"Impression" -- Chip Foose's Reimagined '37 Ford Roadster

For a reason I've never been able to explain, I've never been a hot rod or kustom kar fancier.  Somehow, I always thought that tangible, production-based cars should remain stock.  This excepts those expensive classic cars of yore by coachbuilding firms that worked from a bare chassis-plus-frontal-metalwork.  Ditto concept cars.

The present post deals with what at first might seen to be a 'rod with a kustom body.  But it's not.  It's the Impression, an essentially-built-from-scratch (as best I can tell) car with modern components having a body inspired by 1930s Fords.

The design-builder is Chip Foose, trained in industrial design at the famed Art Center in Pasadena.   His web site is here.

Impression, a commissioned car costing a huge amount of money, appeared in 2006 and won an important design contest, as reported in Autoweek here.  The article mentions:

"That car was the one everyone generally acknowledged would go home with the nine-foot-tall trophy for America’s Most Beautiful Roadster. That car, the Impression, was designed and built by Chip Foose and is owned by Ken Reister. Other owners quoted costs from $1.6 million to $2.2 million, depending on how much they wanted to emphasize the gap between their cars and Foose’s. Neither Reister nor Foose would say how much it cost, and who really keeps track once they hit seven figures, anyway? But Foose did say the car sports 4000 handcrafted pieces and was started six years ago. True, it sat for about three and a half years while Foose and company tended to other projects, but this one got a lot of attention. ...

"'There’s some ’34, ’36 and ’37,' Foose told us, as he set up the display around the Impression. 'I took my favorite cues from those and from 1930s Mercedes influences. Everything was as if you took a ’36 or ’37 Ford and modernized it—if you had a stock ’36 or ’37 next to it, you would see the resemblance.'"

Below are paired images of Foose's Impression and a rare, non-customized '37 Ford so that you can evaluate his work given that starting point.  Photos of the 1937 Ford DeLuxe Roadster are from RM Sotheby's auction web site.  Those of the Impression were taken by me at the Petersen Automotive Museum in the Spring of 2017. Click on any of them to enlarge.

Gallery

This is the museum's plaque.  It refers to Impression as being derived from a 1936 Ford design.

Here is a 1936 Ford.  Little of it is apparent on Foose's design.  Below are comparison photos of Impression and a 1937 Ford.

Front quarter views.  The Impression is lower and therefore visually longer.  The grille is raked back at a greater angle, plus there are no hood side vents.  Also missing are bumpers, this allowing Foose's sculpting to be better appreciated.

Impression's driving position is farther aft than on an actual '37 Ford.  This side view shows its hot rod design heritage in its notionally lowered chassis and the resulting awkward relationships of the wheels to the fender wheel openings.  I hate those chromed wheels that totally contrast with the otherwise clean design.  But (sigh) it's supposed to be a hot rod, so we just have to deal with it.

The real Ford has a rumble seat, a detail Foose probably wisely omitted.

1937 Fords were designed by Briggs, the company's body supplier.  According to Henry Dominguez (here, page 146), Edsel Ford told Briggs to use E.T. (Bob) Gregorie's Lincoln Zephyr frontal design features.  Both the Ford and the Impression have functional headlight components behind styled glass facings.

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Continental Mk II Design Competition

The original Lincoln Continental was iconic, beloved, and considered an automobile styling masterpiece by many observers.  Some background on it can be found here (scroll down for discussions of the Edsel Ford prototype and early production generations).  The original design was marketed during the 1939-1941 model years.  A facelift appeared for the short 1942 model year and there was some further facelifting for 1946-1948.  Model year 1949 brought redesigned Lincolns to market, and Ford Motor Company elected to not offer a Continental model.  This bothered some potential buyers who made their views loudly known, so eventually Ford decided to revive the Continental, this time as a separate, very exclusive brand (Wikipedia entry here).

