The Crosley Super Sports Coupe

I haven't laid eyes on my Crosley Super Sports in nearly two years. It, along with most of my tools, was packed into storage when we tore down my old garage to start building the new house and shop.

If I haven't been able to work on my Super Sports, I have been able to think about the restoration and plan out exactly how I want it: color, stance, interior, frame mods, performance upgrades... even tires. I've been moving this car around in pieces for 23 years, but I finally see light at the end of the tunnel.

If you are anything like me, a tattered project car is a source of endless speculation. A nice survivor or restored car is pretty obvious: you drive it, fix whatever breaks and make minor changes that don't disrupt the feng shui of the thing. But a genuine basket case is wide open. You have to do everything over, so unless you are planning a concours restoration, you have nearly unlimited options - at least insofar as your budget and imagination will go. 

And one of the places my imagination - and my research - took me was to the Super Sports Coupe.

I think the whole thing started last year when I came across a listing for a Crosmobile Coupe for sale in a Mecum auction in Texas. The photos really caught my eye, because the car was unlike any Crosley I've ever seen. I'm not an expert on Crosmobiles, but from everything I've ever read, they were simply Crosleys rebadged for export to avoid confusion with the British Crossley auto company.  Other than hubcaps, gauges and badges, Crosmobiles were identical to stock US Crosleys. 

This Crosmobile was not that.

The car, listed as a 1947, features sleek fastback styling that is unlike anything that ever left the Crosley factory - the canted door pillars alone would never have made it past the bean counters in the head office.  The car is clearly a mild kustom - but very nicely done, and looks totally stock aside from the roofline. 

Whoever built it put a lot of thought into the project, right down to collecting all the Crosmobile goodies to rebadge what very likely started out as a plain '47 US sedan... at least that's my suspicion. Crosley produced a lot more Crosmobile badges/gauges and hubcaps than Crosmobiles, so that stuff used to turn up at Crosley Club swap meets fairly frequently. I know of a couple Crosleys that became "Crosmobiles" exactly that way, so this being a rebadged car makes more sense to me than someone shipping an actual Crosmobile all the way back to the US just to cut the roof off to make a kustom.

That said, I have to hand it to the builder - the paint and interior look great, and that fastback profile looks pretty dang good. The car ultimately sold for $13K, and I can see why.

After the auction ended, I kept going back to look at pictures of the car. Having looked at a lot of Crosleys over the years, the stance on the Mecum Crosmobile is totally unique. I think the suspension may have been lowered a bit, but most of it is that roofline. I'm not sure if whoever chopped the roof was going for a forties GM fastback look or an Italian atelier feel, but whatever they were shooting for, they got the profile on the sweep just right.

For some reason, the proportions of this car really make the original "bones" of the Hot Shot stand out to me. As all good Crosley fanatics know, the four fenders of the Hot Shot were made using the same stampers as early Crosley sedan fenders (except reversed - front sedan fenders used as Hot Shot rear; rear sedan fenders used as the Hot Shot fronts). In fact, early Hot Shots still had the sedan air vents in the back - they were welded up at the factory. If you look at the top picture of the Crosmobile you can really see the silhouette of a Hot Shot poking out of the side.

Staring at that Crosmobile long enough got me thinking: what would that roof look like on the roadster body?

There is precedent for this idea. Nash offered both a coupe and sport roadster version of their Nash-Healey; Jaguar, did the same, coming out with the XK120 Coupe in 1951 a few years after the 1948 debut of the XK120. Later on, the MGB-GT and Triumph GT6 were essentially coupe versions of popular soft top sports cars (although the GT6 also featured a bigger motor than the Spitfire it was based on.)

Given that Crosley offered a plethora of body styles and models, dropping a sedan roof on to their top-of-the-line Super Sports would not have been unthinkable - it certainly would have been a much less involved undertaking than the whole separate Farm-O-Road line. 

