Not so lucky Shamrock
Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2013 5:06 pmOk, let's set this up.
You've got an American business magnete with a plan - to mass-produce a 2-door sports model, using tried & tested mechanicals and innovative bodywork techniques. And he's going to build it in Ireland.
Yeah, so this is gonna be about aluminium, PRV engines, drug money and shady deals. Whatevs.
RONG!
2 and a bit decades before John Z Delorean managed to make a complete hash of things, William Curtis was busy getting it all wrong.
The plan was, like John Z's sound enough. Make a car that would sell well in the wealthy american markets but which could be produced cheaply in Ireland. The initial plan was to sell in excess of 10,000 units of their luxury sports coupe every year. The car could have a removable hardtop meaning it could be used both as a FHC or open, and would be a rust-resistant glassfibre body on a traditional chassis.
Sounds like a pretty good formula, right?
Well as per all of our favourite 50's vehicle ventures, they managed to completely cock up the execution of the thing.
Engine & running gear were sourced from a Morris Oxford, and the 1500 B-series was not exactly endowed with spritely performance. Add to that design flaws such as jet-age faired bodywork that meant you couldn't change a wheel without major surgery and the gaps in the logic begin to show.
Oh and just one more teensy problem... it was utterly, unmeasurably fuck-ugly....
Unsurprisingly, just ten cars were made before they whole shebang went tits up.
Amazingly, of those ten cars, eight still survive.
You've got an American business magnete with a plan - to mass-produce a 2-door sports model, using tried & tested mechanicals and innovative bodywork techniques. And he's going to build it in Ireland.
Yeah, so this is gonna be about aluminium, PRV engines, drug money and shady deals. Whatevs.
RONG!
2 and a bit decades before John Z Delorean managed to make a complete hash of things, William Curtis was busy getting it all wrong.
The plan was, like John Z's sound enough. Make a car that would sell well in the wealthy american markets but which could be produced cheaply in Ireland. The initial plan was to sell in excess of 10,000 units of their luxury sports coupe every year. The car could have a removable hardtop meaning it could be used both as a FHC or open, and would be a rust-resistant glassfibre body on a traditional chassis.
Sounds like a pretty good formula, right?
Well as per all of our favourite 50's vehicle ventures, they managed to completely cock up the execution of the thing.
Engine & running gear were sourced from a Morris Oxford, and the 1500 B-series was not exactly endowed with spritely performance. Add to that design flaws such as jet-age faired bodywork that meant you couldn't change a wheel without major surgery and the gaps in the logic begin to show.
Oh and just one more teensy problem... it was utterly, unmeasurably fuck-ugly....
Unsurprisingly, just ten cars were made before they whole shebang went tits up.
Amazingly, of those ten cars, eight still survive.
