Thursday Trivia

Welcome to Thursday Trivia where we offer up a historical automotive trivia question and you try and solve it before seeing the answer after the jump. It’s like a history test, with cars!
This week’s question: What drivetrain was used in a ’60s reimagining of a 1930s classic, in the opposite end than in its original use?
If you think you know the answer, make the jump and see if you’re right.
Retro-mobiles, those modern interpretations of classic cars, have been over the years hit and miss in both the interpretation of what classic styling means, and occasionally the extent to which bad taste can go.
There have been a few however, that have proven both tasteful and appreciably proportioned. Among those are the original Mercedes SSK-aping Excalibur which was designed by Brooke Stevens, and the Clenet Series I which fitted an MG Midget body to a massive Lincoln chassis. Both combined elegant classic styling with modern mechanicals providing both the show and the go.
Another that might be considered laudable is Glenn Pray’s 1964 Cord Sportsman, also known as the 8/10. Now note, that is not 810. The nickname derives from the size of the car, which is 8/10ths scale of the original coffin-nose car. You might think that resizing would both make for an oddly proportioned car, and annoy its original designer, Gordon, Buehrig. In fact, it was Buehrig himself that encouraged Pray – who was a Cord fanatic – to go ahead with his plans to recreate the iconic cars in pog form in 8/10s size.
The original 1936-’37 Cord 810 featured a V8 engine and front transaxle, an innovative drivetrain for the era. For the 1960s re-do, a similar layout would have to be found, and there was only one American company that could offer a workable solution.
From Hemmings Daily:

Buehrig, then employed by Ford, created a clay model of the proposed car and even supplied an answer to one of its most daunting engineering challenges by suggesting the use of the existing Chevrolet Corvair’s drivetrain. In the absence of a better, readily available front-wheel-drive solution, the Corvair’s transmission, differential and engine were repurposed for the new Cord, kept in the same orientation with the differential centered over the drive wheels, the transmission in front and the engine in the rear. Though the output from the Corvair’s air-cooled, horizontally opposed six-cylinder engine was a modest 140 horsepower, it was sufficient to provide acceptable performance in the scaled-down Cord.

The original Cord 810 was built out of steel in a unit-body design with the drivetrain supported by a U-shaped subframe. Pray’s smaller design rode on a steel frame, but the body was made from and ABS composite called “Expanded Royalite” That was manufactured by U.S. Rubber who saw the limited-production Cord as an excellent test bed for their product. John Fitch drove one of the Pray cars through two brick walls to demonstrate the material’s strength, however the test dodn’t quite go as planned, and the car sustained more damage than expected. Fitch however, was okay.
Pray would eventually be forced out of his company by investors unhappy with his administration of their investments, and the company itself would shut down in 1966 after producing only a handful of cars. Later attempts to make a go of the Cord 8/10 would also prove to be of very limited success.
Images: GlobalCars