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We've got multiple classic sports car restorations going on at any one time and here we have three of them at our master mechanics, Ralph Smith's shop! Come along with us for a tour of the on-going work for these rare American Specials, all of which are fiberglass postwar American sports cars. We even have a few of Ralph's personal projects highlighted including a custom 1931 Ford Model A Town Car he's building along with two other 1930s Ford Hot Rods he has totally completed.
Ralph is currently working on the 1953 Victress S1A, the 1955 McCormack Sports Car, and the ultra rate 1952 Irwin Lancer. We've featured all three of these cars have been previously on the channel as they make their way through restoration and you can find the links to the previous videos at the end of the description.
Hollywood-based Victress was started by Doc Boyce-Smith in late 1952. For the S1 and S1A, Boyce-Smith and Art Center College of Design student Hugh Jorgensen borrowed heavily from both the 1939 BMW 328 Bügelfalte roadster and Jaguar’s XK120 when designing the first Victress car, though they heavily reworked the front end in an effort to “out Jag the Jaguar,” as Victress’s Merrill Powell recalled.
Victress built just the bodies, in a couple of different wheelbases, leaving its customers to choose a frame. However, at least a couple of shops in Southern California–including Mameco and Kurtis–constructed specialty frames to adapt to the growing number of fiberglass sports car bodies on offer at the time.
Victress continued to produce bodies through 1961, when Boyce-Smith sold the company to LaDawri Coachcraft, another fiberglass body manufacturer. LaDawri continued building the Victress models under different names through 1965.
November 1951 is when fiberglass cars debuted to the American public. In reality, these cars were completed sometime earlier with the Irwin Lancer being finished about a month earlier than the Glasspar G2. But which magazine would showcase the first article about these cars? It’s no surprise that it was Motor Trend (Petersen Publishing) who shared the first article about Eric Irwin and his Lancer in their November, 1951 issue.
The article was titled “Fiberglas Sports Car” and was written by Eric Irwin. In the article, he shared the story on how one might build the car of their dreams out of fiberglass. In fact, it was this article by Eric Irwin, and the debut of the fiberglass cars at the 1951 Petersen Motorama that we recognize as the “Big Bang” of fiberglass cars. All subsequent history concerning how to build your own fiberglass body and sports car starts with this article in Motor Trend, November 1951, which you can find in full on our website!
The McCormack Sports car debuted in 1955 at the Petersen Motorama, which was the last big year off of the early fiberglass specials. Names such as Victress, Bangert, Sorrell, Viking-Craft, Woodill and other luminaries of the fiberglass world were there to amaze the audience, for 10 days straight. However, starting in 1956 these names would begin to fade into history and new names would begin to appear such as Devin, LaDawri, Kellison, and Bocar.
Hank McCormack produced these cars though about 1960 when he sold the molds to “Track Kraft” who continued to market the McCormack under a new model name, the “TK-103.” However, by the summer of 1961, the molds and company were for sale again, and no further information of these cars was ever seen.
Motor Life Magazine in 1956 covered the car extensively, which we have a snippet of below and can be found in full on our website: "Not often do we come across a car with such an immediate eye-appeal as the fiberglass coupe shown on our cover and on these pages. Working with a clay model, McCormack originally conceived a four-place, rear-engined coupe, using the scoops in the rear fenders to feed air to small cooling radiators. He had planned to use a DeDion rear axle and a reverse drive unit to get the engine as far back as possible, but space limitations and the expense of such an operation changed his mind to a more conventional design."
1953 Victress S1A:
https://youtu.be/CVCanPAgYKQ
https://youtu.be/Qpr--UNOWPA
https://youtu.be/NvgV3uTogZM
https://youtu.be/acjze4-XB4w
1952 Irwin Lancer:
https://youtu.be/O_LM_WlHUQM
https://youtu.be/MyHB289ZPTs
https://youtu.be/t30XiDSI8zY
1955 McCormack Sports Car:
https://youtu.be/0kwojBypmOE
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Thanks for watching the video Restoration Shop Tour | 1953 Victress & 1952 Lancer Updates, plus a Custom Ford Model A Town Car! |