One can look back at practically any decade in the history of the automobile and think, “What a bizarre time!” Take the 1910s, with huge-displacement engines cranking out horsepower numbers similar to one of today’s hot hatches. Or the 1950s, an era of fins and chrome and chrome with fins and finned chrome with chromed chrome and finned fins. And, of course, the impact-bumpered sloths of the 1970s that seemed bent on returning large-displacement engines to horsepower-per-liter numbers not seen since 1914. (Plus two opera windows in every garage and a landau in every carport!) But the 1960s might just have been the weirdest decade of them all, with offbeat experiments in styling and production happening all over the globe. Racetracks were filled with specials of every stripe and configuration, and television and film were making great use of the skills of California customizers who had set up shop in Los Angeles during the 1950s. Into the middle of all that fell the Piranha.
Developed by Marbon Chemical, a division of automotive supplier Borg-Warner, as a way to sell automakers on the efficacy of its new body-grade plastic, Cycolac, the CRV (Cycolac Research Vehicle) concept car caught the attention of plastic-model manufacturer AMT. The Michigan-based company decided to get into the life-size car business with the help of customizing legend Gene Winfield, and intended to produce 50 Corvair-powered versions of the CRV per year. The car got a real name—Piranha—and AMT commissioned a Cycolac-bodied dragster powered by a 1400-hp 392 Hemi to promote it. That, not surprisingly, isn’t the car you see here. This is the sports-racing version, powered—like the roadgoing variant—by a Corvair engine and campaigned in various SCCA events in 1967 and 1968 by Dick Carbajal.
Carbajal eventually sold the car. At some point later, it was converted to road duty and wound up under a tarp in Santa Clara, California, which is how Livermore resident Frank Zucchi ran across the curious beast. Zucchi restored the car to its former glory and has been campaigning it at various races since 2006. We happened upon the car while stumbling around the paddock at this year’s Monterey Motorsports Reunion at Laguna Seca, a font of “who-knew-this-existed?” oddness if ever there was one. As for the Piranha project as a whole? It fell apart not long after Zucchi’s car originally went racing. GM killed the Corvair, drying up the supply of engines, and AMT found it too hard to meet the $5000 price point it had set for the street versions. Only a few were built, most notably a version featured on The Man From U.N.C.LE., leaving Zucchi’s racer one of the stranger footnote vehicles from a racing era full of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment