A car so simple, it almost looks unfinished. It has British styling, but it’s all American. Photo courtesy of inventorpat.com as featured on the cover of Auto Age Magazine.
In pictures, they’re somewhat bland and look long. In real life, they’re tiny with great curves. A lot of them are ill-fitting, as is typical of a seventy-year-old fibreglass sports car, but the gaps and lines are easily fixed with the products and techniques of today. British sports cars were always more my thing, and honestly, I have no idea why. They had wiring issues and rust issues, everything on them was weird compared to North American standards, and they were overall purpose-built and quite basic. The Corvette of the middle sixties was much more appealing to me, as they were quickly becoming a muscle car that could slow down, stop, and turn corners. Nowadays, the dream is a British sports car with an American powertrain. The Sunbeam Tiger did it, and although the Rockefeller Yankee looked the part, it was all American, as the Yankee name implied.
The Rockefeller Yankee beat the Corvette to the punch. It just wasn’t under a big brand to help it gain recognition. The cars were assembled in Rockeville, New York, and the bodies were produced by Lunn Laminates of Long Island, the same Lunn Laminates that later worked on the first Corvette bodies. The Yankee rode on a modified 1939-1941 Ford chassis and was powered by the stock one-hundred horsepower V8 that came in the chassis. That may not sound like a lot of power for a sports car, especially when you consider the Blue Flame Six in the 1953 Corvette made fifty horsepower more, but the Yankee beat the Corvette in a few other categories. First, it weighed about nine hundred pounds less than the production Corvette at only 2000lbs, and it cost about a thousand dollars less than the Corvette at $2495. I think the big thing with the Yankee was ingenuity. The powered chassis was pre-engineered, and rather than costly paint, the fibreglass was moulded in color. The dash was flat with an off-the-shelf Stewart Warner gauge panel installed in the middle of it. Another thing the Yankee had that the Corvette didn’t was double the seating capacity, a remarkable feature considering how much lighter it was. How many Yankees were produced? Only a handful, we’re talking single-digits, a number so small that, as far as I can tell, none exist today. I wonder what would have happened if Ford had produced the Yankee themselves? Would it have suffered the same fate as the Thunderbird and bowed out of the sports car race early on, or would we have mid-engine Yankee supercars today with hot Coyote 5.0’s in them? Ferrari could hate Ford all over again.
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