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This Month, It’s The American Ferrari! It’s …
The Apollo GT 1962-1965
✪ The Apollo GT is a 2-door Italian-American sports car produced first by International Motor Cars of Oakland, California and later by Vanguard Industries of Dallas, Texas and Apollo International. It was created as the American answer to European GTs like the Jaguar E-Type and Ferrari 250 GT.
Apollo 3500 GT 1962-1965
The history of sports cars is littered with ambitious people with big dreams pooling their money together in an attempt to make the ultimate car. They often run out of money and close their doors after production of only a few units. Creating a successful sports car company from scratch isn’t as easy as it looks; Enzo Ferrari, Ferruccio Lamborghini, Donald Healey and Carroll Shelby are among the handful of people in the modern era who have done it successfully. Sometimes the cars are just horribly styled or have abysmal engineering, but others are fantastic and have serious potential. However, talent, style and clever engineering cannot overcome a lack of capital coming in. Such was the case of the Apollo GT, yet another marriage of Italian styling and American running gear. It was a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and one worth repeating to each new generation of would-be Enzos about the pitfalls of building sports cars.
The Apollo GT was the brainchild of three Northern California friends; engineer Milt Brown, his high-school friend, body designer Ron Plescia and Ned Davis. They wanted to build an American answer to European GTs of the time like the Aston Martin DB4, Ferrari 250 GT and Jaguar E-Type, but with more reliable American engines, transmissions and other parts. A close inspection of the body shows the resemblance to the Ferrari and Jaguar; it featured hand-built Italian bodywork by Turin-based Intermeccanica and was available as a two-seat fastback or convertible.
Car-crazy young Brown bought his first car at age 13, a 1935 Chevrolet. By 17 he had built a Crosley Formula Junior racecar, which he sold to finance a car-guy dream trip to Europe to visit as many famous sportscar factories and races as possible. He miscalculated his budget and ran out of money while on the other side of the Atlantic, and took a job with British racecar manufacturer Connaught. While employed by Connaught, he met Frank Reisner, owner of Turin-based Carrozzeria Intermeccanica at the 1960 Monaco Grand Prix. Brown explained that he wanted to build a luxury GT, and Reisner jumped at the chance to make one. A deal was struck and soon Intermeccanica would be building bodies for Brown at a fraction of the cost of more well-established coachbuilders like Bertone, Ghia or Pininfarina. Back in the US , Brown set up shop as International Motorcars in Oakland, California and the first hand-formed Apollo bodies were shipped from the Intermeccanica shop in Turin to Oakland in the summer of 1962, where the drivetrain and other mechanicals would be installed. The prototype was designed by Brown’s friend Ron Plescia, but that initial design was flawed with limited rear visibility and too long of a nose. Reisner commissioned former Bertone stylist Franco Scaglione to update it and fix the flaws. Scaglione added rear quarter windows, a tapered tail and shortened the nose to create a beautiful and balanced long-hood, short rear deck fastback coupe with quarter-bumpers and an eggcrate grill that echoed both the E-Type and several Ferraris.
Brown also made sure that the narrow 2-seat cockpit was spacious enough to accommodate tall, well-fed Americans, six feet plus people who simply wouldn’t fit into an E-Type. Brown also utilized his engineering skills to design a tube chassis with coil spring suspension to compliment the beautiful body. The transmission tunnel was overly large to provide airflow around the gearbox. The interior, aside from some offset GM-syle pedals, is authentically Italian with its wooden steering wheel, dashboard-mounted rearview mirror, hand-stitched leather seats and plenty of switches and gauges trimmed in chrome. Says Brown, “It was my idea to keep the lettering on the gauges in Italian, and I always thought that a sports car should have a grab handle. It gives the subtle message that this is a fast car.” Hot Rod magazine praised the interior, considering it to be comparable to cars costing twice as much as the Apollo. The prototype was all-aluminum, but the production cars were mostly steel with only the hoods and doors made of the alloy. The finished design is the stunning car that became the Apollo GT 3500. Now it needed a drivetrain.
