We Test the EXACT “Sport Car” on MotorTrend’s First Cover From 1949

It’s not every day a business buys a valuable heirloom, a real piece of its foundation. But as MotorTrend lights 70 candles onto its own birthday cake, it’s this car–this vague frog-green 1949 Kurtis we recently purchased–’therefore being wheeled up as our present to ourselves.

Exactly why the Kurtis? The easy response is that it’s the car onto the magazine’s first grainy, three-color pay for. Not just any Kurtis. The exact automobile .

Another reason is that 70 years is time enough to everybody gift at MT’s arrival to get packed their desks and moved to this terrific printing media in the skies, most especially MT creator Robert Petersen, who started the magazine on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood and transferred into some black-glass tower on Sunset Boulevard and then to a huge bronze on Wilshire Boulevard. We caravanned here, near the shore, to some remodeled El Segundo tilt-up which was initially used for engineering the Apollo space program in the 1960s.

We’ve ever been Los Angeles vagabonds, afterward, without a single home because of touchstone. An Ancestry DNA query would likely pop up a picture of this green roadster rather than any specific address. It’therefore our oldest fingerprint.

In accordance with Ken Gross (virtuoso vehicle historian, “Pete” Petersen’s longtime pal, and regular MT contributor), L.A. race car builder Frank Kurtis was a coauthor of this magazine’s origin story. Although Petersen’s Hot Rod magazine (founded in 1948) found rapid success, it wasn’t bringing the big-buck ads from leading auto companies. Kurtis–working on his car–was a booster of a second magazine oriented about production cars.

After the MotorTrend appeared the following September, it had been obviously Frank’s “Sport Car” (his very first production case ) on its cover. The picture had been snapped by Petersen, with a business secretary supporting the wheel.

During the next seven years –as MT’s covers have been dutifully following motoring’so trends, from ’64 Mustangs to Tesla Model 3s–that the Kurtis was on its own odyssey. The car had been fitted with a cut-down windscreen and dispatched to Bonneville, where its own race-prepped flathead Ford V-8 pushed it to 142.5 miles in the hands of drag racing’s George Washington, Wally Parks. (It was driven by iconic vehicle journalist Dean Batchelor, whom I knew later in his lifetime .)

Refitted with a livable flathead Ford, Frank drove it all around the area to drum up orders for following sales (his Kurtis-Kraft business in nearby Glendale, California, a legendary race car store, was shortly to place five Indy 500 wins in the 1950s). Once Kurtis sold the vehicle, it obtained a Cadillac V-8 transplantthat was dropped in 1960, purchased, sold, its own history garbled, a restoration started and left. Another resto effort by DeWayne Ashmead of Salt Lake City stuck, leading to what you see here.

In terms of the production run of this Kurtis Sport Car, following 18 illustrations, the car’s rights were offered to L.A. entrepreneur Earl “Madman” Muntz, that stretched it to some four-seater and peddled it as the Muntz Jet.

When our recently obtained Kurtis rolls on casters into the center of this MotorTrend cubicle field such as display, it stays just like the Hope Diamond gleaming at the Smithsonian. People walking past give this kind of wide, cautionary berth. If we curtsy before leaning near look at its aircraftlike gauge cluster? Soft-surfaced and handsomely proportioned, 90% of the automobile ’s visual personality probably comes from its considerable flat brightwork. Stand two feet off, and you’re able to check whether your shoes are tied by their reflection in the 6.5-inch-tall streamline chrome belt which ribbons its own flanks and licks across front and rear just like a Tupperware seam. Light in the overhead fluorescents pools on those liquidy green surfaces and highlights a couple of cellulite ripples and its own fiberglass expanses, too.

A worrisome indication of age. Yet, I lift my hands: Can we analyze it? My pitch was our 1949 founders dropped the ball and have to have forgotten to find evaluation amounts back then (not mentioning the NHRA, dragstrips, along with our testing app didn’t even exist). It’s our duty to fix this historic gaffe, I implored.

The Suits drop to it. The Kurtis gets rolled from the building, into our tech center to get a once-over, and then onto a trailer headed to California Speedway with our normal stacks of cones, scales, resources, and Vboxes.

Testing a vehicle like this is similar to waltzing together with Queen Elizabeth. You would like the older gal to swing and sway a bit but not topple over and break a hip, for paradise ’s allure. The car burbled from the trailer onto the skid-marked bunch and loped up onto the scales: 2,835 lbs (maybe not the 2,300 we quoted in 1949; grab a pencil and fix your older copies) with a nose-heavy 54 percentage front/46 percent back weight distribution. Although its own chassis is semi-skeletal–a ladder frame webbed by means of an origami of compacted panels and bodywork hangers on top–it flexed and creaked ominously if we jacked it up to change out the tires.

Chris Walton matches the Vbox to the Kurtis, and they burble off to the dragstrip. Soon , they burble backagain. “Something’so wrong,” he says. “It originally hastens OK but then runs directly from power. I can barely reach 60 mph. ” I try a couple figure-eight laps, so run into exactly the identical issue, and prevent in a haze of steam. This probably isn’t right. It burbles back into the trailer.

