The 1955 Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia Looks Shockingly Like This Custom Beetle That Some Guy Built Three Years Before. I’m Confused

If you’re like me, you know that no news story is worth reporting until it’s had at least a good half-century to marinate. That’s why I was so excited to be sent the March-April 1952 issue of the Sports Car Club of America’s magazine, cleverly and evocatively titled “Sports Car.” This issue has some really mind-blowing and groundbreaking news regarding a one-off Volkswagen-based special that looks strikingly like the Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia. This normally wouldn’t be news except for the fact that the Karmann-Ghia was introduced in 1955, and this special came out in 1952! Was the builder a spy? Did he have strange powers that allowed him to see into the future? Or was it just a coincidence? Perhaps all three?

Here’s the issue of the magazine I’m talking about, in case you want to fish your copy out of the pile behind your refrigerator and follow along:

The article in question is this one, which I’ll admit has a sort of confusing byline: it says “As told by H.L. Brundage” but H.L. Brundage is referred to in the third person in the text of the article, so did H.L. tell it to H.L. or was there some other unnamed author who listened to H.L.? Probably the latter.

However the story was told, it seems that H.L., who was the SCCA Secretary-Treasurer of the Florida region, bought himself a new 1952 Volkswagen Beetle, with its tiny 1.1-liter flat-four making a ravenous 25 ponies. H.L. saw this car, drove it, and had the only rational reaction a human could have: the realization that this needed to be a race car.

So, he made modifications to the little motor, including a twin-carb setup, managed to extract a face-melting 35 hp from it, and then installed his own body of his own design made from a tube frame and aluminum sheeting. But what’s most interesting is the design of Brundage Special which I think is shockingly similar to the famous Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia design, though the Ghia wasn’t introduced to the public until 1955!

Now, the Ghia design was, of course, mostly completed before 1955, with prototypes shown as early as 1953, a date which, if my math serves me correctly, is still (carry the two) one year after the Brundage Special! Here, look how much the front end treatment of the 1953 Karmann-Ghia looks like this home-built special:

Those front ends are remarkably close. Sure, the Special has no need for bumpers and extends the fenders lower, but the whole plan of the front, the pointed prow, the forward-bulging fenders, the whole damn shape of it all really feels like what Ghia designed for VW’s sporty Beetle-based car.

Of course, where Ghia got that design is interesting, too, because it was actually an adaptation of an earlier concept car that Ghia designed for Chrysler in 1952, called the D’Elegance:

I actually did a little video about just this fact a while ago, so if you’d like to hear me talk about it a bit, boy are you in luck:

Now, the D’Elegance certainly inspired most of the Karmann-Ghia’s look, but, significantly, not the front end, which, being an air-cooled, rear-engined car, did not need a large radiator grille up front. So, the part that I find most like the Karmann-Ghia on this one-off Special we can’t attribute to the same root source as the rest of the Ghia, and, even if we tried, it’s from 1952, also.

I’m not saying that somehow Ghia of Italy saw this Floridian’s one-off Beetle racing special and took its front end design and grafted it onto their old Chrysler show car and presented that combination to Volkswagen, who then had Karmann build them and boom, Karmann-Ghia.

I’m not saying that’s remotely probable. But I am saying that, damn, if it was, it would make a hell of a lot of sense, because from where I sit, over 70 years after the fact, it sure as hell looks like H.L. Brundage, the secretary-treasurer-racer, designed at least the face of the famous Karmann-Ghia.

(thanks to Josh Ashby for sending me this!)