That drivetrain came in the form of Buick‘s new 190 HP all-aluminum 3.5 liter (215 cu. in.) V8 that weighed only 300 lbs., providing an excellent power-to-weight ratio as well as a favorable front-to-rear weight distribution. An increase in compression ratio bumped the HP to 200 with a single 4-barrel carb. This was mated to a Borg-Warner T10 4-speed manual transmission with Corvette gear ratios. The engine sat well back in the engine compartment and sat slightly askew. Offenhauser manifolds carried exhaust gases away. The front sub-frame and suspension were Buick, as was the rear trailing-link suspension, which mates easily to the square-steel frame rail chassis that Brown engineered. Bendix disc brakes provided stopping power up front and the rear brakes were Chevrolet drum units. Brown quickened the Buick steering ratio by lengthening the drop arm, resulting in a very light and direct steering feel. The high percentage of Buick parts meant that any Buick mechanic could work on the car in case of a breakdown, a definite plus for the owner as European sports cars required specialist mechanics and pricey imported parts to fix. Due to the high Buick content of the car, Davis had hoped to sell the Apollo through Buick dealers, but GM objected to selling a non-GM built product in its dealerships and IMC was left with no distribution network. The entire package was neutral-handling in corners and refined in a straight line, so you never felt like you were fighting with the car. An automatic transmission was an available option, as were Borrani wire wheels. Buick‘s all-aluminum V8 would also be shipped to the UK to become the Rover V8, also used to power the mid-70s MGB GT V8.
The finished prototype was shown at the Los Angeles Auto Show in January of 1963. The production Apollo 3500 GT had a base price of $5,987, less than a Ferrari but more than direct competitor Jaguar‘s E-Type at $5,500. Initial response was positive, the car looked like a cross between the E-Type and Ferrari‘s 250 GT. The prototype was not without flaws, however, and IMC did its best to address those and by the time the first production car was ready in 1963 they had been. It went like a Ferrari too, with a claimed 130 MPH top speed, 7.3 second 0-60 time and 15.4 second ¼ mile, impressive for the day and just slower than the Ferrari 250 GT, but considerably slower than a Jaguar E-Type. This isn’t surprising since the car weighed 2,485 lbs., 700 lbs. less than a Corvette of the day despite the latter’s fiberglass body. This was a comfortable high-speed touring GT after all, not a primitive speed-at-all-costs road rocket. Roadholding was good considering the Buick suspension underpinnings, but the addition of a front anti-sway bar did much to improve the handling. The press response was extremely positive, with Hot Rod magazine declaring “Workmanship is of the highest quality. Panels fit well, doors close with authority, and the interiors are comparable to cars costing twice that of the Apollo.” Science and Mechanics magazine commented “the Apollo handles as well or better than a 2 + 2 Ferrari, an Aston Martin DB4, or a Sting Ray Corvette.”
The initial press response was encouraging enough for Apollo to commission a convertible model in 1963 from Intermeccanica, although only 11 were ever built. In the words of Brown himself, “I was in Italy at Intermeccanica coming up with improvements for the coupe in spring ’63. We knew we were going to have a stand at the San Francisco Auto Show in the fall and had talked about a convertible, so we got on the phone to Scaglione, talked about it, had a meeting – and two days later he came back with sketches. We said, ‘Fine, let’s go ahead,’ and the car arrived a month before the show. Because of this car we got a premium spot, much better than Ferrari.” The convertible Spider models used the 250 HP iron-block/aluminum head Buick 4.9 liter (300 cu. in.) V8, which also powered the updated coupe version, the 5000 GT.
Carrozzeria Intermeccanica
Frank Reisner, a former chemical engineer born in Hungary but raised in Canada and educated in the US, fell in love with Italy on a honeymoon trip there in 1959 and found a deep infrastructure of artisans and stylists as well as skilled fabricators and bodymen. He established Carrozzeria Intermeccanica initially to supply tuning kits for Renaults, Peugeots and Simcas, but later started building complete auto bodies, painted and trimmed, for the Apollo GT as well as others.
