Despite all of the crap we give Lee Iacocca’s Chrysler Corporation of the eighties, they tended to follow their own path with surprising success. General Motors killed the convertible in 1976, but Chrysler started the ragtop revival in 1982 and ruined the value of all of those Eldorado drop tops that people had bought and kept in mothballs. Ford famously rejected the compact minivan that Iacocca championed when he was president of that company: guess who ended up creating and dominating the segment that should have been the Blue Oval’s?
There is, however, one automotive trend that Chrysler didn’t create and refused to follow. Remember the affordable mid-engine boomlet of the 80s? Sure, we had the European Fiat X1/9s and Porsche 914s in the seventies, but who could have guessed that the Big Guys for America and Japan would offer engine-behind-the-seats motorcars to the masses in the Decade of Decadence?
Chrysler certainly showed us a stunning example of what could have been possible with something called the M4S, but the concept never went anywhere beyond the racetrack and silver screen. The sad thing is, had it been produced, the M4S might have been better than any of the competitors it would have faced – dare I say it, even some Italian exotics.
Could the company that built the lowly Dodge Aries really have made such a world-beater in the mid-80s era? I definitely see a way, but before we get to that, let’s consider the midship sports machines from the mainstream brands that actually did make it to showrooms, or at least got close to production.
The Fiero: Commuter Car My Ass
I would imagine that if the bean counters had their way, it’s quite likely that the Pontiac Fiero never would have existed.
The champions of the Fiero pushed the concept through GM’s bureaucracy by selling it to top brass as an economical two-seat “commuter car” in the same way that you might try to justify a Honda CBR Fireblade to your spouse as an economical way to get to work.
The creators knew all along that it was going to be a sports car; you might scoff at its humble beginnings in late 1983 with a Chevette front suspension and X-Car Iron Duke drivetrain shoved in back, but the fact that they got the thing to exist in the first place is practically miraculous.
Plans were already afoot to make this attractive wedgelette into the legitimate sports car that it could be (and all too briefly was, see the Fiero GT below) before the upstairs offices finally put an end to the Fiero in 1988. The Fiero ends up on a lot of “Greatest Automotive Failures” lists, which seems a bit odd for a mid-engined car that sold over 300,000 copies in five years – that has to be a record, right?
As a bonus with the Fiero, GM was able to experiment with things like their innovative plastic body panel system on this (for GM) low-production car. If that’s a failure, I want to see a lot more failures just like it, thank you.
The best part about the Fiero was the way in which it seemed to inspire others to get into the mid-engined sports car game as well, or at least think about dipping a toe in the water.
Mister Two And Ford Too
If GM could do it, then the Japanese equivalent of the giant American firm could certainly offer a fun midship coupe as well. By most any measure, the twin-cam powered AW11 Toyota MR2 was a far superior car to the Fiero, with one rather glaring exception. Comments I remember on the styling ranged from the polite (“its’s a bit boxy and awkward”) to downright mean (“it looks like you took the handle off off a lawn mower and scaled the thing up to car-sized.”). Regardless, like the Fiero, it was an unexpected malaise-era bright spot for enthusiasts on a budget.
What about the other members of the American Big Three? Ford came remarkably close to making a mid-engine machine, one that in many ways would have been a level or three above the Fiero. In 1983, Ford started working on what was internally called the GN34, a mid-engined car with the goal of offering Ferrari-level performance at the price of a Corvette or a Porsche 944. The ingredients were certainly there for Ford Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) to have a winner. A DOHC V6 powerplant from Yamaha was matched with a race-car-like chassis that was to have adjustable damping from an outside consultant in the UK, providing unheard-of-for-a-supercar comfort with no compromise in handling.
For styling, surprisingly Ford turned to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Ital Design who had already been working on a concept car called the Maya that was midship-motored exotic like Ford was looking for.
The only issue Ford execs had was that they thought the Maya looked too much like the Lotus Etna concept that Ital was working on then as well, so Giugiaro needed to tweak the design to give it a different feel. A running prototype was ultimately constructed in late 1984.
Wait, didn’t Ford have an internal styling department, as well as an overseas Italian team at Ghia? Well, yes, and they were less than thrilled with Ital getting the only shot at a once-in-a-lifetime project. Both teams created their own concepts (which I strongly suggested that you see and read far more about in Steve Saxty’s excellent can’t-put-it-down book Secret Fords Volume II) which ultimately were pursued in what would be the final design (which, to my eye at least, had fussier detailing and wasn’t an improvement over the Ital original).
