Tag: Prototype

GN34: The fastest Ford the world never saw – Steve Saxty @Hagerty

GN34: The fastest Ford the world never saw – Steve Saxty @Hagerty

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It was billed as Ford vs Ferrari: Round Two, with a new Detroit supercar to take on Maranello’s finest. So what happened to GN34, the secret prototype that could have wowed the world? Steve Saxty, a former Ford product designer and author of Secret Fords, takes you inside the hidden world of the canceled supercar.

The Ford GT40 might have crushed Ferrari on the track in the Sixties, but twenty years later Ferrari and Porsche were winning the sales race for highly profitable sports cars—and Ford had no answer.

Or at least, that was the perceived wisdom. Behind the scenes at Ford, a crack team of product planners and engineers were putting their heads together in response to growing numbers of buyers with money to burn on sports cars and luxury models, which were bursting with profit if you played your cards right.

Since the start of the Eighties, Ford had been pondering how it could enter the sports car market with a Ferrari rival costing Corvette money. By the end of October 1983, some of the brightest brains in the company had pulled together a strategic paper that set out the case for a world-class supercar and tackled the thorny issue of how to circumvent the company’s corporate culture that was tuned to conceptualizing and building mass market, everyday cars. At the time, even the Mustang was limping along on just four cylinders.

The Detroit product planners ran the numbers; there was money to be made and an obvious place to start looking for it. They reached out to Ford’s Special Vehicle Operations group (SVO), the performance division ultimately responsible for the turbocharged Mustang SVO. (The department’s equivalent in the U.K. was the British Special Vehicle Engineering group that created the Capri Injection and Sierra Cosworth.) SVO consisted of a 30-strong team of engineers, planners and marketers led by Mike Kranefuss, Ford’s competitions manager who had successfully campaigned the Cologne Capris against the BMW Batmobiles a few years before moving stateside.

Kranefuss was a racer through and through, unused to making road cars, but after his young team created the highly regarded Mustang SVO, it was clear that they could move far faster than Ford’s huge, but lumbering, engineering team. SVO were perfect for the job; an internationally-minded group of Ford mavericks familiar with the external resources necessary to assemble a Ferrari rival sold at a Corvette or Porsche 944 price.

Kranefuss’s 30-strong team, aided by its 46-year-old Chief Engineer Glen Lyall and abetted by 36-year-old Planning/Program Manager Ronald Muccioli leapt at the chance. “For us it was more than a job and another product, it was our dream.” SVO took on the supercar project, now dubbed GN34.

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The Hunt for Little Red – BARRETT-JACKSON

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It was assumed lost for over 50 years, another prototype destined for the crusher. Except this one wasn’t. Witness the incredible story of Barrett-Jackson CEO and Chairman Craig Jackson’s personal quest to find and restore the mythical father of the Mustang California Special, the 1967 Shelby GT500 Prototype (EXP 500) known as “Little Red.” Discovered sitting in a Texas field, Little Red was Carroll Shelby’s way of getting the better of Ferrari’s road cars and the first of many incredible innovations. Get ready for the journey – exploring the restoration for one of the rarest cars on Earth!

More here on Barrett Jackson

Was Chevy’s rear-engine XP-819 really a contender for the Corvette badge, or was it something else entirely – Jim Koscs @Hemmings

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One word might best sum up the arrival of the 2020 Corvette, the first mid-engine model in the Chevy sports car’s nearly 70-year history: finally! Mid-engine Corvettes had been teased as engineering cars, prototypes and concepts for more than 50 of those years. If your car magazine collection stretches back to the late 1960s, you likely have issues promising “the next Corvette” as a mid-engine car. Since then, there have been six generations of front-engine Corvettes and, as social scientists could point out, two generations of humans.
The half-century lineage of mid-engine Corvette teasers was on display at this year’s Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance in March. Nine of those cars were gathered in the same place for the first time ever, including Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle I (CERV I), CERV II, GS-II, CERV III, XP-819, XP-895, XP-987 rotary Corvette, the Aerovette and the Corvette Indy.
Among the group, and even among rotary-engine ‘Vettes, the Chevrolet Engineering XP-819 had long seemed to be an outlier due to its rear-mounted, not mid-mounted, V-8. The XP-819’s recently completed restoration by Corvette Repair in Valley Stream, New York, has confirmed, however, that this car was a critical link in the Corvette’s evolutionary chain. Even if testing proved the rear-engine location to be unworkable, the XP-819’s legacy could be found in other engineering, design and safety ideas applied in Corvettes stretching into the 1990s.
This important, intriguing engineering car would have disappeared for good but for the efforts of several passionate Corvette enthusiasts since the 1970s. The restoration itself could better be described as a heroic rescue-and-rebuild, such was the XP-819’s severe state of disrepair and deterioration. “Of all the cars we’ve ever done, this was the most difficult and the most challenging,” says Kevin Mackay, owner of Corvette Repair. The shop is renowned for restoring historic Corvette racecars and ultra-rare production models.

Twenty years before the FCA-PSA merger, Chrysler tried to build its own Citroen 2CV -Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Long before anybody’s wildest imaginations could have conceived of Chrysler (not to mention Dodge and Jeep) becoming part of a multi-national carmaking company that included some storied Gallic brands, perhaps one of the most important Chrysler concept vehicles of the Nineties intentionally evoked the design and feel of one of the most important Citroens of all time.

At first glance, the CCV, introduced at Frankfurt in December 1997, looks like little more than another pre-millennium exercise in retro looks, albeit one that aped a popular car that Chrysler had nothing to do with. By all accounts, Bryan Nesbitt intentionally designed the CCV as an homage to the “Tin Snail” and the name (two Cs and a V), though deployed as an acronym (Composite Concept Vehicle), could hardly be mistaken as anything other than an evocation of the Citroen 2CV.

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This is the only rotary-powered Mustang ever built – Richard Lentinello @Hemmings

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Rotary Pony

This is the only rotary-powered Mustang ever built

If there was any engineer who had an out-of-the-box mindset, Felix Wankel would be king of the pioneering thought process. His rotary engine concept, based on three-sided rotors spinning on a single shaft, was truly innovative, as it used 98 percent fewer moving components than conventional OHV or OHC combustion engines. Its simplicity of function is truly astounding.

The fan shroud is almost as long as the rotary engine itself, and sits well back in the chassis. Photo credit: Richard Lentinello

Wankel, an engineer in Germany, designed his rotary engine back in the 1920s, receiving a patent in 1929, but it wasn’t until he was employed at the German car company NSU that his engine was developed. In the ensuing years, NSU licensed the Wankel engine design to various car companies around the world, including AMC, Mercedes-Benz, Citroen, General Motors, Nissan, Suzuki, and Toyota, yet it was Mazda that made the Wankel engine a household name.

This is the only rotary-powered Mustang ever built

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Related – A mid-engine Corvette with rotary power – the 1973 XP-897 GT concept

After years of searching, Craig Jackson unearths the ‘Li’l Red’ Shelby prototype – Kurt Ernst @Hemmings

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Shelby American built two notchback Mustang GT500 prototypes, but one — a 1967 known as “Li’l Red” — was reportedly sent to the crusher when its days as a test mule were over. For decades, this was generally accepted as fact, but not by everyone. In an announcement made at a Shelby American dinner during last week’s Woodward Dream Cruise, auction magnate Craig Jackson stunned the room by announcing that Li’l Red had been found on a Texas ranch, and over the coming months the story of its history and rebirth will be shared online.

Read the rest of Kurt’s article here 

You can see the progress on this car and the other prototypes here

The First Camaro – “The 6-Cylinder Detroit Convention Unveil Car” VIN N100001

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If you read my last post about the Norwood assembly plant this will also interest you.

The First Camaro

This is the story of the first pilot prototype Camaro built at Norwood, even before it was actually named “Camaro” read about the restoration and history of the car here

Also here is a link to a recent episode of Hemming’s Classic Car Radio where you can hear from the owners of the car and Philip Borris the author of the “Echo’s of Norwood” book

BangShift.com Random Car Review – The Bizarre 1969 Pontiac-Farago CF 428 – Pontiac Grand Prix Meets Italian Coachbuilding!

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Found this one on BangShift, got to say I’m a sucker for prototypes but I’ve never seen this one before. Even if you didn’t know you can kind of see the Delorean DNA?

Read about it here article by Brian McTaggart