America’s prototype sports car, the 1934 Ford Model 40 Special Speedster, is reimagined for the 21st century.
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Even if you don’t really know your automotive history, chances are you know who Edsel Ford is, or at least his first name—one that’s now forever associated with the disastrous car brand that bore it. That wasn’t his fault. By that time, he’d been dead for years, and his family didn’t even want his name on the car.
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But if you do know your history, then you know Edsel was the man behind the modernization of Ford in the 1920s and ’30s. Bonus points if you’ve heard of the custom one-off Model 40 Special Speedster, a car that served as the culmination of everything he and the Ford Motor Company knew about designing, building, and selling cars during that era.
Edsel’s father, Henry Ford, was a lot of things. Some of them good, others very bad. One thing he was not was an automotive stylist. As far as Henry was concerned, the Model T was all the car anyone would ever need and the purpose of the bodywork was to keep you in and the elements out. Edsel, however, understood the difference between need and want. He knew that eye-catching design was one of the keys to selling cars, that car buying is rarely a rational decision based on objective metrics.
Edsel helped establish the first design studio at Ford and soon commissioned its first designer, Eugene T. “Bob” Gregorie, in 1934 to design Ford’s first sports car. Putting his own spin on the sporty European cars he loved (he imported the first Morgan to the U.S.), Edsel envisioned a roofless speedster in the style of an Indy 500 racer with the driver all the way at the back behind a massive hood covering a big, powerful engine.
Gregorie put those ideas to paper, the Ford Engineering Laboratory was called in to create a sporty chassis from the new Model 40 sedan’s ladder frame, and the idled Ford Aircraft plant handled the aluminum body and tubular aluminum frame holding it up. The new, 221-cubic-inch 75-hp flathead V-8 was fitted to it, and the car was painted Edsel’s favorite color, Pearl Essence Gunmetal Dark. It was arguably America’s first factory-built sports car, created a full 19 years before Chevrolet’s Corvette.
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The real deal: The original Ford Model 40 Special Speedster