What happened? Ford was rather forward-thinking in the eighties, and this view of the future saw the sport utility vehicle. Development dollars to bring the GN34 to life were seen as better spent on the Ford Explorer program; a smart business move in anyone’s book but one that denied us enthusiasts of a sort of street worthy GT40 for Corvette money. Interestingly, Lotus didn’t actually produce Ital’s Etna concept anyway, and the Yamaha V6 lived on in the legendary Taurus SHO (side note: engine was actually intended to go into that large sedan before the GN34, and stories we’ve heard of the SHO being an 11th hour attempt to use up already-purchased motors for the cancelled sports car are simply not true).
Chrysler didn’t seem to get as far down the path as Ford on the mid-engine proto exotic front, but they sure showed us a rather high-profile hint at what they could have done.
Two And A Half Identities
Starting in the early eighties, manufacturers provided a wild array of pace cars for the PPG IndyCar series; you can see the lot here and I’d recommend taking a look since this collection of cars that has to be seen to be believed. Some manufacturers just phoned it in with custom painted stock vehicles, but others did million-dollar custom creations. You want insane? How about a dual cowl phaeton Cadillac Cimarron:
What about a doorstop-shaped Renault R5 Turbo, the aero-bubble Buick Wildcat or a rebodied Skyhawk with the roof chopped off? You really need to see this PPG Pace Car website:
Developed back in 1981 with help from outside consultant Specialized Vehicles, the Dodge M4S was one of the start-from-scratch PPG pace car proposals that was in part a platform to showcase the capabilities of Chrysler’s 2.2 liter turbocharged four-cylinder.
Of course, the Cosworth-developed engine in the M4S was a far cry from what you might find in a turbo Caravan, to say the least. Twin camshafts acted on sixteen valves, fed by the forced induction of not one but two Garrett turbochargers to reportedly produce over 440 horsepower and a zero-to-sixty time of well under five seconds.
The Bob Ackerman-designed shape with a cab-forward look and recessed “loop” spoiler in back. The shape boasted a .236 drag coefficient which contributed to the tested 194.8 MPH top speed. Reportedly four to six examples were constructed between 1981 and 1987. You can read more about the development from Ackerman himself here. My favorite part of his story is of a cigar-smoking Lee Iacocca looking at the mauve-colored rims and saying “I’ll be damned – almost 200 miles an hour on pink wheels!”
In addition to capturing the imagination of enthusiasts with its pace car appearance, the M4S found an audience in the most literal sense of the word in 1986 when Charlie Sheen (pre-sitcom, pre-tiger-blood) exploded across the silver screen as a vengeful ghost piloting an M4S murder-machine in the gleefully bonkers SF-action mashup, The Wraith. In the film, a gang of murderous car thieves is hunted by the “Turbo Interceptor,” a seemingly indestructible, now-black-painted version of the root-beer-brown car you saw pacing the field at the racetrack. As dumb as the movie was, the car was both sinister and redeeming in its role – you couldn’t pay for a better public image than that. The chase scenes may haver been CHiPs-level, but you’d left the theater wanting that car. “A cosmic spirit given another chance” is the line from the cheezy trailer, which surprisingly seems an apropos description for a revival of a legitimate Chrysler performance car.
Despite the car being well received and also appearing at auto shows on the Dodge stand, the M4S wasn’t ever seriously considered for production. To me, this would have been just the car this number-three-and-trying-harder company could have used to tell the world that Chrysler had indeed survived and was now ready to thrive.
With James Earl Jones Voicing The Ads, Right?
Exotic as it might have seemed at the time, there’s no reason that the M4S couldn’t have been a production car in the same vein as the late Fiero: start with a run-of-the-mill front-wheel-powering drivetrain that you massage and put in the back of the car, add a custom-developed front suspension and you’ve got a sports car. Let’s revive the Demon name to conjure up the sinister image of the M4S from that movie with the Platoon star. Here’s the original (or at least an accurate tribute example for sale not long ago):
Naturally, there are things that would need to change a bit before you’d see it on a Dodge dealer’s showroom floor, and a few things have bothered me since I first saw the M4S in 1986. Like many of these ultra-aero cars, we’d have to chop a bit off of the extended XJ220-like back, and the giant void area below the tail would need to fill in with a bumper/lower diffuser. For some reason, the nose on the original appears to be dropping a bit from the character line that runs down the side of the car. I’ve raised it slightly and even increased the length on the nose very slightly (but the car is still shorter than the original M4S). I fully understand that a short, rounded front and super long tail is ideal for aero but it looks a bit odd on a street car and isn’t ideal for something you might need to parallel park, as well as stuff a radiator in the nose of.
