Dream cars, concept cars, by whatever name, they’re the sexy side of auto shows. Concepts are tantalizing glimpses of future automotive designs created to measure public interest and cause buzz–The Ooh and Aah Factor.
Americans love dream cars with their curves and swoops and gadgets and gimmicks. But where do they wind up when the turntable stops?
Take the one-off stars of the GM Motoramas in the 1950s.
General Motors presented traveling Motorama auto shows between 1949 and 1961. They were the inspiration of legendary design chief Harley Earl, and eight editions of Motorama featured concepts such as Earl’s pet project, the 1951 LeSabre, as well as the Space Age-influenced Firebird series. Those cars never left GM property in Michigan. Others were not so lucky.
Case in point: Earl’s 1953 Cadillac Le Mans concept.
GM introduced Caddy Le Mans at the New York Mid Century Motorama in 1953 alongside the Buick Wildcat I and Chevrolet Corvette. Public reaction to Corvette was so strong, the car was rushed to market. It mesmerized the 300,000 visitors attending the seven-day show in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that January.
Le Mans was another story.
Motorama guests puzzled over its look. On first blush, Le Mans seemed reminiscent of the Caddy line. Except it was a two-seater with hind end design cues borrowed from the P-38 Lightning fighter. (Earl and design wizard Bill Mitchell were big on incorporating aircraft themes into their artwork.)
Greg Wallace, director of Historical Services at Cadillac, noted two types of auto show fan in the 1950s. “There were the people who loved futuristic dream cars. And there were those who preferred more realistic concepts, cars they might see moving into production a year or two down the line. That was the 1953 Le Mans. You might have stopped and said, `Oh, this looks like a Cadillac–but which one?'”
Several examples of the 1953 Le Mans concept were hand-built by Earl’s GM Styling Section; all had fiberglass bodies. Le Mans No. 1 reportedly was sold to John Wayne after its Motorama tour ended, and was eventually destroyed in a Pleasanton, Calif., warehouse fire. The No. 2 car also went into private ownership: Shoe magnate Harry Karl hired customizer George Barris to re-work the rear end and add a Continental Kit for Karl’s then-wife, actress Marie McDonald. There’s no clue what happened to this car, which would look radically different from the other Le Mans concepts because of the customization work.
Internet references are made to a No. 3 car going to Floyd D. Akers, a Washington, D.C., Cadillac dealer, but Larry Faloon, retired director of design for the GM Tech Center and consultant for the GM historic collection, questioned that. Faloon’s research shows only three Le Mans prototypes were built. And he’s certain the final car went to Bud Goodman when he retired as head of GM’s Fisher Body division in 1958.
Faloon made the point that in the 1950s care and maintenance of retired concepts was not the formal affair it is today. GM keeps 100 or so retired concepts, such as the 1961 Mako Shark, in climate-controlled storage.
But that wasn’t always the case.
In the 1950s, Earl and Mitchell often used retired concepts as their daily drivers. (Earl loved his 1938 Y-Job concept so much, he drove it cross-country several times.) Many were given or sold to celebrities such as Wayne and Karl, and minor or redundant examples were dumped at a salvage yard outside of Detroit called War Whoops. (Wallace remembered poking about War Whoops as a teenager looking for hot-rod parts and being shouted at when he opened a parked trailer filled with junk dream cars. He immediately knew what they were because the looked like nothing he’d ever seen on the street.)
“The surviving Cadillac 1953 Le Mans is a very, very, functional car,” said Faloon. “The Le Mans has a relatively stock power train. This is a car anyone could drive, and in the 1950s just about any vehicle qualified for an `M’ plate in Michigan,” a regular plate that means the car is street legal.
The No. 3 Le Mans, with its original 331-cubic-inch V-8 engine, was sent back to GM Styling later in 1950s for a makeover. Faloon said Goodman would have made such a request shortly after Earl retired in December 1958. “Goodman had enough pull on his own to get the work done,” Faloon said. “And that’s pretty extraordinary in itself. Normally, Mr. Earl would have been the only one to give such authorization.”
The Le Mans freshening included new front and rear ends. Single headlamps were replaced with quad headlights, and the rear received a sharper, more aggressive jet-age tailfin. The engine also was changed to a 390-ci with three two-barrel carburetors. (We’re talking Tri-Power years before the PontiacGTO.) But Le Mans was never again exhibited.
No. 3 was taken by Goodman to California when he established his Dixon Cadillac dealership in Hollywood. The Goodman family kept it nearly 40 years, adding 18,000 miles to the clock through occasional use. In the late 1990s, Le Mans reportedly was put up for auction twice–once seeking $375,000 and again for $1 million. (There apparently were no takers.) Then, just as Cadillac was about to roll out the Evoq concept roadster for the 1999 auto-show circuit, Wallace had an opportunity to re-acquire the car for the Cadillac Historic Services.
“Bud Goodman’s son Jack approached us,” said Wallace, “but we had to build a business case for spending the money. Our idea was to show the 1953 Le Mans alongside the Evoq concept. Both cars are silver. Both are two-seat roadsters. It was a chance to show Cadillac roadsters then and now. The Le Mans was used extensively with Evoq at press events. They went to Europe and were very well received.” Wallace declined to say what Cadillac paid to re-acquire the Le Mans, saying that was proprietary information.
The Goodmans had fastidiously maintained the Le Mans. There were no cracks in the fiberglass, missing gauges or torn-up dashboard padding. Wallace said the upholstery–silver-blue metallic leather with half-inch pleats–was worn and needed restoring. But the car was intact. Think satin finish with flawless chrome and a deep wrap-around windshield, looking like Elvis just drove it out of a movie with Sue Ane Langdon snuggled on his shoulder.
Billed by GM as “a luxury sports car” in 1953, the Le Mans cockpit includes six aircraft-style gauges trailing off to the right of the steering wheel. The Orlon convertible top lowers into a recess below the rear deck and has a primitive sensor to detect raindrops and rise automatically. Add a push-button Wonderbar radio and secret, spring-loaded compartment containing a pop-out umbrella. Electric seats glide backwards automatically for easy entry and exit when the doors open. (Then they return to pre-set positions.)
Add turbine blade wheel treatments and the Le Mans logo script hand-engraved and this is a neat car.
But is it the only Cadillac Le Mans? Faloon is of the mind that you never say never when talking about dream cars.
“The 1955 Bonneville Special is a good example,” he said. “For many years, [Highland Park collector] Joe Bortz and the collector world thought Joe had the only Bonneville Special. Well, several years ago, Bonneville Special No. 2 was found in a garage, much to the amazement of everyone. It was a 100 percent duplicate, so now there are two. One red and one green. We know that Bonneville No. 2 was used at least in part in the Canadian auto shows. Its full history is probably stored in the limestone mine GM uses for document storage in Pennsylvania.”
One Motorama car from the 1950s vanished years ago and is considered mythic.
“Our 1956 Pontiac Club de Mer disappeared into the fog,” said Faloon of the one-of-a-kind brushed aluminum, 300-horsepower roadster built on the Corvette platform. “All we have left is a one-quarter scale model owned by Joe Bortz, but we’re convinced the car itself is out there somewhere in a garage–and we want that one back. “There is no confirmed record of destruction,” he said, “and we have no first-hand accounts of the car being sent up to War Whoops or cut up for scrap.”
Faloon may not be far off. After all, nobody thought the 1953 Cadillac Le Mans owned by Bud Goodman would surface again.
Or the second 1955 Bonneville Special. Now, who was that fellow in Washington, D.C., again?
Floyd Akers?
