Studebaker exhibit driven by hybrids of a different sort

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) - The Studebaker National Museum hopes to get high mileage out of it current exhibition of hybrids.

Just don’t look for any Priuses in “Powered by America: The Original Hybrid.”

Instead, the 10 cars in the exhibit represent unique, limited collaborations between American engineers and European body designers that took place between the 1950s and ’70s.

“Generally, they would fall into the category of sports and exotics,” museum archivist Andrew Beckman says about the cars, which he and museum curator Aaron Warkentin assembled for the exhibit from a variety of collectors. “In the day, some of them were marketed as grand touring cars, like the Jensens, which meant lots of power but comfortable. . You could consider them a supercar.”

With the exception of two Nash-Healeys, all of the cars in “Powered by America” feature American V-8 engines.

“The European manufacturers were looking for cheap, reliable horsepower and that’s what the American engines brought in spades,” Beckman says. “European engines in that period, many of them dated back to the prewar era. American engines were state-of-the-art designs.”

Each of them also has an interesting story behind it or features on the car. The 1951 Nash-Healey in the show, for example, is Serial No. 001, was owned by Donald Healey and has a European pedal configuration - clutch-accelerator-brake.

Argentine race car driver Alejandro de Tomaso named his Mangusta as a challenge to Carroll Shelby’s Cobra: Mangusta is Italian for mongoose, an animal known for its ability to kill cobras and other snakes.

Tom Cotter found his 1952 Cunningham C-3 - one of only 25 produced - in a basement in South Carolina and thinks it hadn’t been driven since the early 1960s before he bought it and became its sixth owner eight or nine years ago. Remarkably, all 25 C-3s still exist.

The author of numerous books and articles about cars and the host of the YouTube series “Barn Find Hunter,” Cotter met company founder Briggs S. Cunningham Jr. once in the 1980s and later became friends with his son and daughter. Part of his interest in the car is based on Cunningham’s story: He wanted to race at Le Mans, but the rules stipulated that only production cars could be used.

“He wanted to win the 24-hour Le Mans with American drivers and American cars,” Cotter says, and Cunningham almost did: He finished No. 4 at Le Mans in 1952, and his team finished at Nos. 3, 7 and 10 a year later.

Cotter’s car was once the company’s “media car” for test drives and photos, but although he’s made mechanical repairs to it, he has otherwise left it in “as-found” condition, which means it has rust on the hood and fender and isn’t as shiny as the other cars in the show.

“If I had restored it and if I restore it,” he says, “it will not be nearly as much fun because I’d worry about stone chips. . I have more fun with my rat-rod Cunningham than people with restored ones do.”

And he does drive his Cunningham, which has a 220 horsepower Chrysler Hemi V-8 under its hood.

The car weighs 3,400 pounds, 700 of that for the engine alone, and, Cotter says, he’s heard the brakes may have been the same ones used on Cessna airplanes.

“It has a lot of torque,” he says. “The engine sounds really cool.”

Naturally, with all that power, unlike today’s energy-efficient hybrids, these cars are among the greatest gas guzzlers in automotive history.

Cotter estimates his Cunningham gets about 10 miles per gallon in the city and 14 on the highway. New, the 1968 Iso Grifo got 10.7 miles per gallon, while the 1969 Jensen FF got 10.1 miles per gallon, and the 1966 Sunbeam Tiger got a whopping 18-22 miles per gallon.

But, Beckman says, “If you’re buying these cars, you’re not worried about fuel mileage.”

You wouldn’t be worried about cost, either.

With a base price of $9,000, the Cunningham was one of the most expensive cars on the market. By comparison, a 1952 top-of-the-line Cadillac Coupe de Ville cost $4,015, while a 1952 Ford Country Sedan Station Wagon cost $2,060.

“You could buy a Charger for $2,800,” Beckman says. “The Cobra was pushing $6,000. They weren’t competitors in the market. You really had to want one of these cars to buy it.”

Nor were any of these cars mass produced.

Only 400 Nash-Healeys were made, for example, and only 998 Shelby Cobras were built. At 7,083 cars, the Sunbeam Tiger - the type of car Maxwell Smart drove on “Get Smart” - was the most-produced of the show’s 10 vehicles.

“It was a very exclusive club,” Beckman says, “and yet the engines found in these cars were the same as what you found in your everyday Ford Fairlane or Chevy, significantly warmed up. . It’s kind of an irony that these exotic, high-performance, very up-market European automakers looked to America for their engines. They were excellent engines but had modest beginnings. These were their bread-and-butter engines to power American highways.”

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Source: South Bend Tribune, https://bit.ly/2hqcIbg

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Information from: South Bend Tribune, https://www.southbendtribune.com