Pop-up lights on the Demon are complemented by driving lights below in the position of what was the headlights on the show car, recessing the lights slightly being necessary for the five-mile-per-hour bumpers. Flash-to-pass slots can live in the character line that terminates at the nose. Wheel arches are more defined than on the concept, which radiused inwards and never looked right. “Lambo doors” remain, but with fully lowering glass to allow for an optional removable roof panel. The massive side intakes have been made a bit more shallow and mirrored exhaust vents on the “C” pillars help to break up that giant breadvan-like visual mass.
Yes, I made the wheels dark grey instead of the mauve color. Sure, kind of unfair of Iacocca to make fun of them but sadly the dude KNEW what would sell cars more than almost anyone else on earth, so I have to take his advice.
There’s no hint of a rear bumper on the M4S, though admittedly none of the examples made were ever made for anything more than a racetrack or a movie prop, which would explain things like the ill-fitting wheels and unfinished detailing.
We’ll add a structure below the tapering tail, which always screamed “kit car” to me in the first place. Now we have a place for the license plate and backup lights as well, and in black it doesn’t visually alter the lines of the unchanged body-colored parts above. If the opening in the loop on the spoiler seems a bit smaller, that’s because I raised the sheet metal below it a bit to give more trunk space.
The interior of the M4S was more resolved than you might imagine, but I had to add some more tricks to it.
In that recessed area in front of the steering wheel, there’s now a pod that moves with the adjustable height steering wheel; a giant analog tach shares the space with a digital speedometer and a turbo boost gauge. Smaller graphic digital gauges with a gas gauge to the left and others to the right flank the wheel. Digital displays with buttons from a LeBaron for the trip computer are complemented by a very techy-looking car schematic. A strip of line-of-sight warning lights similar to the concept car remains.
A lot of Mopar parts bin items, but below the protruding part of the dash I’ve added some tough industrial-looking toggle switches for a kind of aircraft cockpit or GT40 race car look. A pistol-grip shifter is a must.
Under the hood lies the radiator, space saver spare, battery, and washer bottle – you can see the exhaust vent on the hood to allow airflow out of the radiator. The engine would sit ahead of that small rear trunk, and it would be a possibly-industry-first production twin-turbocharged 2.2 four. Iacocca would work with his buddy Alejandro’s DeTomaso (then owner of Maserati) to develop a twin-cam head and a fuel injection system to in effect create a detuned version of the M4S motor that would still hopefully pump out well over 300 horsepower. I can see a huge falling out between the two ultra-alpha-male main players when Lee would want to put large DODGE POWERED BY MASERATI logos on the Demon and DeTomaso wondered why he wasn’t more instrumental in making the Demon into a latter-day Maserati Bora instead.
Likely heavier than the M4S as a production car, the Demon would still likely be able to match the Corvette performance numbers but with even better mid-engined handling; a Dodge of all things with Ferrari-level acceleration, top speed, and road manners for less money.
I Wish This Had Appeared On Miami Vice Instead Of Lee Iacocca
Why a Dodge proto-supercar? Chrysler’s image really needed this in the eighties. The Imperial didn’t succeed in giving Iacocca the flagship he wanted, and even though the K-Car-based Daytona Turbo Z coupe was a lot better than it often got credit for, with front-wheel drive it was never going to fully be embraced as a Camaro or Mustang challenger. Far worse than that, when the real-life collaboration between Chrysler and Maserati saw the light of day (the Chrysler TC by Maserati) it was a huge disappointment, to say the least. Ultimately, Chrysler didn’t have a real Corvette-level sports car until the Viper, which was highly questionable as a real, resolved, useable daily driver until later models (you’ll recall the debut model’s V10 sounded like a milk truck, it had no exterior door handles, and the car wore a toupee top). For the money spent on developing the TC and Viper alone, I have to wonder if a ‘Vette-fighting mid-engine, neo-exotic forty years before the C8 would have been a better investment.
Still, you ask, could a 2.2 liter Chrysler four-powered sports car really have been a winner? One such vehicle literally was: Warren Mosler’s Consulier GTP put a turbocharged motor from the vaunted Omni GLH in the middle of his race-engineered ultra-lightweight (and painfully awkward looking) coupe (with El Camino taillights no less). Mosler produced a run of only around sixty to a hundred cars, and it won so often in the IMSA racing series that it was saddled with a 300-pound weight penalty before ultimately getting banned. The funky Consulier beat sports car royalty like Boris Said’s twin-turbo Corvette and even the legendary 911 of Hurley Haywood before getting told to never come back (Brock Yates also banned it from his One Lap Of America race after it dominated).
