Team-BHP - Official Guess the car Thread (Please see rules on first page!)

@V-16:

In their quest to build the world's finest sports car, brothers Jim and Ed Gaylord hired famed Milwaukee industrial designer Brooks Stevens to style a two-seater for them on a relatively short 100-inch wheelbase. The resulting car was strikingly modern on the one hand, yet carried overtones of classic-era cars on the other. The entire front end thrust rakishly forward at the top for an illusion of speed. It featured a narrow vertical grille opening reminiscent of the Classics of the Thirties. The grille was flanked by two huge headlights of the sort one would expect to see on a prewar Rolls-Royce. The rear end was topped by moderately tall fins, which were coming into fashion when the car was designed. Taillights were nestled into chrome bezels that capped the ends of the fins. Vertically ridged bright trim suggested rear grillwork, which housed additional rear lights. Dual exhausts exited just above the narrow rear bumper.
Seven chrome strips rode on top of the rear deck, a feature DeSoto would adopt later for its hot Adventurer. Extremely deep side sculpturing allowed for fully exposed front wheels and tires. This was made even more striking with additional bodyside sculpturing that created a sort of "Deusenberg-sweep" two-tone paint scheme, which Stevens preferred to call the "Washington Coach Door Line." Large wheelwells left the back wheels exposed as well. Knock-off hubs with twin "G" lettering highlighted the wheels, which sported a "vane" design.

This first Gaylord, which was introduced in 1955, differed somewhat style-wise from what was to follow. The first Gaylord had made its mark, but styling changes seen on the second car made the newcomer look a bit more conventional. This one (top), licensed as a 1957 model, lights the way with then-fashionable quad headlights, housed in this case within oval bezels. The eggcrate grille looked less fussy than the punched-full-of-round-holes texture used on the first Gaylord, and the chrome grille surround was bolder. A dual-stack front bumper allowed the parking lights to be moved from the fender tops downward between the bumper bars, and because the bumper was split, onlookers could see the entire grille opening. From the rear (above left), the revised Gaylord looked familiar, although the rear bumper had disappeared. In its place was a two-piece bumper that housed the exhaust outlets and left the entire center section of the car vulnerable. The biggest design change brought about more conventional front fenders longer did they wrap far inward to completely expose the wheels; instead, the fenders flowed more smoothly into the other bodyside panels. Interestingly enough, the front wheel cutouts were almost square, seemingly at odds with the round opening that nearly radiused the shape of the rear tires. This was done to accommodate the Washington Coach Door Line two-toning, which itself had to be modified up front to be compatible with the new front fenders. But despite all the changes, there was no mistaking that the car was still very much a Gaylord.

The revised Gaylord kept its fins hardly surprising in the 1956-56 era, not to mention its wraparound windshield, another styling device very much in vogue when the car was designed. One Gaylord feature, however, which had actually been seen on a Citroen way back in the late Thirties, was a retractable hardtop roof been unable to capitalize on it, but Gaylord perhaps figured it could. And well it should have, for it could boast about a recessed rear window and integral air-extractor vent, a pioneering version of "flow-through" ventilation. At a touch of a button, the rear deck lifted and a chain drive pulled the top down into the trunk. In this, the Gaylord was a full year ahead of Ford's 1957-59 Skyliner retractable, which was considerably more complicated. Inside drawer in the finest British tradition with a wood-faced instrument panel and fine leathers. The chassis Gaylord's own design, a strong chrome-moly tube type with coil springs and A-arms in front and a beam axle on leaf springs at the rear. The first prototype carried a Chrysler 331-rid Hemi V-S, but two later cars, such as this one, ran with a Cadillac V-8. A modified Hydra-Matic made full-throttle upshifts at peak revs. Unfortunately, a $17,500 list price -- $14,035 more than a base Corvette! -- virtually guaranteed that the Gaylord would fail to attract enough buyers to make the car a commercial success.

From www.clubhotrod.com Here's the linky http://www.clubhotrod.com/t803.html

Manti