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Steve Kealy16 Jan 2010
NEWS

Fancy a brand-new 70-year-old car?

A truly unique car goes under the hammer in Arizona soon

The only convertible version of a Tucker 48, the innovative rear-engine car that challenged Detroit's Big Three just after World War II, is to be auctioned in Scottsdale, Arizona on January 20.


The Tucker Convertible was recently completed, using parts left over from the stellar but brief existence of Preston Tucker's 1948 car-making effort.


The new car is essentially a brand-new Tucker that was assembled on the special ovular frame -- stamped No. 57 -- that was built by the Tucker Experimental Department for the prototype convertible, but the car was never completed.


Only 51 Tucker sedans were produced, and they are among the most rare and valuable of all American cars with values of around the US $1m mark.


But there is only one Tucker convertible -- and this is it. Most of the 51 are accounted for although some have been lost -- one was burned and buried, while another was dumped on a riverbank.


With only two miles on the clock, the experimental Tucker convertible has never been registered and the buyer will become the unique car's original owner.


Remarkably, the car has taken sixty years to surface -- the convertible was completed last year by Benchmark Classics, a Wisconsin restoration business. The unfinished car was found in the Tucker factory after it closed down.


Although most Tucker sedans have been preserved, the Tucker story was just a fading historical footnote until the 1988 movie, 'Tucker: The Man and His Dream'.


The movie is a dramatisation of the events surrounding the rise and fall of a man who took on the might of America's mainstream car industry with a better car, better safety, better handling, brakes and performance -- but without the vested interests and crooked politicians who eventually shut him down.


The brand-new convertible is painted Waltz Blue, a colour rumoured to have been inspired by a favourite dress of Preston Tucker's wife, Vera. The convertible top is light tan and the chrome is perfect, from the imposing nose to the six individual exhausts.


The nose of the car contains one of the most prominent Tucker hallmarks: the centre-mounted headlamp that turns with the steering wheel. And this one works.


In the rear of the car is the Tucker-specific, watercooled, 5.5-litre Franklin flat-six aero-engine, which puts out 124kW.


The prototype sedan used a 9.7-litre innovative flat-six cylinder with hemispherical combustion chambers, fuel injection, and overhead valves operated by oil pressure rather than a camshaft, but it wasn't a viable option for mass-production.


The new convertible has a perfectly calibrated Cord-sourced pre-selector gearbox and sits on four rare Kelsey-Hayes wheels.


This Tucker includes the safety-car innovations which made the brand famous, such as side-intrusion beams, safety belts and a few examples of Tucker's famed parts-sourcing skills.


The correct Tucker steering wheel contains a modified Lincoln horn ring and a centre-hub crest that uses parts from a Mills jukebox. Tucker's famous vertical factory AM radio is to the right of the steering wheel.


Russo and Steele, a Phoenix-based auction house specialising in sports cars, muscle cars, hot rods and customs, celebrates its 10th anniversary Scottsdale sale with more than 600 cars on offer.


The Tucker headlines the auction, ahead of rarities such as a 1955 Porsche Carrera Speedster Cabriolet and a 1960 Ferrari 250 GT Pininfarina Series II Cabriolet.


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Written bySteve Kealy
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