SoCal Skorpion For Sale - CHEAP!

I did an old-fashioned spit-take when I saw David Wheeler's recent post on the "Crosley Automobiles... Fun Little Cars page" on Facebook: Crosley Skorpion for sale, $5000.

For those of you not familiar with Skorpions, they were one of the most successful of first wave of DIY fiberglass-bodied sports specials. John Wills and Ralph Roberts jumped feet-first into postwar industrial experimentation with plastics, and specifically, the new miracle material, fiberglass.

Roberts first designed a rear-engined, motorcycle-powered, Crosley-chassised version of the Skorpion, then called a Wasp. When the rear engine design proved problematic, they revised the design to accommodate the entire Crosley drivetrain - a great improvement on reliability.

If the Skorpion wasn't the sexiest of the early fiberglass-bodied sports cars, it was appealingly simple: some builders bragged that they had converted a stodgy Crosley station wagon into a "sports roadster" in a weekend!

Since Wills and Roberts were based in Southern California, it is unsurprising that there is a strong Skorpion presence out here. West Coast Club member Glen Brynsvold (above) still drives the Skorpion he began building as a teenager in the fifties (took him a little more than a weekend to finish) and Service Motors' Dale Liebherr did a spectacular restoration of a Skorp that was shown by invitation at Pebble Beach. I found a nice runner for sale in the Bay Area back when I was looking for my very first Crosley, for $3250 - which seemed like a great price then, in 1997!

You can imagine, then, my shock at seeing a nice, running, driving Skorpion for not much more than they were going for 20-something years ago. 

And, David's Skorpion has very cool provenance: he got it from the original Crosley kook, Bob Carson! In a community of automotive eccentrics, Bob Carson stood out; he's best known for regularly driving his Crosleys back and forth across the country, and probably put more miles on Crosleys than any other person in the 1970s and '80s.

I first saw this car when I made my first Crosley road trip, driving 350 miles from Sacramento to Morro Bay for the 2000 West Coast Crosley Club meet. 

Back then, David was barely out of his teens, but had already impressed everyone he met with his mechanical abilities. He had brought the Skorpion and a beautifully finished hot rod Crosley sedan called the Slo-Cal Special, a tribute to the So-Cal Specials of the fifties. Both cars ran well and made the 20 mile trip from Atascadero to Morro Bay.

I don't need another car, but if I had any room in my life for one more Crosley, I'd have bought this the moment I saw it. Someone is gonna get a very cool car.