It’s time to finish our perusal of the SCI 1958 Directory of Sports Cars. The original was sent to me by CC reader Zipster, and I want to thank him for providing me and you this very comprehensive look at the sports car scene in 1956-1957. These were peak years for the Great Sports Car Boom, a social phenomenon that had wide and lasting influence.
During these early years, the sports car was more likely to be used according to its name, for participation in sporting events, although by about this time, the market was increasingly bifurcating, as sports car road racing became increasingly competitive and as greater numbers of consumers bought sports cars just because of the image and the fun factor.
What’s remarkable is the wide range of sports cars one could buy at this time. The cars here are arranged in three categories, Readily Available, Limited Availability, and Plastic Bodies for DIY builders, which was another huge thing at the time.
To Zipster: I’m returning it to you now, a bit worse for wear. But it’s been preserved digitally for the ages.
This selection is absolutely incredible, and then there’s the plot twisty halfway through!
It’s almost shocking to see the choices available in a market before corporate mergers and monopolies became big influences.
The spectrum of beautiful, diverse, and very unique designs is stunning. 🙂
Fascinating to see how times change. BMW & Volvo under “Limited Availability,” BMC’s dealer base “one of the biggest and best.” Wonder how fortunes will turn in another 60-odd years. Somehow I’m guessing we’ll still have Corvettes and 911s.
I’m not sure how to read the bits about Volvo… Are they saying that all Volvo models had limited availability, or that the P1900 was limited?
I think Volvo as a brand began official importation in ’56, and even by 1958 there probably weren’t many dealers in the US. But the P1900 model was only ever produced in a quantity of <60 units worldwide, so that obviously had extremely limited availability!
Pure gold !
Can’t quite believe the photo of a Lotus X1 with hood/soft-top erected !
The Frazer Nash entry mentions the new Continental model not having a body – they actually built only two of them, with a Porsche 356 coupe body modified to accommodate a front-mounted BMW V8.
“Frazer-Nash has no connection with the Nash of American Motors…” That confused me for a long time. Pre-internet I’d assumed that Archie Frazer was the man’s name and his cars used Nash engines, and just never followed the rebrand to Frazer-Rambler let alone Frazer-AMC…
No connection to Kaiser-Frazer for that matter.
Surprising Frazer-Nash is even included in a 1958 directory as they gave up building cars in 1957. They were the UK official Porsche agents and sales were starting to take off.
This was compiled in 1957 with the then current 1957 cars as a base of info, but was sold as “1958 Directory of Sports Cars”. Probably came out in the fall of 1957.
I got stuck on Ferrari, Jaguar, Thunderbird and Borgward all being on a list of “sports cars”.
Say what you will about the fifties, it had variety!
In the early fifties Borgward had two liter races cars that fought it out with Porsche for class wins. The Borgward Isabella could was as much a sports car as a Mercedes 190SL. Not much, but a GT type car. I had a Borgward Isabella sedan and it was a pretty nice car for that era. After the Borgward, I bought a Mini which was much more fun. Ah, to go back to that time when youth made everything better.
One theory suggests the Isabella Coupe came about because Madame Borgward wanted a VW Karman Ghia, so Herr Borgward needed to come up with an acceptable alternative.
The scientist in me likes how they always took the picture of cornering ability for their road tests on the same corner.
I know cars are safer now, but something was lost when individuals and small companies could design and produce sports cars in such wonderful variety. “Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained, in living every day.”
I wonder why the “Base price, FOB Detroit” was left blank on the Corvette and Thunderbird?
Not sure if relevant, but the 1958 “Monroney Act” window stickers began as a requirement in January 1959.
The article is fascinating–plenty of marques I swear I’ve never-ever even heard of. Interesting to hear about great resale value on Thunderbird, and the “you could drive a new one from Detroit to L.A. and sell it for a $200 profit.”
Thanks for posting this, Paul—I know I’ll be back sooner or later to really digest all of it!
A ’57 T-bird is shown, wasn’t the ’58 four-seater a late intro?
Do we get to pick? I’d like the Aceca-Bristol please.
Interesting to see Ernie McAfee down as the western agent for Ferrari, I thought it was John von Neumann but maybe that was later. McAfee was a real force in sports car racing before being killed in a crash at Pebble Beach in 1956
Pure eye candy. Very nice to see how much these would have cost back then, too.
Absolute Classic.
The Paul!!
Amazing variety some Ive never seen before some its hard to really call them sports cars but its a big shed so why not AC would have been using the Ford Zephyr engiines by then and they go ok with a Raymond Mays head and a set of freeflows before Caroll Shelby got his mitts on thedm of course and went two cylinders more
When I was in high school in the mid-to-late ’50s, in east central Illinois, we had a restaurant just off Illinois #1, our main street thru town, that had a well-deserved rep for great food at popular prices. On the weekends when there were SCCA sports-car races at the airport down in Lawrenceville, there would be masses of foreign cars, from the usual MGs and Jaguars to DB Panhards and a Ferrari or two, parked along the curb in front and all over the nearby side streets on Friday night. I’d park my bicycle and walk among these refugees from my treasured R&T or Sports Cars Illustrated magazines. We did have a few local examples – James Jones, the author, had a Jag XK120, and his co-owner at the writers’ colony had a Mercedes 190 SL. An extremely tall local guy had a T-Bird with a hardtop that he never removed, and people would stop on the sidewalk to watch him get in and out … and another fellow had the first Volvo B16 two-door I’d ever seen, which he drove very briskly all over town.
What an amazing selection of cars. That SIATA with the 122 cubic inch V-8…sigh. In Fiat green, please, with a brown leather top and interior
Interesting to see how Mercedes-Benz were sold through Studebaker-Packard dealers.
Almquist Engineering of Milford, PA made the bulk of their money from their large mail-order hot rod parts catalogue. They got into the kit car business in 1952 by purchasing bodies from the defunct Clearfield Plastics company. The body was the basis of the Saber I, based on a modified Fiat Topolino chassis. The Saber II was shorter with a higher deck, while the Speedster I, II & III were longer versions of the Saber. The glitzy El Morocco used American based mechanicals. The last Almquist body was the Thunderbolt, which resembled the newly introduced 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, with the company stopping the production of body kits shortly thereafter.
I still have the copy my father bought in 1958 and also bought another off eBay. He was in the market for a new car at the time. It was a fantastic read as a 10 year old in 1976 and still is. Dad ended up buying a 59 Studebaker Lark V8 sedan because mom said she wouldn’t marry him if he bought a sports car as they planned on a family. He also had to sell his ’48 Harley. They had a wonderful marriage that lasted over 40 years until his death.
Still have the Lark and one treasured snapshot of him on the bike with his initials painted on the gas tank.
One interesting thing is a Porsche ad-I think on the back cover-that mentions their ‘Continental’ model. I’ve always heard that Ford made them stop using that name, but before this was printed. Can anyone enlighten me?