Images courtesy Kustomrama, unless otherwise noted.
Even today, the 1951 XP-8 Le Sabre concept car, Harley Earl’s successor to his pre-war Buick Y-Job, looks like nothing else on the road despite its far-reaching influences on automobile design, construction, and technology. So it’s not hard to imagine what sort of impact that concept car had on impressionable gearheads, young and old alike, especially considering how many of them imitated, copied, and outright plagiarized the Le Sabre over the next several years.
To those imitators, perhaps the most prominent design aspect of the Le Sabre was its proboscis, a centrally mounted concave oval that flipped to reveal a pair of headlamps. And none of the imitators made more hay of that feature than Glen Hire and Vernon Antoine of Whittier, California, a pair of aviation company employees who built their Manta Ray in 1953. Starting with a 1951 Studebaker chassis and drivetrain, Hire and Antoine then rebodied the car in fiberglass, throwing in some Lincoln, Hudson, and Plymouth parts and replicating the Le Sabre’s distinctive front bumpers and catwalk hood. No word on where they got the giant nosecone, though.
It wasn’t just hot rodders who took the Le Sabre as inspiration, as we see from coachbuilder Henri Esclassan’s 1952 whack at replicating the concept car. Esclassan, based in Boulogne-sur-Seine, got his start in 1948 and previously rebodied Citroens and Renaults, but for his Le Sabre lookalike, he went with a Salmson chassis. He didn’t quite get the catwalks flat, but he did manage to throw in a prominent nosepiece, the front bumpers, the swooping C-shaped side trim, and the compound fins. In fact, he was so enamored of the Le Sabre, he built two such cars, each with slightly different details.
It wasn’t just hot rodders and coachbuilders who took the Le Sabre as an inspiration – Russian automaker ZIS, the one best known in the States for building suspiciously Packard-looking cars, put together the cyclopean ZIS-112 in 1951. Its experimental V-8 engine eventually produced 192 horsepower, good enough for a top speed of 130 MPH, and rather than put it on a turntable ZIS took it racing, largely “for propoganda intentions, without any commercial objectives,” according to Andy Thompson’s “Cars of the Soviet Union.” “Which was not all that surprising considering the very limited market in Soviet Russia for luxury cars.” This one actually got the headlamp in the nosepiece and incorporated a wraparound windshield, though the front bumper and fin interpretations seemed a little half-hearted.
Both Bob Metz (above, top) and Jack Kirsch (above, bottom) built admirable Le Sabre knockoffs – long and low proportions, plenty of swoop, tailfins, wraparound windshields, nosepieces and elbow bumpers – but from different approaches. Metz’s La Rocket, built sometime before 1954, started as a 1939 La Salle and used an Oldsmobile Rocket V-8 for power. Kirsch’s 1954 Cadillac actually replicated the Le Sabre’s flip-up headlamp mechanism, though he also incorporated a back seat into his version.
Like Kirsch, Frank Mann of Los Angeles tried his darndest to put the headlamps in the nosepiece of his Le Sabre-inspired custom. He also got the tailfins, the quarter-panel intakes, and the front bumper somewhat close and made an attempt at a wraparound windshield. And he did it all in metal. Unlike Kirsch, Mann started with a Crosley and used hardware store expanded-metal screen for decoration.
Photos courtesy Theodore Davis.
Perhaps the most puzzling of the knockoffs was this bus that SIA reader Theodore Davis spotted in 1952 or 1953 in Switzerland. Though nothing was known of it for many years, Kit Foster reported that Belgian historian Bernard Vermeylen identified it as a Van Hool-bodied Dodge built in 1952. Van Hool paid pretty close attention to the Le Sabre, putting in place pretty much every detail except for the roadster body configuration.
Photos by Aloft Aerial Photo, courtesy RM Sotheby’s.
Certainly inspired by the Le Sabre, Tom Cramer’s 1954 Cramer Comet took a far more radical and homebuilt approach to the genre with an Allison V-12 fitted to a homebuilt chassis and a well-finished all-steel body. Though he started on the car just a few years after the introduction of the Le Sabre, he didn’t actually register it for the road until 1980. Put up for auction at RM’s Monterey sale back in 2008, it failed to sell against a pre-auction estimate of $250,000 to $350,000.
You’ll note that the further down this list we go, the further away from the XP-8 Le Sabre we’re getting. Right about here’s where we’ll take note of the various Le sabre-inspired cars that German coachbuilder Spohn churned out in the early 1950s. Spohn, based in Ravensburg, Germany, got its start in the 1920s bodying Maybachs and even then seemed fond of extraneous decoration and futuristic body shapes. How the company became known among American soldiers and airmen stationed in post-war Germany, we don’t know, but we count at least nine cars – Nickolas Staranick’s 1947 Buick, Robert Mooselli’s 1948 Mercury (above, bottom), Arthur Cooper’s Packard, a 1940 Ford, Ralph Angel’s 1950 Chevrolet (above, top), Louis Struna’s Lincoln, Dan Wylie’s 1952 Pontiac, and a 1950 Veritas, and Jack Chandler’s car – that Spohn built with some Le Sabre styling aspect, usually those distinctive fins.
GM’s own designers even made some attempts at inserting more of the Le Sabre’s styling into production cars. The fins, for instance, almost wholecloth made it onto the 1954 Cadillac Park Avenue sedan concept car, and the nose popped up years later on a clay model for the 1959 Buick. In addition, we’ve also read about – but not seen photos of – a circa-1954 Dutch car called the Joymobile and a circa-1953 custom built by Max Fleischer that both featured similarities to the Le Sabre.
The phenomenon didn’t last long. By about 1955, customizers and coachbuilders had moved on to other concepts, perhaps prodded along by GM’s Motorama, the increasingly chrome- and fin-laden cars coming out of Detroit, and the competing visions of the future that Ford and Chrysler offered in response. Several of the above cars still exist – most notably the Manta Ray, the Cramer Comet, the Spohn-bodied Veritas, and the Spohn-bodied 1940 Ford – but many of the rest seem lost to time and fashion trends. Hopefully more such cars come to light to help illustrate the extensive flattery-via-imitation lavished on the XP-8 Le Sabre.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1FMpYyW
No comments:
Post a Comment