Make no mistake. The engineers who come up with cars like the Koenigsegg, Bugatti, McLaren, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche and Consulier are brilliant and their cars are fantastic, but there’s a good reason why they hire the best designers to come up with the most exciting styling for their mechanicals.
Consulier proved, once and for all, that good looks count for more than performance. A sexy bodywork is more important than a car’s lightness, and no amount of composite is going to persuade someone wearing suits that cost more than family cars to spend their money on something unattractive.
Consulier made a car that’s three decades ahead of its time, but I have to explain that a Consulier is not a mob lawyer.
Consulier was a supercar made entirely out of composites. It was the first production car with a full composite monocoque and it came out when cellphones looked like small briefcases.
The problem with the Consulier was that it was designed and built by an economist who was persuaded by an emergency-room doctor that he should build a lightweight composite sports car.
The economist is Warren Mosler, an influential figure in post-Keynesian economics and had written books on fiat money in Modern Monetary Theory and Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.
The emergency room doctor was Benjamin ‘Dick’ Respess, who was not just a brilliant student but also good enough to be called for a tryout with the New York Giants American football team.
These two guys are smart, but if you asked either of them to draw his dream car, it would look like an eight year old had sketched it.
The doctor had a love for composites and had established Respess Composites Inc. and when the two men met, he suggested that a lightweight non-metal monocoque could be built and a car based on Volkswagen mechanicals would tip the scales at no more than 545kg.
That got the economist thinking about supercar performance using a family car engine, if they could build one that weighed in around 900kg.
Amazingly, the doctor delivered on his promise and built a 125kg full-composite chassis.
What was more impressive was the fact that the car was designed without using computers; it was done by instinct.
In fact, some people say it was designed without using a computer, just strings, rulers, pencils and a calculator.
It’s something to sit down and figure out how to build a composite monocoque now when everyone has heard about it, and you probably can find a YouTube idiot’s guide on building composite cars.
But doing it then, when no one had done it and done by a chap who is more familiar with plaster of paris than fibreglass or carbon fiber, is astonishing.
The origin story is a sketchy but apparently Respess built a prototype and figured out the rest from there and came up with a shape that was optimised for strength and rigidity. It was not a pretty shape.
If a company that made jelly or cake moulds were to make one for novelty race-car shaped cakes and jellies, this is what it would look like.
While the Consulier’s shape has been known to make some shake involuntarily, it was steeped in technology.
We are not sure if Respess was an aerodynamic genius, but the car’s glassfibre, carbon and foam composite monocoque design was pretty good out of the box, and apart from a large spoiler tacked on to the back for racing, it was competitive from the get-go.
Mosler didn’t muck about with the rest of the car. The suspension was designed by Indycar suspension expert McKee Engineering and the rest of the car was stripped down from a Dodge Daytona, including the 2.2 litre four-cylinder Chrysler Turbo II engine.
They decided on a production four-cylinder engine because it meant reliability and since the car’s monocoque weighed less than the average American person, it didn’t much power to get it going.
The engine cranked out 175hp in early trim and later upgraded to 195 horses. Hardly earth shattering, but it was good enough for Mosler to offer US$25,000 for any car that could beat it in a race track.
American Magazine Car and Driver found a Consulier at a racing school and, legend has it, they pitted this car, which had worn brakes and tyres, against a new Corvette. It lost.
Mosler didn’t want to pay and asked for a rematch, which the magazine declined. They wrote about what happened and Mosler didn’t come out looking good. The racing followed because they needed to prove how good the car was.
The Consulier began competing soon after and took part in the Nelson Legends 24 hours. Turbo failure meant the they couldn’t capitalise on the pole and second starting position, ending up 14th.
They came back and won the race for three years running. The organisers told Mosler that once a car won the race three times, it couldn’t race anymore. They made up the rule because they didn’t want Mosler to dominate the race.
After that, he took part in the IMSA Supercar Series and qualified first, second, fourth and fifth in the first attempt and won its first race.
Soon the organisers banned the Consulier. Details on why the car was banned are not easy to find, but they were banned.
The Consulier was in production for 15 years from 1985 to the turn of the millennium before being succeeded by the equally mental Mosler MT900.
In the end, only 83 cars were built and its failure can be pinned on the fact that no one wants to buy an ugly supercar, not even if it was economical, affordable and reliable.
A check online showed that these cars fetch around US$100,000.
Mosler attempted to run for the United States presidency in 2012, and gave up the race early because there was no chance for anyone going up against Barack Obama for a second term.
