Technical 1950 or 51 "sports car"...what engine?

THAT sir, is one bad MOFO!

Looks like he could have stolen the body straight out the back door of Scuderia Ferrari!

 

Pretty much, Benno. Sniffing through the engine histories and looking for something that was or might have been used in a road race special in the very early fifties.

 

Whoh! Theres the tach I've been hunting for my T!!! Sex on wheels!!

 

Nice car!!! A small blower would be the most appropriate power adder, eh? Gary

 

Those ol Lucas gauges used to be pretty easy to come by, not so much any more.

There is actually a blower from a ford Super Coupe that would be a shoe in foor an inline six for sale cheap here in our classifieds. The neat thing about a 6 or banger is that you can hook one up road warior style pretty easy with an electric clutch. With your bottom end properly set up and your block O-ringed you could keep your compression up and only boost when you have good gas. Best of both worlds.

 

No need to actually shut the blower off, Beaner... many of those Eatons have a built-in bypass that keeps the air bypassing the supercharger as long as there is vacuum. It wouldn't be hard to adapt a manual override to that system.

I played around with the Eaton quite a bit on O/T engines years ago. I think it's a cool piece; but for what I have in mind only a centrifugal will do.

 

Art Ingels also did the sheetmetal work on one of my all-time favorite hot rods, Dick Krafts V8-60 powered job. Funny time for this to come up, I just mentioned this car in a PM to someone in relation to a different thread...


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Wow, I didn't think my post on Dick Krafts would kill the thread! Bumpity bump.

 

So what 1950 vintage inline 6 would best lend itself to a "bespoke" DOHC head? Not Jag thanks, I get that.

 

The Nash head (yea, I know this is the later AMC version) with the open trough intake passage is just begging for a log style top connected to a supercharger.




SOHC conversion maybe?

 

I thought the idea was to build a special in the spirit of home built sports cars of the early 50s. Anyone who had the dough for an OHC head could go and buy a Jaguar.

More likely would be a Ford flathead V8, one of the new OHV V8s or other common available engine of the time.

 

Not home built exactly. Limited production. Let's say the Nash Healey was a big success and you knew the Corvette was coming. Good chance to cash in on the popularity of American sports car racing...that sort of thing.

 

If you knew the Corvette and Thunderbird were coming you would be crazy to try and build sports cars.

As long as the only competition was very expensive imported sports cars like Jaguar and Allard, or very slow ones like MG, it would seem possible to build a low production sports car using cheap American components and sell them at a profit.

Cunningham started this way. But their cars were very expensive ($9000) because of costly parts like the hopped up Chrysler hemi and the hand made body imported from Italy.

If you started with a lower cost chassis like Ford, Oldsmobile or Studebaker, suitably shortened, and added a fibreglass body you might have had something with Jaguar performance at the price of an Austin Healey or Triumph TR3.

There were efforts in this direction in California but none of them came to much. Once Ford and Chev jumped on the bandwagon it was impossible to compete on price and quality.

For laughs, here is Tom McCahill's idea of the ideal sports car. He really let himself go on this one. I don't believe you could build in all the junk he specifies and keep to a reasonable weight and cost.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mccahills-3-in-1-dream-car/#more

Less than a year after this appeared he bought the first Thunderbird sold to a retail customer. He remarked to a Ford executive at the time, that it seemed to have a lot of his Dream Car in it. The Ford man replied that if he was going to publish his ideas in a magazine he should not be surprised if someone else picked them up.

 

yeah, but...the Thunderbird wasn't a sports car, nor the Nash-Healey, nor really the original 'Vette, or the Kaiser Darrin, 'Vette aside they were all big heavy two-seat tourers and none of 'em made a dent in sports-car racing of the day. The 'Vette was never competitive with the six, it took a few years and a smallblock V8 to get the thing into the grid and the drum brakes were a limitation well into the '60s.

So...you can do it half-assed and fail, as the big automakers of the period did, or you can do something real.

The period exwestracer originally defined, the early '50s, was Jag XK120, Allard, maybe the first postwar Aston-Martins and Maseratis and Ferraris, and a bunch of one-offs. If you're gonna do it with a production domestic engine, you're gonna use an Ardun Ford, or an early Cadillac or Olds. If you're going to base it off of a six of the period, you're going to be doing what they would have done back then - fix the bottom end and do a custom head to get to ~200HP.

 

You are describing the Cunningham operation to a T. He was one of the richest men in America and he inherited his money, in other words he did not need to work.

In 5 years he spent $5 million on the Cunningham car company. At that point the IRS said that if they lost money 5 years in a row there was no prospect of ever making money, therefore he could not write off the losses against other income.

Cunningham cars ceased production the next day.

In other words one of the richest men in the country couldn't pull it off.

There were a few short lived companies that made much less ambitious cars but unless they were backed by a major car company they didn't get very far.

Longest lasting were body companies that sold a fibreglass shell, or shell plus chassis, to be completed by the buyer. I doubt one in ten of these was ever finished.

But who knew all this in 1951? A lot of guys dreamed of building their own sports car and a few succeeded, at least as far as getting a car or cars on the road.

