The Chevrolet Corvette is often credited with being the first American-made sports car, but did you know that it wasn’t the car that invented the class in North America? In fact, in the early 1950s, the Corvette was beaten to the sports car market by no fewer than three vehicles.
The first American carmaker to join the trend was Nash Motors. It achieved this in 1951 with the Nash-Healey, an automobile that came up as a consequence of cooperation with the British automaker Healey. Although production versions did not come off the assembly line until 1954, the Kaiser Darrin did arrive a few months ahead of the Corvette.
Then there’s an even more obscure sports car called the Woodwill Wildfire. Introduced in 1952, it used a fiberglass body just like the Corvette. It was built by Dodge and Willys dealer Blanchard Robert Woodill until 1958 and one of the reasons you haven’t heard about it is that he didn’t make too many of them.
While production lasted six years, Woodill built only 300 examples. And only 15 were ready-to-drive automobiles, while the remaining 285 were sold as kits. Only nine factory-built Wildfires are known to exist, while many of the kit cars were destroyed when their owners decided to do something else with the chassis and the engine. A sad fate for a vehicle that pioneered the fiberglass sports car in the United States.
Fortunately, there are still a few of these vintage kits vehicles around. Discovered one in a salvage yard in 2012. In 2022, he acknowledges that the majority of people believed the Woodwill was a piece of garbage, which is why his attempt to sell it failed. Thus, he made the decision to hold onto it and give it another go.
When he purchased the car, it had been retired off the road sometime in 1966 and was in bad condition. Though the project is still in its early stages, he was able to repair the broken fiberglass body. And he’s got a few issues at the moment. To begin with, he hasn’t been able to get the body verified as a genuine Woodwill.
The way it looks and the way it was built point out in the right direction, but there’s no real way to tell for sure. The original title doesn’t help either, as it only says it was made from parts and that it had a Studebaker engine. But he’s almost certain it’s a Wildfire body because it rocks the correct 1952 Willys Aero taillights.
Second, he’s having trouble deciding whether to go the restomod path or restore the Woodwill to its original specifications. Since there are no parts available, achieving the former would be difficult. It will probably be somewhere in between, though, since he plans to swap out the original windshield for an MG MGA and install a contemporary LS under the hood.
Whatever the outcome, though, this is fantastic news for a unique and unusual sports car that was off the road for more than 50 years. And maybe eventually, it will be parked next to Kaiser Darrins and early Chevrolet Corvettes at antique car events.