A telephone to Ken Gross resulted in flathead Ford Zen master, Paul Gommi of nearby San Pedro, draping a cloth over the Kurtis’ fender and glancing under the hood. “The vacuum is misconnected,” he says, like scolding the preceding mechanic. “There’so too much improvement. ” The V-8 stays unnaturally high, as the engine awaits an Studebaker mill that never materialized. Even the Ford’s carburetors are so near the hood there’s room for an air filter. “These flatheads easily overheat, therefore we’ll temporarily replace the flow of water to your evaluations so that it ’s just hot water which gets on the staircase. Switch it back when you’re done, however, because it’ll immediately corrode the motor. ”

Back at the track, the Kurtis has been a good deal livelier. Chris burbles back in the dragstrip: “I did a few driveline-sympathetic launches from 2,000 rpm and chirped the tires. It’s got some good low-end grunt, but also the long-throw shifter slows things down. Power ebbs by 4,000 rpm, so I shifted at 3,500. I received into third straight before the quarter mile at almost 70 mph, but I can’t envision going 140 mph. ”

Zero to 60, however? 15.3 minutes, the quarter in 20 flat.

But now it goes, it doesn’t stop. “The brakes have gotten worse,” Chris says. “The pedal is long and springy, and now there ’s barely any bite whatsoever. ” It’s 60–0 distance of 370 ft is triple that of a modern car’s and longer than a football field, goalpost to goalpost. At least there’s no steam from beneath the hood that time.

One good thing about the brakes terrifying you round the figure eight is they divert you from the car’s awful ergonomics: The driver’so seat is too low and barely adjusts, and the wheel’s rim is too near and gets the diameter of a manhole cover. The pedals blot up to now off the ground which you have to lift your toes in the atmosphere to run them. Along with also the arthritic three-speed manual is an H-pattern with first gear being left back and back and undo a fearfully near miss as you shank the lever to the right and then far away up to the right to pin next.  It’s a strange Kabuki dance to get a vehicle from a man like Frank Kurtis, that must have understood perfectly well how to build cockpits for finicky race car drivers.

Building speed on the figure , I twist the helm via its first 45 degrees of steering play and in the ideal corner. The car starts to influence and then, gradually, corner; the back suspension is a conventional live axle on longitudinal leaf springs. But the front is separate, sprung by means of a lateral leaf lever and spring shocks which are strangely integrated into the upper A-arms. I can’t see the ideal corner’therefore cones for the windshield frame (cast in a first for the recovery ), however, the tail marginally drifts at 0.5 g. At what point will the nut ’s willowy 5-inch-wide tread along with 6-inch-tall sidewalls peel straight off their rims? I stand to the gas outside the corner, along with the flathead roars; then I immediately lift to start a several-second leg press the brake pedal, although its slowing seems more like atmosphere haul than brake lining.

I toss the wheel to the leftside. The planet warms counterclockwise, and I start to slide across the slick flat-bottom pillow, on the center tunnel’s carpet, and partway onto the passenger seat. On the following lap, I stay on the throttle a second too long. The Kurtis isn’t stopping, the corner’s turn-in point passes me on the left, along with the controlling and weapon are 100 feet dead ahead. I’m also the watch in the Titanic’s crow’s nest, begging this bastard to cease as the iceberg grows.

I’m palpitating. I’t driven more expensive cars–although the Kurtis is rather expensive, to be sure–but that is a part of history.

Time slows as the distance to tragedy shrinks. Inside my mind’so eye, I envision that the Kurtis, unnaturally redisplayed in the center of this MotorTrend building as a cautionary warning about hubris, awkwardly tilting on its own right-side suspensions, its own fiberglass bodywork broken, its chrome cladding half-peeled away.

Right thigh aching, then I bend the Kurtis into a sizable, arcing drift and skirt the curb by some little feet.

Notice to MT’s 2049 evaluation staff: When you update this item for the 100th anniversary issue, fix the brakes.

1949 Kurtis Sports Car

BASE PRICE (IN 1949)
$3,495

PRICE AS TESTED (IN 1949)
$5,000

VEHICLE LAYOUT
Front-engine, RWD, 2-pass, 2-door convertible

ENGINE
3.9L/160-hp/225-lb-ft (est) side-valve 16-valve V-8

TRANSMISSION
3-speed manual

CURB WEIGHT (F/R DIST)
2,835 lb (54/46%)

WHEELBASE
99.3 in

LENGTH x WIDTH x HEIGHT
169.0 x 68.0 x 51.0 in

0-60 MPH
15.3 sec

QUARTER MILE
20.0 sec @ 68.3 mph

BRAKING, 60-0 MPH
370 feet LATERAL ACCELERATION
0.50 grams (avg)

MT FIGURE EIGHT
35.3 sec @ 0.37 g (avg)

EPA CITY/HWY/COMB FUEL ECON
8/10/9 mpg (est)

ENERGY CONS, CITY/HWY
421/337 kW-hrs/100 kilometers CO2 EMISSIONS, COMB
2.21 lb/mile

The article We Test that the EXACT “Sport Car” on MotorTrend’s First Cover From 1949 appeared first on MotorTrend.

Buy Tickets for every event – Sports, Concerts, Festivals and more buy tickets