 

^^^ Conversely, all the Popular Mechanics style builds and a great many of the cars seen in the "Rods and Racers" type magazines championed the everyman style of sports racer / rod build. Gary

 

In unrelated news, I find it funny that it's captioned "Mebbe" for maybe, like Internet-speak. Then again, it's "Mechanix Illustrated" with an X.

 

I find it funny that you don't consider a Nash Healey to be a sports car. Donald Healey thought it was a sports car, and proved it by finishing first in class and third overall at LeMans in 1952.

You may not think the Darrin, Corvette or T bird were sports cars but a lot of people did.

Our prospective 1951 model would probably fall into your category of grand touring car too. It would be pointless to build it as a competition model today because there would be no place for it to compete.

I would say do it half assed and succeed. Succeed in building a cool, good looking, fun car you can drive around and have a ball in. Just like they did in the fifties.

 

I'm a little familiar with the story of the Cunningham... and personally I think the problem was TOO MUCH money... They bought, and built, the best of everything; and then had to figure out how to amortize it into the price of the cars on such a low volume basis. NOPE.

This is all "what if" anyway. We know now that it didn't work out (in the long run) for anyone other than Chevy and Jag, and they both had more pedestrian models to ease the loss from the "sports car" production.

JEM's comment about fixing the bottom end and modifying the head is exactly what I'm thinking with this project...and a supercharger and period fuel injection.

The car design itself will owe a lot to the Buick Wildcat II and Pontiac Club de Mer dream cars, but won't be the same in the end.

I'm still leaning toward the Nash 6; anyone know of any major problems with that engine that would make it a bad choice (for the time)?

 

The Nash six was a very good engine for its time. 7 main bearings, very strong bottom end. OHV head. They did offer a LeMans Dual Jetfire option with dual carbs and, I think, a modified head. Good luck finding one today.

The intake was cast into the head but had an open top, sealed by a long bolt on plate. This makes it a cinch to cut a piece of aluminum and drill it for 2 or 3 carbs.

Some of their engines had an unusual exhaust design. No exhaust manifold, the exhaust pipe ran along the engine and was clamped in place, with holes cut to align with the exhaust ports.

Donald Healey was very impressed with this engine. It was not his first choice among American engines, Cadillac V8 was. He took the Nash when he could not get Cadillac engines. But after working with it, and racing it, he beat the world's best sports cars at LeMans with what was basically a passenger car engine costing less than 100 pounds.

That is on the good side. On the bad side it was an older design not as good as the new generation of OHV V8s then coming on the market.

 

Cool idea and I hope you get to build it. If I was building a "sports car" (or even a sporty car) in the early '50s, and I lived in SoCal, I might be tempted to use a Caddy or Olds. But if I were anywhere in the south, I'd be looking at how Hudson's were kicking tail in NASCAR and think of all that low end torque and wonder what it would do in a lightweight beast.

 

I'm sold, now if I can just get my customer to bite...

 

You mean you found a Nash Ambassador six or an even rarer Dual Jetfire?

Congratulations, in either case.

Incidentally aftermarket manifold companies used to make multi carb bases. I think they made them thicker than stock and hollow underneath to create a larger intake passage.

 

Lemans Dual Jetfire. Haven't bought it yet, but it is buyable and not likely to go anywhere soon.

 

I'm interested in how this is incorrectly described as a Kurtis.

 

I should have used more words! The chassis is Kurtis, the body is not. Those of us interested in sports cars of that era have a picture in our mind when "Kurtis" is mentioned, and it is not that car, but rather one of either the early "cycle fendered" cars (Bill Stroppe), the later and much more similar envelope bodied cars (Bill Murphy), or the final "switch body car" (Sam Parriott).

Mr Borelli's car is wonderful, not doubt about it, but I think it is more properly called his special than a Kurtis.

 

Are many Kurtis cars not one-off bodies on Kurtis chassis? While Frank Kurtis built the bodies on the 500S and 500M series cars, most, if not all, of the 500KK and 500X cars were one-off bodies on Kurtis chassis, weren't they? By your rationale, these are incorrectly identified as Kurtis cars?

 

I agree 100%, and I grew up around the sports car/road racing scene in the sixties. Other than a few mostly factory-backed, HIGHLY modified race cars, T-birds were NEVER taken seriously, more of a bad joke, posuer-mobile. Corvettes were another matter.

 

For my money, I dont think Cunningham ever really gave a damn if he "succeeded" in the way Rusty means. He did succeed, his goal was to build the ultimate, no-holds-barred, American sports car of the time, and thats what he did. I dont think he ever really honestly expected to sell hundreds of thousands of Cunninghams, and turn a per-unit profit. If he did, he really WAS stark-raving bonkers...

 

Dale, it seems to me that calling a car a Kurtis because it uses one of his chassis means a car like the Baldwin Special is a Ford because it is on a Ford chassis. If the builder is known, I'd rather we memorialized his name as the title and the Kurtis contribution as part of the specifications.

You are certainly correct that we see cars with Kurtis chassis with a number of different bodies - often fiberglass. Very seldom, if ever, are they of the quality of the Borelli car!

In the early 1980's a Kurtis chassis with Atlas/Allied "Cisitalia" coupe body and Desoto engine was a frequent competitor at the Monterey Historics. It later got an engine transplant to small block Chevy.