Avanti

Oh how I hate the monstrosities Excalibur made from the Series 2 on, like the one currently "gracing" the Forum home-page. Much of it was dictated by emerging Fed regs of the era but a lot was from catering to the market and what it demanded. For years the Stevens Bros did okay making such things, though.

However, such behemoths make it easy to forget the all too rare (97 total) early roadsters that were real sports cars using Vette drive-trains. I spoke with Denise McCluggage from time to time about her efforts to race one of the early cars and the race promoters repeatedly refusing to let her enter. In her words, they didn't want their expensive thorough-breds beat by a Studebaker chassis sporting a Chevy engine. I had the good fortunate to sit in one in the mid-'60s when an upper class-man (at a small, central-Kansas undergrad school I attended) drove his dad's to school. Much more often he drove the ol' man's 4-wheeled Morgan. I tried for many years to buy one of the earliest Xs but for equally many years failed... for various reasons.

Over that time, I managed to become something of a pseudo-expert on the things, writing about them for various outlets and trying to correct a small portion of the considerable false info that abounds about them.

Anyway, for some totally silly and pointless reason I felt the need to respond to the "thing" shown on the Forum main-page. Hence, here is the real X, in this instance mine. I've traced as many as a third of the original 97 cars having gone to Europe over the years, but to my knowledge mine is the only one to have been repatriated. So,here is the 62nd one built and originally sold to a young real-estate heir in New Orleans, before going to Europe to appear in a French movie, among other weirdnesses.

The second pic below is to put it into a commonly understood context. Thanks.

(Okay, it wouldn't load my pix here...)