in. vs. 85) and was wider (64 in. vs. 59); minimum weight was up from 1,000 lb. to 1,170.  But by the time the Westfield Eleven appeared, vintage racing had become popular, driving up the price of the original Lotus Elevens, which were mostly useful on a race track, and not very practical anywhere else.  By the mid-Eighties, Road & Track had built a Westfield Eleven project car and taken it on a road trip across America, proving that it could be done, though this might be a more daunting task in these days of lumbering SUVs with texting drivers at the wheel...

One of the results of the Eleven's success was that most production Lotuses (Lotii?) that came after it were given names that started with the letter E.  Colin Chapman liked the way "Eleven" sounded after "Lotus", and during the design of the Lotus 14, which overlapped production of the Eleven in 1957, decided to call it the Elite.  A white Type 14 Lotus Elite is centered in the row of Lotuses shown below, parked next to a green Elise and a white Esprit.  Between it and the red Westfield Eleven is a black Lotus Sprint.  Wait, that violates the rule, right?  Well, in England and Europe, the Sprint was called the Eclat. It was a fastback version of the wedge-shaped wagon-back Elite Type 75, with 2+2 seating. Maybe Chapman didn't trust that Americans could pronounce "Eclat", and perhaps it served him right that the Sprint flopped in the USA.  But the Elite Type 75 introduced in 1974 was a flop too.  It had the same reputation for fragility as the original Type 14 Elite, but none of its beauty.  And Road & Track thought that retreating from discs to inboard rear drum brakes on the Elite / Eclat / Sprint was not a wise move, especially as the Elite was, at the time, the world's most expensive four-cylinder car. The commercial failure of the expensive, wedge-shaped Lotus front-engined production cars highlighted the popularity of the Westfield Eleven, which appeared in 1982, the year the Elite / Eclat twins faded, as well as the Caterham Seven*, which had been building a following since 1973.  And it may not be a coincidence that when new Lotus management planned a more reasonably-priced Lotus for the Nineties, the new Elise was a lightweight 2-seater that abandoned the wedge for a design with no straight lines. But the story of the mid-engined Elise and its Esprit and Europa forbears is one we'll save for another day...

*Footnote:  A brief history of the Lotus Eleven's forgotten ancestors, the Mark VIII, Mk. IX and Mk. X, appeared in our previous post, "Forgotten Classics: Lotus, Between Seven and Eleven", on March 10, 2023.  We told the story of the Lotus that preceded the Mark VIII, the Lotus Seven, and its modern Caterham cousins, in "Caterham Cars: Multiples of Seven", posted on March 11, 2018.  And we examined a famously beautiful design landmark, the fiberglass monocoque Lotus 14 (the original Elite) and compared it with a missed design opportunity from the same period, in "Worst Car Designs Ever, Part 2: Plastic Promise, Plastic Peril", posted here on July 31, 2016.  

Photo Credits:
Top:  Denée Foti

2nd:  Bob Jecmen

3rd:  Ralph Poole for Road & Track

4th & 5th:  Lotus Cars

6th & bottom:  the author

Forgotten Classics: Lotus, Between Seven and Eleven

Most American car enthusiasts know about the Lotus Seven*, Colin Chapman's second effort at a production club racer which appeared in 1957 and was sold in kit form because of English tax laws. What they may have forgotten or never known is that between the launch of its very similar predecessor, the cycle-fendered Lotus Mk. VI, in 1952, and the first Seven, Lotus also built the Mk. VIII, Mk. IX, and Mk. X.  While the Mk. VI was credited by its maker with being the first "production" Lotus, it was sold as a kit, so final assembly was up to owners, and it took until the end of production in July 1957 for Lotus to sell around 110.  By contrast, the Mark VIII pictured was only sold as a complete car (well, complete unless you wanted creature comforts).  Lotus sold 7 or 8 specimens of the aerodynamic Mk. VIII, 30 of its closely-related sister the Mark IX, and 6 or 7 of the Bristol-engined Mark X.  And those cars were produced over a shorter period, 1954 through '55, so perhaps they should count as the first Lotus production models...

The Mk VIII was the first Lotus with an envelope body, in this case a 20-gauge aluminum skin designed by Frank Costin, built by Williams & Pritchard and draped over a lightly modified Mk VI chassis.  The white car above, the first Mk. VIII built, was delivered late to its owner, racer Tip Cunane, because, among other reasons, the original tubular space frame had to be redesigned to allow easy removal of the engine. This originally took over 12 hours and required partial engine disassembly; perhaps this led to the story that LOTUS stood for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious. The "other reasons" apparently included Chapman using Cunane's deposit to build the Lotus team Mk. VIII.  That team Mk VIII, piloted by Chapman, gained fame for Lotus when it and a Mk. VI driven by Peter Gammon beat Hans Herrmann's 4-cam, factory team Porsche Spyder at Silverstone in 1954.  Power came from an MG 1500 four.  Frank Costin's design included the wild stabilizing fins that were given more vertical edges on the following Mk. IX shown below, parked next to a Mk. VI. This shortened the car; the MG-powered Mk. IX also had a revised space frame design which eliminated the need for stiffening panels (the Mk. VIII had a stressed belly pan).  

Meanwhile, potential customers had noticed Lotus success on British tracks and requested a car that would accommodate a bigger engine. One engine that was popular in British club racing at the time was the Bristol* 2-liter, closely based upon the pre-WWII BMW 328 design. The Bristol had the advantage of being reliable and available, but the tall, long-stroke inline six did no favors for the lines of the Mark X, as the revised car was called.  The unpainted example below was recently sold, dents and all...

Even when the Mk. X was given a nice coat of paint and polished up a bit, it was hard to ignore that big lump in the bonnet to clear the Bristol six. Under the sleek bodywork, the Mk. X chassis was very similar to the Mark VIII, which meant that the triangulated space frame weighed an amazing 35 pounds, that the rear brakes were inboard, the front suspension was by swing axles, and the rear suspension featured a De Dion tube.  One area where the Mk. X differed, however, from Marks VIII and IX, was in the braking system.  The Lotus Mk. X was the first Lotus to feature four-wheel disc brakes...

One Mk. X was exported to the USA for James Dean*, the movie actor, but he died in his Porsche Spyder before he could drive the car.  It was likely the only one not to feature disc brakes, allegedly because Dunlop hadn't cleared them for export.  

The Lotus Mk. VIII, IX and X established Lotus as a builder of modern sports racers, and the body design by ex-De Havilland aerodynamicist Frank Costin made traditional, taller front-engined racers look obsolete. Frank's brother Mike served as technical director at Lotus before joining Keith Duckworth in 1958 to make racing engines: Costin was the "Cos" in Cosworth Engineering...

The low seating position and small-diameter steering wheel were a sign of things to come, even if the long-stroke Bristol engine was not.  Chapman's design team had another surprise in store for club racers and aspiring pros, and it would appear the next year, in 1956. The Climax-engined, Frank Costin-styled Lotus Eleven would finally make Lotus famous in America, too... 

*Footnote:  We told the story of the Lotus that preceded the Mark VIII, the Lotus Seven, and its modern Caterham cousins, in "Caterham Cars: Multiples of Seven", posted on March 11, 2018. We took a look at another landmark, the fiberglass monocoque Lotus 14 (the original Elite) and drew a contrast with a fiberglass disaster from the same period, in "Worst Car Designs Ever, Part 2: Plastic Promise, Plastic Peril", posted here on July 31, 2016.  We profiled the Bristol, along with Bristol's Le Mans race cars, in "Forgotten Classics: Muddling Through With Bristol", posted Sept. 22, 2016.  And we happened upon a memorial to actor and racer James Dean "On a Lonely Highway in California", posted on January 18, 2016.

Photo Credits:
Top:  Wikimedia

2nd:  flickr.com

3rd:  Wikimedia

4th:  bonhams.com

5th thru Bottom:  Automobiles Historiques

Forgotten Classic: AC Cars and A98, the Other Cobra Coupe

Even if you're a vintage racing fan (or maybe a racing fan of a certain vintage) the car pictured above may not look familiar, and may not remind you at all of the familiar AC Cobra.  But that could be because it only raced once, with a less successful outcome than its more famous sister cars from Shelby American.  It turns out that while the California firm was working long hours to ready Pete Brock's* Daytona coupe design below for the 1964 Le Mans, the AC factory in Thames Ditton, England was working on Alan Turner's design for the A98 coupe pictured above and below it... 

Turner and Brock were both aiming at better aerodynamics with less frontal area and also more downforce at the rear, and both designers achieved that in different ways. On Turner's A98, as with John Willment's* 289 Cobra, the other one-off Cobra racing coupe, the nose is sharper in profile and the roof is lower than on Brock's Daytona, which is all gentle curves from the rounded nose back to the abrupt Kamm-insipired tail chop with that tall spoiler, which Brock wanted to be retractable, a feature Shelby vetoed for cost reasons.  Even the flat, recessed tail outlines the ovoid section of the car. On Turner's A98 design, pictured above the blue Daytona, the rear section is more rectilinear, and the spoiler more angled. There are sharply defined blisters above A98's wheel arches to direct air flow, and these recall the Mercedes 300SL and SLR.  Both designs added rigidity to the chassis, improving handling, and added speed. The Daytona coupe was timed at 191 mph, and AC's A98 became famous (or notorious) even before Le Mans when test driver Jack Sears was timed at 185 mph in a pre-dawn run on a public highway, Britain's M1 Motorway...

In the photo above, the A98's tubular steel framework waits for the aluminum body panels that would be fabricated by AC.  For the Daytona Cobra, Shelby American formed the first alloy body over a wooden buck in Los Angeles; subsequent "production" cars (all 5 of them) were built by Carrozzeria Gran Sport in Italy.  Shelby had funding for only 6 coupes, so the British teams fielded by the AC factory and by Ford dealer John Willment* had to make their own.  Shelby and AC took advantage of the race organizing body FIA's Appendix J rules to fit their production Cobra roadsters with non-standard aerodynamic coupe bodies. Enzo Ferrari had used the same rule to get his GTO approved, and was upset that AC and Shelby had made far fewer of their cars than the 3 dozen 250 GTOs he presented as mere variations on the 250GT.  He was even more upset when the Daytona helped Shelby American's AC Cobra team to win the Manufacturer's Championship, beating Ferrari in 1965...

In fairness to Shelby and AC, though, we'd point out that the alloy bodies on the Daytona and A98 really were mounted on standard AC Cobra chassis, while the Ferrari GTO featured a dry-sump engine never available in the production 250GT.  In the photos above and below, the lone A98 Le Mans Cobra emerges from the AC factory at Thames Ditton.  Note the sharp crease above the air intake, and the low profile...A98 was just 41 inches high, 5.5 inches lower than the Daytona.  AC's test driver Jack Sears was the only one to have raced all three types of Cobra coupes along with the roadster. In comparing them, he noted that the more rigid Daytona handled better than the "bucking bronco" roadster, but was hot and "deafening" in long-distance races.  He thought the Willment coupe felt almost the same as the Daytona, but noted the lower profile.  Finally, he thought that AC's A98 might have been "the best of the lot", with great speed in a straight line, as well as predictable handling and stability...

At Le Mans in 1964, early indications were that Sears was right.  A98 matched the speed of the Daytonas, even with less power than the Shelby-tuned coupes. The car Sears shared with Peter Bolton ran well after the mechanics sorted out a mess caused by someone sabotaging the fuel tank with shredded newspaper.  Then, in the 7th hour, A98 blew a tire with Bolton driving, was hit by Giancarlo Baghetti's Ferrari, and jumped the guardrail.  Tragically, three teenagers who'd ignored restricted area warnings were in the path of the wrecks, and died.  Bolton was taken to the hospital with amazingly minor injuries, and Baghetti escaped unhurt.  Years later, Barrie Baird bought the wreck of A98 and restored the car.  The process took a dozen years... 

It's one of those tantalizing "what ifs" to ponder what might have happened without the sabotaged fuel tank, the blown tire, and the deadly accident at Le Mans. Those who remember A98 at Le Mans, along with many who have seen the restored original, have noted that it may have provided a template for an AC production car when the aging Cobra roadster had run its course*.  It may have been difficult, though, to adapt this A98 design, or that of the Daytona, to the coming US safety standards, and the bumper standards that would follow those.  For AC and for Shelby, the Cobra was a hard act to follow, but that's a story we've covered in another episode*.

*Footnote:  We compared the Cobra Daytona coupe with the less well-known (okay, mostly forgotten) Willment Cobra competition coupe and Willment 427 Ghia coupe in our previous post, Forgotten Classic: Willment Cars---Climax, BRM, and Those One-Off Cobras, posted Feb. 11, 2023.  We surveyed a selection of AC Cobras in the Shelby American Collection in Roadside Attraction: The Shelby American Collection Part 1, on Dec. 28, 2017.  For more on the original Cobra Daytona along with other designs by Pete Brock, you might visit Unsung Genius: Pete Brock, Car Designer, posted here on Jan. 16, 2017. A survey of proposed successors to the Shelby AC Cobra roadster appears in AC Part 4: Shelby's Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow, posted on Aug. 20, 2017.

Photo credits:

Top:  pinterest.co.uk

2nd:  the author

3rd thru 5th:  AC Cars Ltd. on primotipo.com

Bottom:  AC Owners Club