Muntz Jets, Cosworth Vegas to take place of (dis)honor at Concours d’LeMons

Photo by Thomas DeMauro.

Whether a badge of honor or a slap across the face, the Concours d’LeMons has put out the invitation for Muntz Jets and Cosworth Vegas for its California event.

Given the concours organizers’ self-imposed mission to celebrate “the Oddball, Mundane and truly Awful of the automotive world,” it makes sense that they chose to highlight a car built by and named after a man with the nickname “madman”- even as the cars now sell for six figures at auction.

Based on the Frank Kurtis’s eponymous 1949 sports car, the Muntz Jet came about when Earl Muntz – a Los Angeles-based used car dealer and television manufacturer – bought the rights and the tooling for the Kurtis and began to market it with an asking price well beyond any Cadillac then on the market. For three years he sold the Jet straight out of the factory, making a few changes along the way: He stretched Kurtis’s two-seater sports car into a four-seater; he moved production from Los Angeles to Elgin, Illinois; and he wavered between V-8s provided by Cadillac and Lincoln.

However, at the end of the production run – with somewhere between 198 and 394 total Jets built, nobody seems able to say for sure – Muntz walked away from the venture having lost a bald fortune. According to Jeff Koch, writing in the April 2017 issue of Hemmings Classic Car, the Muntz Jet ultimately cost Muntz the equivalent of at least several million in today’s dollars. “The Muntz Jet is an outlier in the man’s business history, if only because it wasn’t a raging success – and it’s all the more interesting for it,” Koch wrote.

Photo by Jeff Koch.

The Cosworth Vega, on the other hand, represented a serious effort by two serious car companies to enhance a punchline of a car. Initiated by John DeLorean, the Cosworth was more than just a fancy engine plopped into a subcompact with quality issues – suspension and cooling upgrades accompanied the fancy trim and wheels – but “fancy engine plopped into a subcompact with quality issues” essentially sums up Chevrolet’s rationale for the model.

Cosworth, contracted before the Vega’s launch to turn the Vega’s four-cylinder engine into a race engine, certainly made its best effort, ultimately developing a 2.0-liter double-overhead-camshaft engine capable of 270 horsepower. However, the basic design of the alloy blocks Chevrolet provided Cosworth for testing and development purposes couldn’t support such radical alterations. As pointed out in the December 2007 issue of Hemmings Classic Car, Cosworth itself later described the engine as a “debacle.”

Regardless, Chevrolet decided to go forth with a limited-edition performance model bolstered with the Cosworth name but equipped with a Chevrolet-detuned version of the Cosworth engine featuring just 110 net horsepower. Notably, the Cosworth Vega became the first American production car to feature electronic fuel injection and not face a recall for the fuel-injection system. A little more than 3,500 were built for the 1975 and 1976 model years, a figure hampered by the price tag more than double that of a base Vega hatchback.

This year’s Concours d’LeMons will take place August 19 at Seaside City Hall in Seaside, California. The Michigan Concours d’LeMons will take place July 29 at the Inn at St. John’s in Plymouth, Michigan. For more information on the shows, visit ConcoursdLeMons.com.