Shapeshifter

STROTHER MACMINN, BORN in 1918, was one of this country’s most influential automotive designers. Known to his friends as Mac, he won a schoolboy prize for auto design when he was 13, visited the famous ’30s-era coachbuilder, Walter M. Murphy in his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., and became friends with its famed designer Frank Hershey. Mac worked for General Motors just before and after World War II, then was briefly with industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. He was best known for his long association with the Art Center School of Los Angeles, which later moved to Pasadena and became the Art Center College of Design He taught at the college, the world’s most prestigious auto design school, for nearly 50 years. Mac’s 1959 book, Sports Cars of the Future which was part of the Modern Sports Car Series, prominently featured the Le Mans Coupe.

MacMinn, who passed away in January 1998, was the consummate car guy, but first and foremost, he was a designer and a teacher. He was often credited with having taught, or certainly influenced, many major auto designers, including Robert Cumberford, J Mays, Chris Bangle, Freeman Thomas, Wayne Cherry and Chip Foose, to name just a few. Bill Motta, long-time Art Director at Road & Track magazine noted, Strother MacMinn was “probably the most knowledgeable person alive in regards to automobile design.”

Mac loved Classic cars, and he was Chief Honorary Judge at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance for more than 20 years. Sports cars were another of his life-long interests. He photographed most of the earliest West Coast races with a Leica camera, and he knew how to use it, thanks to his having one of the best-trained eyes for design in the world. Until his passing, he drove a Jaguar XK120 roadster that he bought in 1953. His other “driver” was a much-loved 1970½ Chevrolet Camaro coupe.

But his piece de resistance was the Le Mans Special, a startling, out-of-this-world coupe that starred on the August 1960 cover of Road & Track, but never reached production. I will never forget seeing this scarlet missile for the first time. I was gobsmacked, to use the British term, meaning “utterly astounded.” Besides its stunning styling, the sleek red coupe incorporated many of the elements of the two cars I loved from that era, the Mercedes-Benz 300SL and Jaguar XK-E. I liked the idea of a Corvette V-8, a transaxle and disc brakes and a slippery design with gull-wing doors — that was state-of-the-art as far as I was concerned. And it would be American!

Interestingly, MacMinn wrote the fateful August 1960 R&T article, but he’s not mentioned as the coupe’s body designer, possibly because some elements of the design had been modified for improved aerodynamics. Road & Track’s publisher, John R. Bond, was an engineer, who had published articles about sports car design for years. Many of those designs were fanciful. Some were good looking. But they were drawings. This cover car was for real.

The coupe was projected to weigh 2,000 lbs. Its modified Corvette V-8 engine would propel the coupe to 60 mph in 5.5 seconds then on to a top speed of 182 mph. MacMinn and Bond predicted that this dual- purpose berlinetta could be street-legal and in race trim, it could win the grueling 24-hours of Le Mans.

Before the R&T crew could build a chassis, two teams took up the challenge. Alton Johnson, a talented fellow, who’d won a GM Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild contest, worked for Victress Manufacturing (they built sports cars and fiberglass bodies). He joined up with Marvin Horton and Ed Monegan (they worked for the Marquardt Corporation). The latter duo lofted the magazine sketches into a full-sized drawing to facilitate building a body buck and a mold. Six fiberglass bodies were built (that we know of) and three cars were completed; two other cars were partially built, and the remaining bare body shell was never finished. A second father and son team, Edward and Frank Tift, built a MacMinn coupe they first called the “Tempest,” and its name was later changed to “Dolphin.”

In August 1959, Alton Johnson tested his red coupe at Riverside Raceway where it was reportedly clocked at over 150 mph. It became the Road & Track cover car, and it appeared in Hot Rod and other magazines. Sadly, Johnson crashed the car above Malibu Canyon. Luckily for Brown and his passenger, a guard rail cut off the roof and they were miraculously thrown clear.

The wreck was unsalvageable. We haven’t space to detail the histories of the other cars. But the aforementioned bare body shell found its way to Doug Adler who planned to build a Land Speed Record car with it. Adler displayed the sleek shell a few times before selling it to Dennis Kazmerowski, who became the first person in decades to build a running, driving Le Mans Coupe.

“I was on the phone with Geoff Hacker,” Dennis recalls, “and he asked me, ’of all the cars you build or want to build, which one would you want to have?’ I said I would love to have the Le Mans Coupe by Strother MacMinn. He said, ‘you can’t have that one because it went tumbling over Malibu canyon, and was destroyed, never to be rebuilt. But I know where a body is.’ I said, you can’t be serious. Geoff gave me the gentleman’s name.”

