The Suits fall for it. The Kurtis gets
rolled out of the building, into our tech
center for a once-over, and onto a trailer
headed to California Speedway with our
usual stacks of cones, tools, and Vboxes.
Testing a car like this is like waltzing
with Queen Elizabeth. You want the
old gal to swing and sway a little but not
topple over and bust a hip, for heaven’s
sake. The car burbled out of the trailer
onto the skid-marked lot and loped
up onto the scales: 2,835 pounds (not
the 2,300 we quoted in 1949; grab a
pen and correct your old copies) with
a nose-heavy 54/46 front/rear weight
distribution. Although its chassis is
semi-skeletal—a ladder frame webbed by
an origami of welded panels and body-
work hangers on top—it still flexed and
creaked ominously when we jacked it up
to change the tires.
Road test editor Chris Walton fits the
Vbox to the Kurtis, and they burble off
to the dragstrip. Shortly, they burble
back. “Something ’s wrong,” he says. “It
initially accelerates OK but then runs
right out of power. I can’t even reach 60
mph.” I try a few figure-eight laps, run
into the same issue, and stop in a haze
of steam. This probably isn’t right. It
burbles back into the trailer.
A call to Ken Gross resulted in flathead
Ford Zen master, Paul Gommi of nearby
San Pedro, draping a cloth over the Kurtis’
fender and leaning under the hood. “The
vacuum line is misconnected,” he says,
as if scolding the previous mechanic.
“There’s way too much advance.”
The V-8 sits up unnaturally high, as
the engine bay awaits a Studebaker mill
that never materialized. The Ford’s
carburetors are so close to theWith a 20-second quarter-mile time, one
might call it “same-day acceleration.”
We removed the car’s irreplaceable hub
caps and side skirts for testing.hood that there’s no room for an air filter.
“These flatheads easily overheat,” he says,
“so we’ll temporarily replace the coolant
with water for your tests so it’s just hot
water that gets on the chassis. Switch it
back when you’re done, though, because
it’ll quickly corrode the engine.”
Back at the track, the Kurtis is a lot
livelier. Chris burbles back from the drag-
strip: “I did some driveline-sympathetic
launches from 2,000 rpm and chirped
the tires. It’s got some good low-end
grunt, but the long-throw shifter slows
things down. Power ebbs by 4,000 rpm,
so I shifted at 3,500. I got into third right
before the quarter mile at almost 70 mph,
but I can’t imagine going 140 mph.”
Zero to 60, though? 15.3 seconds, the
quarter in 20 flat.
But now that it goes, it doesn’t stop.
“The brakes have gotten worse,” Chris
says. “The pedal is springy and long, and
there’s barely any bite whatsoever.” Its
60–0 distance of 370 feet is triple that of
a modern car’s and longer than a football48 MOTORTREND.COM SEPTEMBER 2019