Take a look at the video below to learn more from our friends in Owings Mills, Maryland:
Our Dodge Demon likely wouldn’t have come close to the Consulier’s low weight and stiffness but Warren Mosler’s experiment proved that, like Wu-Tang Clan, a K-powered car ain’t nothing to fuck with.
People often scoffed at Lee Iacocca’s “if you can find a better car, buy it” challenge with his eighties cars, or Darth Vader saying “the competition was good; we had to be better.” This twin-turbocharged Dodge Demon likely would have made people think twice before laughing at those lines.
A Daydreaming Designer Imagines An AMC Sports Car Based On The Look Of The Pacer – The Autopian
Let’s Figure Out The Best ‘Worst Car’ From Those Stupid Lists Of ‘Worst Cars’ – The Autopian
“Too bad about the ‘Cuda, Skank. It was a tits car.”
“As dumb as the movie was…”
How DARE you sir!
The M4S is beautiful, the array of random cars is great, the cast is quite good (Sherilyn Fenn, Charlie Sheen, Randy Quaid, Clint Howard, and a low-rent Patrick Swayze – sorry Mr. Cassavetes) and the soundtrack is an absolute 80s home run.
I may be biased though, my username evolved from this movie =D
Seriously though, If the M4S existed as a production vehicle, there’s a fair chance I would own one.
Admittedly, “The Wraith” is a guilty pleasure movie for me. It’s awful, and I love it. I’ve always wondered why no diecast company ever made the M4S. Hot Wheels even made the pacecar Buick Wildcat (though “Demolition Man” was a bigger blockbuster). This redesign is great, and the performance would’ve made the alternate reality Probe (Mustang?) seem pedestrian in comparison.
I forgot that movie was Charlie Sheen, but I remembered Sherilyn Fenn.
For some reason in the early 1990’s when I had Driver’s Education in high school the teacher would wheel in a CRT TV and VCR cart and play The Wraith along with Red Asphalt 1-3. I suspect those were days when he was hung over and didn’t feel like dealing with teenagers. The district had just ended behind the wheel training that year. My friends who were a year ahead said that the training sessions would begin with a drive to McDonald’s first thing in the morning so the (presumably hungover) teacher could get coffee and a McMuffin.
I had an eerily similar experience in the same timeframe haha
I am assuming that the novel length story of the AMX/3 was left out because it’s getting an article of its own correct?
I’d love a Consulier , I can barely afford the soap.
No, because I forgot since it was ten years before. But now I know.
Don’t forget the AMX GT, the best concept that AMC never produced, but could be made today with largely existing sheet metal. I want to build one so bad.
As the car was, with the originally proposed body and the 4-cylinder turbo, it got 30 mpg highway. For the time period and performance this car had, this efficiency was about double its competition. The low drag body is mostly the culprit. Its efficiency exceeded that of many economy-oriented American-made shitboxes.
Keep the longtail, don’t add the rear scoops, and go to the smaller rear vents in the doors(or better yet, NACA ducts). The front changes are good.
Make it nice and slippery, and then have the option of a Viper V10 and longer-legged final drive shoved in it at some point, to keep most of the highway fuel economy of the 4-cylinder, BUT with the potential to increase that top speed to over 220 mph while offering the delightfully brutal torque of the Viper…
This would then pave the way for an EV version in the 1990s, that using NiMH batteries, could get 150+ miles range at 70 mph while weighing around 3,000 lbs.
Thanks, Toecutter!
was this just a coincidence with the Jay Leno Garage youtube this week?
https://youtu.be/93nFkNBbgaI?feature=shared
Yes! I did a search while working on this and was surprised to see that come up and figured the timing would be perfect!
Having had a (older) Honda Fireblade as a commuter vehicle: it was a solid reliable motorcycle.
I do lament not having got the RC51 parked next to it at the time, but the Fireblade served me well for many many years.
I can’t wait for your take on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
*looks at his turd firebird then looks at the wraith mobile* those wheels look oddly familiar
they do look like GTA wheels, and if you do in fact have a GTA it isn’t ever a turd regardless of the condition. Turds are born (2004 Malibu, for example) not made.
