One of the pleasures of being around the kit car industry is meeting the people who have made it all happen. I recently enjoyed talking with William Hough, who does composite and body construction consulting work for a number of current kit car manufacturers. He used to work at Autodynamics, a race car construction firm in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he hobnobbed with such famous racers as Bruce McLaren and Sam Posey. Hough reminded me of a rare and very interesting kit car built by Autodynamics in 1967 and 1968, called the Hustler.
The Hustler was a VW-based kit car that looked a little like a Lotus Elan. Okay, it looked A LOT like a Lotus Elan. Autodynamics was already selling fiberglass replacement body panels for Elans, so adapting them to fit a VW chassis seemed natural. Autodynamics did not originally set out to be in the kit car business, as they intended the Hustler to be a learning step toward building their own line of street sports cars, but once they started on their kit project, they intended to do the job right.
Forged in Competition
The race car business makes the kit car industry seem positively stable and predictable. In addition to trying to guess the driver's taste in cars, race car builders must attempt to fathom the minds of rules makers bent on re-inventing the world every six months. It is a business fraught with peril, and few survive for any length of time. Autodynamics did better than most, with a long list of championships to its credit. Company founder Ray Caldwell was a successful racer who built one of the first Formula Vee racing cars. This Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) racing class featured cars based on lightly modified VW 1200 engines, transaxles, brakes, and suspension attached to a single-seat frame and a cigar-like body. The joke at the time was that they also required stock VW drivers!
Formula Vee was a huge success story, with thousands built from the early '60s until today, and the class is still going strong. Caldwell called his company Autodynamics, and his first D-1 model was highly competitive right out of the box. Hundreds of Autodynamics Vees were sold.
Caldwell had two partners: aspiring racer Sam Posey (the same Posey who is now a respected TV broadcaster) and Fred Jackson, who was vice president and treasurer. They soon spread their wings with other racing projects, like building a unique Can-Am car and running the Dodge Challenger team in the Trans-Am series.
Caldwell knew the race car biz was fickle and wanted to emulate Colin Chapman, who had built Lotus up from a low-volume race car manufacturer to a semi-successful passenger car company with the innovative Elite and Elan sports cars. Caldwell was already making replacement parts for the 'glass-bodied Elan, so he understood the technical aspects of small sports cars. However, he wanted an intermediate step before he was ready to undertake a sophisticated original design like the Elan (which utilized some Ford parts in a Lotus-designed backbone chassis). Thus, the Hustler was born.
Although the Hustler body looked a lot like an Elan, it was stretched 4 inches wider and 6 inches longer to fit on a shortened (by 10 inches) VW platform. The body was made of two sandwiched layers for extra strength and was delivered with a hood, decklid, doors, dashboard, windshield frame, soft top, simple fiberglass bucket seats, and hardware kit. The Hustler utilized a Corvette windshield and VW latches, hinges, hood releases, wipers, and side window cranks. Autodynamics would also shorten the chassis for the buyer, although the manual included instructions for doing it yourself.