William Clay Ford, youngest grandson of Henry Ford, was placed in charge of the new Continental project.  An initial design by his team was poorly received by company president Henry Ford II and others, so Bill had to come up with Plan B, a design competition.  What happened is described by Michael Lamm & Dave Holls in their authoritative book "A Century of Automotive Style," pp. 146-147:

* * * * *
[William Clay Ford, in charge of the Continental project] asked his staff to suggest names of outside stylists, and the groups invited were: George Walker Assoc., consultant to Ford Motor Co.; [Buzz] Grisinger & [Rhys] Miller, independent designers, previously with Chrysler and Kaiser-Frazer; Vince Gardner, formerly with Cord and Loewy; and Henry [Ford] II's brother-in-law, Walter Buhl Ford, who later merged with Harley Earl Assoc.

The Continental project now became a five-way contest.  The four outside teams would receive $10,000 each for their Mark II designs, chosen or not.  To keep everything fair and consistent, each team had to deliver side- plan- and end-view drawings plus 3/4-front and 3/4-rear perspective sketches.  Rules stipulated that all artwork had to be the same size, same matting, use the same supplied perspective grids and be of the same color.   No sketches could be signed or identified.   Judges -- five executives from Lincoln -- could cast only one vote each and had to pass through the final display area separately so they couldn't talk, nod or read each other's body language.

The final judging took place in Apr. 1953, and the design that ended up winning the competition came from Bill Ford's own Special Products group [the team led by John Reinhart].

* * * * *
One thing to keep in mind is the styling fashion context of the competition and the resulting production car.  The Continental Mk. II appeared for 1956, the same year the Studebaker Golden Hawk and the Chrysler Corporation line began sprouting tail fins.  Elaborate two-tone paint schemes were found on some 1954 Oldsmobiles and three-tones appeared on 1955 Dodges.  Panoramic (wraparound) windshields were found on a few 1953 Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs, then in 1954 all Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs had them.  Contrasting all this, the Continental was very conservative, having only a moderately wrapped windshield, a single-color paint job and no tail fins.  So to some degree the Mark II fit more closely to 1952-53 when it was designed than for its actual model year.  On the other hand, even in 1953 its stylists were probably aware of the near-term new concepts and they or management chose to ignore them.

Decent images of the competing designs are hard to find on the Internet, so I had to resort to scanning images from books in my automotive library.  The design renderings are from Automobile Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1974, pp. 100-101.  Side drawings are from "Lincoln & Continental: The Postwar Years" by Paul R. Woudenberg (Motorbooks International, 1980), p. 72.  Click on the images to enlarge.

Gallery

1940 Lincoln Continental Club Coupe
This is the Real McCoy.  Future Continental designs had to either speak to it or consciously ignore it (at their peril).

1948 Lincoln Continental Club Coupe - RM Southey's photo
The last Lincoln Continental using original bodywork and facelift features from 1942 and 1946.

1956 Continental Mk. II
The result of the competition and later refinement.  Features echoing the original Continental include: a long hood (by the mid-1950s, long trunks were coming into fashion, hoods becoming shorter); somewhat similar passenger greenhouse, including the general shape of aft side windows and the large C-pillar; and the spare tire at the rear (the hump on the trunk lid was atop the actual tire mounted in an angled position beneath it).

I don't think any of the design proposals makes for an appropriate successor to the original Continental.  Some details here and there are not bad, but the overall designs are lacking the right stuff.  A consistent problem has to do with grilles and front ends in general; most of these designs are bland, characterless.  The best of the lot, an opinion I've held for many years, is the second (lower) Grisinger-Miller design.  I don't like its front and the little fins at the rear, but the rest of the design comes closest to the spirit (not the details) of the original.

As can be seen in these side views, the designers had very little flexibility in basic layout of the car.

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Albrecht Goertz Messes with the Phantom Corsair

One of the most iconic automobile designs of the 1930s was the Phantom Corsair of 1938, intended as the prototype of a hyper-expensive luxury cruiser.  Michael Lamm provides useful background here, as does this article.

