Left: Author and MT testing director
Kim Reynolds cautiously probes
the limits of the 70-year-old Kurtis
Sport Car on our figure-eight
course. Right: International bureau
chief Angus MacKenzie welcomes
the priceless Kurtis to its new and
fitting home in our office.IT’SNEVER TOO
LATE TOPUT
THE ORIGINAL
MOTORTREND
COVER CAR
THROUGH
INSTRUMENTED
EVALUATION
MotorTrend cubicle field for display, it
sits like the Hope Diamond gleaming at
the Smithsonian. People walking past
give it a wide, cautionary berth. Should
we curtsy before leaning close to view its
aircraftlike gauge cluster?
Soft-surfaced and handsomely
proportioned, 90 percent of the car’s
visual character probably comes from
its considerable horizontal brightwork.
Stand 2 feet away, and you can check if
your shoes are tied by their reflection in
the 6.5-inch-tall streamline chrome belt
that ribbons its flanks and licks around
the front and back like a Tupperware
seam. Light from the overhead
fluorescents pools on those liquidy green
surfaces and highlights a few cellulite
ripples along its fiberglass expanses, too.
A worrisome sign of age.
Nonetheless, I raise my hand: Can
we test it? My pitch was that our 1949
founders dropped the ball and must have
forgotten to get test numbers back then
(not mentioning that the National Hot
Rod Association, dragstrips, and our
testing program didn’t even exist). It’s
our responsibility to fix this historical
gaffe, I implored.When the inaugural MotorTrend
appeared the following September, it
was naturally Frank’s “Sport Car”
(his first production example) on its
cover. The photograph was snapped
by Petersen, with a company secretary
behind the wheel.
During the next seven decades—as
MT ’s covers have been dutifully
following motoring ’s trends, from
Mustangs in ’64 to Tesla Model 3s—the
Kurtis was on its own odyssey. The car
was fitted with a cut-down windscreen
and dispatched to Bonneville, where its
race-prepped flathead Ford V-8 pushed it
to 142.5 mph in the hands of drag racing ’s
George Washington, Wally Parks. (It was
also driven by iconic car journalist Dean
Batchelor, whom I knew later in his life.)
Refitted with a more livable flathead
Ford, Frank drove it all over the place
to drum up orders for subsequent sales
(his Kurtis-Kraft business in nearby
Glendale, California, already a legendary
race car shop, was soon to post five Indy
500 wins in the 1950s). After Kurtis sold
the car, it got a Cadillac V-8 transplant,
was crashed in 1960, bought, sold, its
history garbled, a restoration started
and abandoned. Another resto attempt
by DeWayne Ashmead of Salt Lake City
stuck, resulting in what you see here.
As for the production run of the Kurtis
Sport Car, after 18 examples, the car’s
rights were sold to L.A. entrepreneur
Earl “Madman” Muntz, who stretched it
into a four-seater and peddled it as the
Muntz Jet.
When our newly acquired Kurtis
rolls on casters into the middle of the