SPORTS CAR CENTRE PRESENTS
Motoring news from around the world - November 2019
A mythical combination: The Pontiac Pegasus has a Ferrari heartbeat
For most of its existence, Pontiac wasn’t known for wild styling exercises and often seemed to live in Chevrolet's shadow. Yet in 1971, Pontiac went off the deep end and added some pasta to its meatball of a Firebird by transplanting a Ferrari V-12 into a Firebird body. This unholy mashup occur requires an explanation, and a long one at that. So let’s dive right in.
This isn’t a production car. The Pegasus was never meant to be more than a one-off design exercise. GM Design Vice President William L. Mitchell, better known as Bill, was in charge of the design concept study utilizing a 1970 Firebird as the base. While it seems a close coincidence that Krazy Glue was introduced the same year as this wild mashup, this car is more than just parts tacked together.
The hand behind the mashup was Jerry Palmer, a stylist at Chevrolet. With a goal of freshening up the Camaro, Palmer created a four-by-two-foot sketch combining the Camaro with a 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa. Bill Mitchell liked the design, but carried it down the hall to Pontiac where it got off the paper and into the metal.
Pontiac further massaged the design, using it as a test bed for design elements that would appear on the Firebird in the coming years. The wraparound rear glass can be seen on 1975 models, and the narrowed tail can be seen on the 1973 LeMans and Grand Am.
But the look is only a small portion of this design car’s story. The Ferrari V-12 tucked under the hood is sourced from a 365 GTB/4 Daytona. The 4.4-liter, four-cam V-12 was rated at 352 horsepower, which compared pretty close to the Ram Air series of engines. That comparison, combined with Bill Mitchell’s love for low effort driving experiences, might explain why the car was initially assembled by mating the Ferrari 12 to a GM Turbo 350 transmission.
The powerband of the peaky V-12 didn’t agree with the slushy three-speed gearbox, and the car went back under the knife and received the five-speed manual, and also get an upgrade to a V-12 sourced from a 365 GTC/4 to ensure the car would drive as Mitchell thought it should. The gauges and exhaust were also pulled from the Ferrari and fitted to this hybrid.
The original engine now resides tucked away in a back corner of the GM Design facility, still sporting its Luigi Chinetti-marked filters and hoses, possibly waiting for a new home, or to return to its original home.
Of the history of this car, by far the most impressive part is that the car was driven regularly by Bill Mitchell. In fact, he had such a strong appreciation for the car that he took it with him upon his retirement. The car was involved in an accident under his tutelage when it hit the bridge at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. Whether the bridge was named Mitchell Bridge before or after the accident is unclear. Pegasus only returned to GM when he passed away in 1988.
The original design featured a mother-lode of gold to accent the deep candy red paint. Interestingly, Ed Wellburn revisited the car and removed much of the gold striping and trim in 2012. While it seems sacrilege to change a historic car like Pegasus, he was head of GM Design at the time and GM Design owned the car, meaning he was well within his rights to make such changes.
Now this wild experiment of a car is a showpiece that travels to shows and events when not tucked in the GM Heritage collection. Awesome cars such as this piece of history rotate through the Hagerty main office in Traverse City, Michigan on a monthly basis, so be sure to drop by and check out what’s new whenever your nearby.
The name's Moss… Stirling Moss
He may not carry a gun in his glove compartment but there are some quirky connections between racing legend Sir Stirling and a certain James Bond.
One might be a fictional hero, the other a living legend, but 007 and motor-racing icon Sir Stirling Moss have much that connects them. Aston Martins, for a start. Moss raced the DBR1, famously winning the World Championship for the marque some 60 years ago this year. And Aston Martin has been James Bond’s primary on-screen car of choice since the release of Goldfinger in 1964, when Sean Connery drove a DB5 – though Bond aficionados would be quick to point out that in Ian Fleming’s 1959 novel of the same name, the secret agent drove an earlier model. According to Ben Macintyre, author of For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond , 007 drove only one Aston Martin in the books themselves: “It was in Goldfinger – a grey DB Mark III from the secret service pool with headlights that change colour, a reinforced bumper, a radio receiver and a Colt .45 in a secret compartment. I don’t think Stirling Moss ever drove with one of those.”
The world’s most famous spy and the racing driver also hail from the same generation. The cinematic Bond is eerily ageless, as he must be in order to keep the franchise in fine fettle. His novelistic year of birth, however, is generally calculated as either 1920 or 1921, while Moss was born in 1929, and turns 90 this month – many happy returns.
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Fame arrived for both the spy and the driver in the early 1950s. The publication of Casino Royale introduced James Bond to the world in 1953. Fleming’s books, of course, became an almost instant success, but it’s a sign of Moss’s celebrity during this era that an unpublished (and never filmed) story by Fleming, Murder on Wheels , centred on a plot by SMERSH, the evil Soviet counterintelligence agency, to bump him off while he raced at the Nürburgring circuit in Germany. In the story, James Bond rode to the rescue, or rather drove to it – having been taught to race by Moss, this time driving a Maserati.
Although the plot never made it to the movie screen – or indeed to the “Jimmy Bond” US TV series that Fleming was working on before the film franchise took off – it became the basis for Anthony Horowitz’s Trigger Mortis , commissioned by the Fleming estate and published in 2015 (with the racing driver renamed as Lancy Smith). But Moss’s biggest 007 moment came in 1967 with his cameo performance in the spoof Peter Sellers Bond movie, Casino Royale , playing a chauffeur. True, his role was brief – “Follow that car!” he was instructed – and uncredited. But he was in good company, as the movie also contains uncredited performances from none other than Peter O’Toole, Anjelica Huston and Geraldine Chaplin.
Macintyre adds that Fleming was himself a car aficionado: “He bought a Daimler with the money from the film rights to Casino Royale and then a vast American car called a Studillac, a Studebaker with a Cadillac engine, which he test-drove at 80mph before being pulled over by traffic cops.” Now that’s something that never happened to Bond – or Moss.
This dual-engine deux chevaux is one dastardly Frenchman
A twin-engine, all-wheel-drive, chopped and channeled Citroën 2CV built by a mad Frenchman might be the wildest vehicle ever to raid the desert. “Whoever heard of a car with two engines?” asked Frank Locker, a retired architect and educational planner. He has a driveway full of rusting Volkswagen buses at the home he built on the coastline of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. But when he stumbled across the 2CV on a French antique parts site, he immediately fell head over heels. “It was as simple as that. I’ve always loved 2CVs, and this was the only way I was ever gonna get one.” And what a 2CV it is.
In the mid-1980s, accomplished race car driver Jack Hanon wanted to tackle the Rallye de l’Atlas, a grueling, 1800-mile trek across Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Strapped for cash, he disappeared into his garage in the Parisian suburb of Gennevilliers. After more than 3000 hours of work, he reemerged with his wild 1785-pound race car.
It has 12 inches of ground clearance, double sets of springs and shocks at each corner, and disc brakes. It is possibly the only race car with three-lug wheels and two engines. The dual Citroën GSA 1300 flat-fours produce a combined 130 horsepower, a 500-percent increase over a period 2CV’s 26. The frame is actually two Citroën Ami frames cut and welded together. For mechanical access, all the fiberglass bodywork fore and aft of the doors can be raised skyward, like ring boxes. Both engines retain separate transmissions, with a shared gear shifter; a crude linkage connects the powerplants.
Hanon’s high-tech method for engaging the rear engine? Shove a metal pin through a pair of eyeholes.
When he’d finished it, Hanon affixed a sign to the back window—”Seeking Sponsors to Participate in the Rallye de l’Atlas”—and then circled the Eiffel Tower until someone noticed. Ultimately, an underwear company rose to the challenge.
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Two decades and nearly half a dozen liveries later, the 2CV wound up in Montreal, owned by Hanon’s widow and entrusted to a caretaker named Jeff Silas. “I called him as soon as I saw it,” Locker said. “It was a Sunday morning, around eight, as early as I could imagine calling someone on a Sunday. I had to be in Burlington, Vermont, on that Tuesday, so it was a no-brainer to say, ‘Hey, Jeff, I’ll be there on Tuesday with my trailer.’ ” Locker then began a loving restoration, returning the 2CV to its original 1985 livery, with the help of Silas, who did the graphics. “It cost more than I expected, but it was worth it.”
At a quarry near his home, with only the front engine engaged, Locker drove the 2CV for just the third time since completion. Running this car without the full fury of both engines would have been a shame, and if you’ve never bump-started a car’s rear engine with its front engine, you haven’t lived.
So Locker got the car up to speed, shifted to neutral, then jammed Hanon’s trick pin into the eyeholes. A series of grinding noises ensued. It took a few attempts, but the rear engine soon fired up. “It was working hard on one,” Locker said, “Two was like night and day.”
Hot, cramped, and scary, Hanon’s mechanical wonder is as otherworldly today as it was when first conceived 35 years ago.