Haha I got a 89 Formula (as shown in profile pic) but I have put reproduction 17×9 GTA wheels on it original GTA wheels were 16×8 so it is nice to be able to fit beefier tires on it. Also I love the mesh wheels they are awesome.
Watch the Jay Leno Garage episode this week, Jeff Dunham and Jay talked over Jeff’s “restomod”.. Apparently the wheels are from Chrysler minivans.
“As dumb as the movie was, the car was both sinister and redeeming in its role – you couldn’t pay for a better public image than that.”
Dumb it was. My favorite part was installing an engine zapper to fry the engine should the driver try to flee.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Y7WnKKTIs
The hood is raised to reveal the engine bathed in red light and covered in electrical arcs. We were supposed to see it as “spooky” or something but all I saw was a shitty engine with faulty wiring and a overheating catalytic converter (or a small fire) under it.
The engine scene was pretty standard 80s fare, similar to when Sigourney opens her fridge in Ghostbusters. It even has a nearly identical hair-blowback moment, besides the swirling effects and lightning.
Also, the car magically reforms after brutal crashes. It’s not hard to suspend disbelief when the entire premise is just fun nonsense.
Anyone else read ‘Cimarron CART PIG Trackside Vehicle’?
just me? damnit
Anyway, I love the interior: it doesn’t get any more ‘80s than that. Kinda reminds me of my Sapporo or XT: all I need is a TURBO/// sticker and I’m good 🙂
Right? I miss how simply cool turbos were back then. Now, it’s usually meh, but back then, anything and everything, even if it wasn’t in fact turbocharged, seemed to have turbo in the name or on the product. It’s too bad EVs now can’t use the similar “HIGH VOLTAGE” as that would just freak everyone out.
Yep. Back in those big (or, just extant) hair days, even my hairdryer had a turbo sticker on it!
Our vacuum had a turbo decal on it, in outline-y lettering to set it off!
Wow, I haven’t given this thing a thought since probably the early 90s when a guy in my small town tried to make his own “Wraith” with plywood and fiberglass on a VW Beetle chassis. He got the general shape close, but it otherwise looked like crap and nobody could make sense of why he did that for a car from such a crummy movie.
The evolution you’ve done here Bishop definitely would have made for an interesting car had Chrysler done more with it.
But Iacocca on Miami Vice was just so wonderfully ’80s!
Everyone was there at one point or another it seemed – Sheena Easton as Crockett’s of-course-doomed love, both Genesis’ Phil Collins and Watergate convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy in bonkers reoccurring roles, and the whole thing culminating in my mind with then-VP George HW Bush appearing in an episode.
I rewatched that series a few years back and it still stands up today as an excellent buddy cop / crime drama show, at least the first few seasons do. After they blew up the Daytona and moved Crockett into the Testarossa things started to get weird, like that James Brown episode. The coolest part watching it now though is seeing people who are huge stars these days being introduced as guest stars on MV episodes.
Early episodes were much better. I especially liked how they often ended badly (the guy gets away, or the Feds let him go since he’s on their payroll, etc.)
Calderone!!!
https://youtu.be/Jw135y5IL7c
Totally agree. It can’t be overstated how influential the early seasons were on tv generally – the pilot alone practically invented the now-standard montage-set-to-music scene.
But yeah re the later stuff, and the James Brown episode totally fulfils the seemingly mandatory ’80s tv trope of an eerie supernatural episode (in addition to other ’80s tropes like the kids and their drugs, defecting Soviets, and joining a pro sports team).
The music was a key part of that series from the beginning and it really showed. Someone made a playlist on Spotify of every song in every MV episode and I must have worn that thing out over the years because it’s missing now 🙁 To this day any time I hear smooth jazz playing I assume Tubbs is getting lucky somewhere.
Or if it’s an insistent synth, Lt. Castillo is sitting in his office late at night intently reviewing files.
I still have my cassette copy of Jan Hammer’s Beyond Television (which interestingly is just all Miami Vice music). It lives in my Mustang as she has the only cassette player I still own!
Olmos was apparently insistent that his character’s desk remain always clean. That and the black suit just added an air of mystery.
Glass bricks are considered “dated” now but when we remodeled our shower 2 years ago I insisted on a wall of them just like Lt Castillo had behind his desk! I have no regrets.
Not necessarily! There was an article in the news just recently about how they’re seeing a comeback, given how practical they are.
For me, when I see them, I always think of Will Graham’s desperate rescue of the Tooth Fairy’s next victim, set to Iron Butterfly’s Innagaddadavita.