The Phantom Corsair was the brainchild of Yale dropout Rust Heinz of the "57 Varieties" Heinz family.  The body was crafted by Maurice Schwartz of the famous Bohman & Schwartz coachworks in Pasadena, California. Heinz died in a car crash in 1939, ending plans to produce more Phantom Corsairs.  Today the car is part of the National Automobile Museum (The Harrah Collection) in Reno, Nevada that occasionally sends it out for display.

Lamm mentions some of the hands the Phantom Corsair passed through, but the one who interests us is Herb Shriner, a show business personality whose career peaked in the early 1950s, around the time he acquired the car.

According to Lamm, Shriner thought the Phantom Corsair was too prone to overheating, so he brought in stylist Albrecht Goertz, perhaps best known for designing the BMW 507, to design some alterations.  These alterations are little seen on the internet, and my contribution in this post is a page from a short-lived automobile magazine that deals with the car.

A nice image of the Phantom Corsair found in many places on the Internet: I don't know its origin.

Paulette Goddard and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. posing with the Phantom Corsair that will be called the "Flying Wombat" in their movie "The Young at Heart." This shows the small air intakes for the radiator, inspiring Shriner to commission a redesign.

This is the only photo I could find of the restyled Phantom Corsair as completed.

Here is the page from the March 1954 issue of Cars magazine (a short-lived offshoot of Mechanix Illustrated).  Aside from the cosmetic two-tone paint job, Goertz's contribution was grille openings somewhat similar to those on 1953 Studebakers, along with eliminating the little louvres on the original nose.  Click on it to enlarge.

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Tasco: Gordon Buehrig's Mistake

Gordon Buehrig (1904-1990) was one of the greatest automobile designers.  His best-known and most highly regarded designs were for the 1935 Auburn 851 Boattail Speedster and, especially, the 1936-37 Cord 810 and 812 models. A brief Wikipedia biography is here.

Being human, not all of his designs were so successful, his worst being the 1948-vintage Tasco.

Buehig described his Tasco experience in his autobiography.  Below are some excerpts from pages 120-123:
* * * * *Someone once said, "Show me a man who never made a mistake and I'll show you a man who never did anything."  It helps a little.

The Tasco, you might say, was my personal Edsel ... it still exists to haunt me...

They [the other Tasco investors] were probably right [that it should be a large sort of MG] and I was probably wrong, because I kept insisting on a closed car with a new type of top which I had in mind, employing twin removable panels on each side...

Ultimately, as we can see now, I was right [that a closed sports car was the way to go].  But had I gone along with my associates' desires at the time, we might have been successful with an open car.  After getting established we could have developed the more complicated closed variety...

[One investor] showed me a lot of pictures he had collected, including some design sketches by Claire Hodgman published in the English magazine Motor.  One of these was a sports car with front fenders that turned with the wheels.  [He] was intrigued with this feature and suggested it be an integral part of the design...

I made two 1/8th scale models.  the first was fairly well detailed, showing the windshield and window layout, the turning front fenders and the first concept of the top I planned to use.  the second model was just a shape which I never finished in detail.  This one lacked the turning fenders and was the one I personally preferred.

As I went into the turning fender problem, I became more skeptical of the merits of the idea... [Showing the models to the investor] his reaction to the second model was that it resembled the Buick fastback and was not sufficiently different to command a market...

At this point I made a crucial mistake.  I should have refused to retain the turning front fenders because I was aware of the problems they would entail.  But at the time I thought I could work them out...

One of my more serious mistakes, which largely contributed to the broken-up lines of the finished car, was the conflict of the daylight openings or glass areas with the overall design.

* * * * *
The prototype Tasco was built by Derham, the well-known Philadelphia-area coachbuilder.  Here are some images of the unfortunate design.

Gallery

Buehrig with Tasco 1/8th model.

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