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The first mid-engine Corvette wasn’t a Corvette—it was the Astro II
Corvette has a tumultuous history of ambitious designs and concepts leaking out, only to have the wild design tamped down to a reality not far removed from a previous generation of the legendary sports car. As the Corvette was in its big-block heyday, GM Design was creating the first tease for what would eventually become the 2020 Corvette.
The Astro II is labeled by the GM Heritage Center as a 1968 model, which is right at the tail end of a decade where Corvette legend Zora Arkus-Duntov was set in a path that Corvette would need to become a mid-engine design in order to compete with the emerging high-performance European cars. As lead Corvette engineer in the early 1960s, Duntov led a team to the creation of the Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle (CERV), which happened to have a mid-engine layout with two seats.
The CERV program created two prototype racers, which attempted to lay the groundwork for Duntov’s 1964 push for a 1967 production mid-engine car. He didn’t get his mid-engine in 1967, but his consolation prize was to take the XP-880 to the New York Auto Show. Later dubbed the Astro II, XP-880 ignited a firestorm of rumors and buzz around the Corvette nameplate and a significant change in its design. This firestorm became a smoldering pile of rumors that flared up occasionally, and never seemed to go out completely.
Astro II packs a 427-cube, 400-horsepower big-block just behind the driver’s right shoulder, which seems oddly appropriate. To fit the massive mill in the petite wheelbase, the engine was mounted up to a transaxle rather than a standard transmission and rear axle arrangement. The power flowed through a 1963 Pontiac Tempest two-speed rear end—one notorious for its glass-like strength. This transaxle also necessitated the engine to be reverse-rotation, something not uncommon in the marine industry.
With a redesigned rear axle, the Astro II was put through testing with Duntov behind the wheel. The cast aluminum wheels and four-wheel disc brakes kept the car on the road, and under his careful control, the car achieved a full 1.00 g of lateral grip on a skidpad. For reference, the C7 Grand Sport is capable of 1.18 g. All to say the Astro II held the ground just fine.
So what stalled this radical mid-engine shift for five decades? Chevrolet was having no trouble selling every Corvette right off the assembly line in the late ’60s, so it made no sense to mess with success. The concept worked in drumming up press and conversation about the Corvette nameplate, and that was ultimately good enough. Just a few years later, in 1974, you can see the Astro II’s tail design influence on production (front-engine, obviously) Corvette models.
One-Owner 6k-Mile 1997 Acura Integra Type R Sold For $82,000 US
Specifically, Scottish sportiness: the tartan cloth design. It is often misrepresented as plaid (that’s a mostly American thing), much like Porsche’s legendary patterned seats are not Houndstooth but are, in fact, Pepita or Shepherd’s Check. Adding to the confusion, the GTI tartan pattern is now referred to as “Clark Plaid.” Sigh. Regardless, Liljequist’s decision to give the GTI tartan-covered seats was a monumental one in that it makes the GTI—which debuted in 1976—easy to distinguish from an original Golf, just as she had intended.
The GTI’s golf-ball gear knob, on the other hand, was a bit of a fluke.
“That was a completely spontaneous idea,” Liljequist says. “I just expressed my sporting and golf associations out loud: ‘How about a golf ball as the gear knob?’”
Although Liljequist personally loved black-and-white patterns, she used plenty of color in her 30-year career at Volkswagen, and she influenced some of VW’s most iconic paint hues, trim, and interior during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.
In 1987, four years before she retired, Liljequist helped create the limited-edition Etienne Aigner Mk1 Golf Cabriolet, which was influenced by the luxury maker of handbags, luggage, and leather accessories. During the design process, she discovered an iridescent pearl color that she applied to the car surface by using a transparent foil. Liljuquist’s research and testing of paint and coloring may have hastened the evolution of today’s metallic automotive paint, but let’s face it, she’s better known for what she did to the inside of the Golf GTI than the outside. Thanks to her bold upholstery choice the car will be forever plaid. Or is it forever tartan?
Targa Newfoundland Saved
After the cancellation of this year's event and the uncertainty if this very unique event would continue to be hold, there is positive news the organisation is bought up by an corporation out of Toronto and there is already an Targa planned for the year 2020.
This also good news for our Edmonton based TVR Classic Race Team, that after the the cancellation of the Targa, stopped all activities in the building of there TVR 3000M, but after the positive news about the Targa, the build of the car is again picked up and there will be soon a Facebook page opened and the hunt for sponsors is re-opened.
We will report more about this in our next news letter.
Merry Christmas
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