I gave him a call. It was Doug Adler, who said he was thinking about taking the finished car to Bonneville. I thought to myself that this car shouldn’t be at Bonneville. We went back and forth, he finally relented, and we made a deal.

“There wasn’t much,” says Dennis, who likes to be called ‘Kaz.’ “Just the body with the hood cut out, the windows cut out, the doors cut, and no interior. It was just a shell. And a thin one at that. It had been sitting out in the Mohave Desert, in the hot California sun for sixty years. The weather had taken its toll. Doug wanted to make sure it was going to a good home and that I’d do something with it. I couldn’t guarantee him anything, but I sent him pictures of cars I had done. I told him I would do my best. My plan was to keep it as original as possible, with nothing out of the extreme.”

First, Kazmerowski had to build a chassis and there were several different choices. Marvin Horton had used a square tube frame. Others utilized a more conventional round tube setup. And that doesn’t even get into suspension. He had to make all those decisions.

“I went back to the articles in Road and Track,” Kaz explained. “The first ones were all about chassis and suspension. And the later ones concentrated on aerodynamics and the body. The last article married those two together and was about Alton Johnsons’ car in Road & Track. So, I went back to what they said in the first article, using round tubing, very much a Cobra-esque or AC-Bristol type of thing. They talked about an 88-to-90-inch wheelbase and a 48-inch track. But when I read further in the articles, they said ‘we changed our mind. What we really want you to do is keep it simple. Use the components that are available.’”

“I found a Triumph TR-4 front end that had rack and pinion steering, and independent suspension with a 48-inch track, and I used an independent rear end from a TR-6. I fabricated frame pieces for the middle and lengthened the chassis two inches to bring it to 90 inches. I originally had the body sitting on an 88 inch chassis. It just looked strange, in the sense that there was so much rear overhang. When I brought the body down, the shell was so thin I had to crawl underneath the chassis and up through the bottom to get into the body. When I dropped the body on the frame, I lost 2.5 inches of headroom, because it just billowed out on the thin sides. I had to build all the supporting structure on the inside to hold the body up before I could mount it.”

The engine is a period 283-cid Chevy V-8 with 327 heads. The transmission is a Muncie M21 four-speed. “There’s an American engine and transmission and British suspension. There’s very little German and Italian in it,” says Kaz. “I tried to build it as you would back in the ’50s and ’60s using parts that were available in the period. A number of friends donated their time, which was great.”

Next, he had to construct an entire interior, with a dashboard, an instrument panel, bucket seats, a center console, footwells, etc. Many decisions had to be made: where to mount the brake pedals, support for the steering column and so forth. “I just couldn’t bolt it to the dash. I had to have a proper structure for it. I made all the outriggers to hold the body up. It was a tremendous amount of work. But in my opinion, it was well worth it. Would I ever do another one? No way.”

From the time he received the body to the time he had a rolling, driving car was about six months. “But it is all the little things, the car was rolling and driving but there wasn’t necessarily a dash. You’d mount things here and you’d mount things there and all of a sudden, you find out that’s not going to work. When you restore a car, you take a piece off and you look at it, you paint it, you fix it, you buy a new one if you have to. And you put it right back where it came from. When you build a car, you have to decide where all the components fit. There were many times that I got in the car and took it for a ride or sat in it, and I thought how ‘this isn’t going to work.’ And I had to mount something somewhere else.”

The entire process took a little over two years and 3,000 hours.

“The response to the completed car has been outstanding,” Kazmerowski notes. “At The Amelia, we won the Chief Judge’s award as well as a class award, At Eyes on Design, you are judged by designers, and that meant a lot to me. We won the Chairman’s Award. It was especially nice to receive that from designers. They really appreciated it for what it was. There were guys saying they couldn’t believe they were seeing Mac’s car. And Jay Leno featured the car on ‘Jay Leno’s Garage.’ He drove it on the show, and he was really impressed.”

Dennis Kazmerowski’s MacMinn Le Mans coupe is the first example to be completed and running since Alton Johnson wrecked his car decades ago. There are three bodies extant. One is owned by Dr. Mark Brinker, whose cars have starred in special classes at Pebble Beach, another by Geoff Hacker, the ebullient founder of “Undiscovered Classics,” and the third is overseas, fitted with a Jaguar XK-150 engine. Brinker and Hacker plan to restore their cars. “Oklahoma City entrepreneur, Chip Fudge, was my financial partner,” says Kaz. “He has the car now.”

As for Dennis Kazmerowski, he’s on to the next project. He’s presently restoring “The Ocelot,” a dramatically-styled, fiberglass-bodied sports roadster designed and built by the late automotive illustrator Ken Eberts. The Ocelot was lost for 54 years, and it’s recently been discovered.

That sounds like a perfect project for Dennis Kazmerowski.