Not to mention his dislike of Don Johnson (which in fairness, we all kinda did – he was a little insufferable then) kept the characters’ engagement so frosty and spare, which really increased the dramatic feel.
My favourite is Steve Buscemi and Penn Jilette as out of town coke dealers.
I liked Ted Nugent’s episode and thought Phil Collins made an great con artist.
Or that doll killer episode that was hilariously ’80s. But, yeah, I saw it a few years back, too and was amazed at how well it holds up, especially compared to contemporaries (holy Athena, I tried watching A-Team and ended the suffering after 20 long minutes). It was one of the earliest shows to have longer term arcs and I loved the idea of playing dark noir against neon and pastel. I’d say it’s something that would be great to be remade without the limitations of network programming and expectations in the ’80s, but I don’t think it would be done correctly (the movie was OK, but seemed to miss what made Miami Vice so memorable and it could have been called anything else. Perhaps putting it in contemporary times was the biggest mistake—the ’80s were an essential character in the story along with the soundtrack.)
The biggest problem with the movie wasn’t that they updated the setting, changed the music, or the actors.. the biggest problem was that they changed the car. You never change the car!!!!
Seriously, new Dukes movie was silly but not too bad, because they kept the car. Meanwhile all the Knight Rider reboots have been lukewarm flops because they keep changing the car. The Ghostbusters reboots are another example. The 2016 remake with the SNL cast fizzled because they tried to update the Ecto1. The 2021 version did much better, in my opinion, because they returned to the original Ecto1.
I can’t argue against that.
Just saw the latest Ghostbusters movie, though, and Ecto 1 was the best thing about it. I didn’t see the previous one, but I don’t think I missed something that would have made this one better. Another modern remake that missed what made the original great, though in that particular case, I think it was just lightning in a bottle.
I liked Afterlife better than the Frozen one. I thought it was a well executed tribute to Egon’s character.
I’ll check it out if I see it pop up on streaming.
Another vote for Afterlife here. Some of the plot makes little sense, but the bones are good and it has the right feel to it.
They do a great job integrating the old crew.
Frozen Empire has the old people doing too much. A little bit of cameo goes a long way IMO.
“2016 remake with the SNL cast fizzled because they tried to update the Ecto1.”
I think this is car bias showing itself here.
The Ecto 1 was the least of their problems, though I agree with you there.
1) The movie wasn’t that good
2) A fair portion of the country saw it as woke and wouldn’t have enjoyed it even if it was good.
DT is reading this thread wondering what the hell all of you, Bishop included, are talking about.
#Facts
This sounds like it comes from experience, Mrs The Bishop didn’t fall for it I guess?
That said, I loved The Wraith as a kid and still rewatch it every now and then. It was a year or two old by the time I got to watch it on VHS and my mom had just bought her ’87 Chrysler Conquest TSi and even though that’s a Mitz it had the same badge as the Turbo Interceptor and my friends and I all thought that was pretty cool. Your rendering actually looks better than the concept/move car and I would have LOVED to see these on the street.
Fireblade is better for the earth, less carbon footprint, and it must get well over 30 MPG if you take it easy on the throttle.
I regularly got 40+mpg on my CB700SC but Mrs 10001010 never liked it and was secretly happy when it broke its alternator/starter chain 6 years ago and began its new life as a towel rack in the garage :-/
That Consulier GTP was always such an interesting car, but just so… ugly. And apparently Warren Mosler took GREAT offense at anyone who suggested any changes be made. At least, that’s my memory from various articles on it.
Supposedly the shape was in part determined by making it strong enough, and able to be made by the capabilities that he had (as in no multi-million dollar pressed and such).
The bigger thing was his $100,000 or so challenge to beat the car at the track, which Car and Driver claimed to do and caused him to really get bend out of shape
Here is the challenge, and Mosler’s defense
Consulier By Mosler (fiberclassics.org)
There was one at a Cincy/Chrysler Shelby Club autocross event a few years ago that had a Barbie car paint job.
Sports Car Illustrated/International (IIRC) had a contest to redesign the Consulier. Can’t remember if it was the magazine that did it on their own on what the deal was, but I sent in an entry. I think I was about 12 at the time. Of course, I did not get picked.
A huge miscarriage of justice, I’m sure.
Definitely not! [Looks at Consulier] Then again . . .
Man with the hood up, pop-up headlights, and targa top it really gives of 4th Gen Camaro vibes, but I like it, so now convince Beau to build one
I noticed that as well, and over a decade before that car came out