In mid-1963, with the production Mustang’s shape already locked-in, John Najjar was tasked with building that styling bridge. Line drawings of the Mustang II were quickly converted into a full-sized clay model. Gurney was confident he could top 100mph/160kph. Cooling air was fed through prominent side intakes. The engine was a 1.5 litre V4, sourced from Ford in Germany, which sat mid-car and drove the rear wheels. The car was white with twin blue racing stripes. He’d been involved in its development since it was just a drawing on a piece of paper. On Saturday 6 th October, 1962, at Watkins Glen Raceway in upstate New York, Dan Gurney strapped himself into a small open cockpit two-seater sports car. Originally blue, it was re-painted in red for an appearance in the 1963 movie Under the Yum Yum Tree. It sat on a mid-fifties Thunderbird chassis. The car’s engine was a 406 cubic inch/6.7 litre V8, hence the car’s internal code. Although it attracted attention at auto shows, there is very little of the Cougar I’s shape which influenced Ford’s styling direction. The Cougar I’s design harks back to the mid-fifties and the Mercedes 300 SL gullwing. He left Ford to work at Chrysler where he shaped the 1964 Plymouth Barracuda. Samsen was one of the designers who worked on the first Thunderbird. That’s not surprising, because the original design dated back to a 1955 sketch by John Samsen, coded D523. What it really looked like was a re-imagined Mercedes 300SL, with its gull wing doors and “pontoon” front fenders. The Cougar 406 was a fully operational car and was said to predict a future Thunderbird design. This might explain why the hurriedly styled 1963 Dodge 880 Custom has a grille very similar to the Palomar’s. By the time the Palomar was unveiled, Engel had left Ford and was Chrysler’s vice president of design. Like the Gyron, the Palomar was designed under the eye of Elwood Engel. A small wrap around windshield was fixed to the roof to protect the now exposed occupants from the wind. When the rear half of the roof was retracted, the forward-facing third row seat elevated six inches/150mm to provide a vista of the heavens and the road ahead. The car was named after the large astronomy observatory near San Diego, California. Along with the Gyron, it was destroyed in the fire which saw the Ford Rotunda burnt to the ground in less than an hour, on 9th November, 1962. First shown on 1 st April, 1961 at the New York International Auto Show, the Gyron was developed to counteract the enormous publicity General Motors had gained for its winged, finned and jet engine Firebird III. Of all of Ford’s concept cars, the two-wheel Gyron was the most unusual. This month the spotlight is on Ford’s full-sized concept cars from the first half of the 1960s, three of which, surprisingly, still exist. In case you missed them, I’ve listed the links at the end of this story. In previous Retroautos I’ve written about other 1960s concepts: Dodge FliteWing, Chrysler TurboFlite, Plymouth VIP and Chrysler 70X. In the April 2021 Retroautos, I featured the three Dodge Charger concept cars. Rather than create expensive Motorama-type extravaganzas, the companies transitioned to a wide range of communication channels-print, TV, radio, auto shows, auto racing events and their many dealership showrooms across the county-to shout out their claims to be the leader of the automotive future. The 1960s was a decade of dazzling dream cars and creative concepts.įord, GM and Chrysler continued to spend millions of dollars to showcase their technological and styling prowess. If you read certain books, magazines and online stories about the history of dream and concept cars, you could be forgiven for assuming that it all ended when General Motors (GM) presented its final Motorama during the northern hemisphere winter of 1960-61.īut that would be a wrong assumption.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |