The Larson Engineering Special

What do you call a handmade car built by a 20 something name Bob Larson and old enough to have been in the original Detroit Autorama? You call it the Larson Engineering special and it is a treasure trove of clever ideas and hellish ergonomics. We're not implying anything, but if this is the car responsible for the whole scissor doors thing, we're way less excited by it. Still the way they operate is pretty clever, sort of a pivot on a carrier mounted to a parallelogram hinge and secured with a shot pin latch, not bad for 1953, but not even the tip of the iceberg for this car.

Larson Engineering Special

Novel ideas don't end there. The car has been sort of a test bed for go-faster ideas seeing all kinds of changes and updates over the years. When it was originally built, it pucked the trend of a front mounted solid axle with trailing arms and instead went with a swing axle design allowing for the low stance. Since anybody who's studied chassis physics will tell you a swing axle sucks for driving dynamics, the car was again upgraded with a double wishbone and coilover setup which it still retains. Motiviation comes via a compact V6 V8 which we could not discern but was equipped with some cool parts. The open headers have a cutout valve operated by a cable which runs down the center of the exhaust pipe and can be operated from the cabin. Speaking of cabin, even though it's a cool looking ride, the driver space looks like a special kind of hell. Looking at one of the mods in particular, the big scoops behind the front suspension leading into the footwell, we're assuming that in addition to being cramped, the footwells were hotter than the fires of hades. Yikes but awesome.

Send an email to Ben, the author of this post, at ben@jalopnik.com.

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