Curious, I fired up my photoshop to see exactly what a Super Sports Coupe would look like. I found straight profile photos of a Super Sports and a sedan, and matched the size using the wheels for scale. Even though the roadster frame is longer than the sedan frame, the lines of the roadster body and the sedan top seem to match up surprisingly well. The biggest issue would be the doors, which seem like they'd be pretty tight on the rear wheel well... and even that seems like an eminently solvable problem.

I couldn't stop thinking about this idea.  

I love the look of sport coupes, and I also love the utility of closed cars. (Did he just mention "utility" in reference to a Crosley?) An evening spent tooling around Torino with Liv and my pal Davide in his brother Mauro's MGB-GT was life-changing, and made me realize just how cool four-seat sports cars could be. And, you could lock the car!

I mocked up the illustration at the top of this article using old Crosley ad artwork, and seeing the three-quarter view made me like the idea even more.

And, my '51 SS would be the perfect starting point for this type of project. It came to me mostly intact (at least it was a "roller") but as soon as I started working on it, I realized just how big of a mess it was. The body was basically comprised of bondo, rust and bad welding repairs; whatever I do with it, it will be better than what I started with.

My mind went into overtime once I got into the idea... how could I make a Super Sports Coupe that was as close as possible to what Crosley would actually have built?... something that seemed more like a prototype than a kustom. 

I am a huge fan of kustom car builds that are painstakingly period-correct. That concept was a big motivator for the guys who started the "rat rod" movement back in the late '80s, before that term became a catchall for crappily slapped-together trash cars. If those guys could build a gow job that looked exactly like it had been put together in 1948, why couldn't I build a Crosley "faux-totype" that, looked like it could have come out of Crosley's Indiana factory?

I spent a ton of time looking at forties and fifties coupe conversions, most of which were done as showcars and prototypes by studios like Ghia in Italy for the big US automakers. The problem there is that most of those carmakers wanted something spectacular for shows, so the final products were a far cry from the spartan econoboxes Crosley specialized in. A "real" Super Sports Coupe would not be a showstopper, any more than any other Crosley.

The first thing I realized is that the sleek reworked roofline as on the kustom Crosmobile would not cut it. It would look WAY cooler for sure, but if Crosley was going to produce a coupe, he would have reused existing stampers wherever possible, just like he did in the production of the Hot Shot's fenders. I wrestled with the windows - the sliders look better and fit the sports car theme more, but roll ups were getting standard by my 1951 target date. And, looking at all those Italian coupe builds made me realize that eliminating the door pillars was a standard coupe design element. Dropping them could solve a few design problems, and might even have made a coupe cheaper to produce (always Powel Crosley's first concern). 

I spent a couple of months working out the bugs in my designs and obsessing on the idea. It was very do-able: I already had the Super Sports, and finding a donor sedan to cut the roof off of would be easy. I'm not a great welder, but from my experience with Crosley products, neither were the welders at the factory. All in all, this project didn't seem like it would be that much more difficult than restoring my car back to stock.

Then, just as easily as my vision for the Super Sports Coupe came together, it came apart. 

The fun part of the project was, like with all basket-cases, the speculation: figuring out exactly how it should look, and how it should work. Once I'd figured out what it should be - a car as close to what a real, factory Super Sports Coupe would have been  - I realized that it wasn't what I actually wanted.

I know myself well enough to know that my favorite part about owning old cars is driving them - as much, and as far as possible.  I also know Crosleys well enough to know that 100% stock cars can be stressful to drive in modern traffic, and that some well-thought upgrades can make a huge difference in driveability. A truly "authentic" 1951 Super Sports Coupe would be an amazing car to show off to other Crosley nuts, or take on the occasional Sunday cruise, but maybe not so great for driving 300 miles of mountain roads in a weekend.  

So, the design went back in the box and I returned to my original plan to build a really roadworthy Super Sports roadster that fits my goals better. I thought I'd share the story of the Super Sports Coupe here just in case someone else out there has a burning desire to build the car Crosley never did.

I sure would like to see it.