Apollo 5000 GT 1964-1965
The 5000 GT was created in response to calls for more power and persistent production problems from Buick with the all-aluminum 3.5 liter V8. Initially IMC wanted to use the 300 HP Chevrolet 327 from the Corvette, but that engine required oil pan modifications to fit in the chassis and only one was built by IMC, although a few were built later with the 327. In the meantime, Buick had come out with their 250 HP 4.9 liter (300 cu. in.) iron-block and aluminum head V8, which required no such modifications. However, this new, 150 lb. heavier Buick engine completely changed the driving characteristics of the car, and in the view of people who had driven both cars, not for the better. The larger engine did improve performance; a 6.2 second 0-60 time and a 14.6 ¼ mile at 93 MPH which was now faster than the Jaguar E-Type, but handling suffered despite a theoretically more favorable weight distribution.
Financial Woes / Vetta Ventura
Thinking that they needed a roomier model, a 2 + 2 prototype was made up and shown in New York in 1965, also shown the following year as the Griffith GT, but it never got beyond prototype stage. A California Buick dealership ordered 50 Apollos despite GM‘s misgivings, and IMC had its biggest customer. Some snooping by Buick corporate management revealed that the dealer was re-badging the Apollos as Buicks, and that deal came to a screeching halt. Brown also hadn’t figured enough profit into the car, and by 1965 the writing was on the wall. IMC completed 42 cars, then ran out of money and sought outside capital. Shipping the completed bodies from Italy was a huge expense, a succession of angel investors failed to deliver their funding, and eventually lack of capital and cash flow meant that the business was unsustainable, despite the positive press and demand for the car. As a stop-gap measure to keep production going and keep their supplier Intermeccanica afloat, they allowed the sale of the Intermeccanica bodies and chassis’ to Vanguard Industries of Dallas, Texas, owned by Frank Ricketts, who would produce and market the same car under the Vetta Ventura name while IMC sought new financing, but Vanguard only produced 11 Vetta Venturas. Shop foreman Tom Johnson purchased 11 leftover units from Intermeccanica and completed them for Dallas-based Precision Motors, an import-car dealership, with the last one selling in 1971. When no influx of cash surfaced, IMC sold its assets.
Apollo International
Attorney Robert Stevens of Pasadena, California bought the remaining assets of IMC and set up Apollo International to make a third attempt to produce the Apollo GT, ordering 24 body shells from Intermeccanica but completing only 14 cars. Foreman Otto Becker completed and sold another 6. 4 body shells were left unclaimed at the docks in Los Angeles and were seized by U.S. Customs officials. The units were sold by U.S. Customs sometime in the 1980s to Ken Dumiere, who completed the cars and sold them off.
After the demise of the Apollo GT, Intermeccanica moved all of their production in-house rather than just making bodies and rolling chassis’ to be exported for completion. They later developed the Griffith, the Murena GT, the Veltro 1500, the Phoenix, Omega and the Italia. They also produced the Griffin, a re-worked version of the prototype Apollo 2 + 2. They relocated from Turin to California in 1975. When Frank Reisner passed away in 2001, Intermeccanica passed to Frank’s son Henry and they relocated again to Vancouver, where they are still based, producing Porsche 356 replica bodies.
Had IMC found the capital it needed, the demand was there and the car could have been the success that it deserved to be and taken on the British and Italian GT coupes on its home soil. Brown said of the 3500 GT, “We got instant acclaim, particularly in LA, about 70% of our production went to Hollywood. Car culture in the ‘60s was ‘you are what you drive’ and it made a big impression; it looked expensive, but it was easy to drive and live with.” The Hollywood connection was real as the car was sold to celebrities such as Pat Boone, and it did make it into a film, not as the Apollo GT but the “Thorndyke Special” in the 1969 Disney classic The Love Bug. Most movie-goers assumed that it was either a Ferrari or some one-off design made for the movie. It is a much less ephemeral car than its fleeting image suggests, competently engineered by a man who had a good eye for what makes exotic car buyers’ toes curl. The Apollo is largely unknown due to its rarity, but it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Americans could design a car just as capable as any from Aston Martin, Ferrari, Jaguar or Maserati, and much less expensive to maintain. Just 88 examples were sold, between the 3500 GT, 5000 GT, Apollo Spider and Vetta Ventura models, in reality the same car with different names except the 5000 GT. 79 coupes and 9 Spiders were sold and 5 of the Spiders still exist, with only one of these produced with the original 3.5 liter V8. The other 8 were fitted with the 4.9 liter Buick engine from the 5000 GT. ✪
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