(engine roars)
- This is one of the wildest cars we've ever covered
here at Donut.
When the team first dug into this bad-boy,
it was like one of those Russian Babushka dolls.
We kept uncovering more and more and more
weird and wild (beep) about it.
So first we have to talk about the man responsible
for this thing right here.
Then, we're gonna dive deep into how one goes about
building a supercar back in the '80s.
Finally, I'll explain why a 200 horsepower,
no-name American exotic got banned from racing.
We're going bumper-to-bumper on this Consulier GTP.
(upbeat rock music)
('80s electronic music)
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of this Consulier GTP,
I think you'd be able to appreciate the car more
if we explained how this thing came to be.
To do that, we have to go all the way back to the '80s.
('80s electronic music)
Now, I would imagine that most people who go off
and start their own car manufacturing company
have their roots in the automotive world.
They're engineers, or racing owners, or Elon Musk.
Warren Mosler is none of those things.
He's an economist, a guy who's had a passion,
or as he puts it, a disease for cars,
ever since his early days of messing around with go-karts.
But before Mr. Mosler could form his new car company,
Consulier Industries, he needed some guap.
In 1982 he started his own hedge fund,
you know, a company that invests other people's money.
Lucky for his investors, he was good at it.
While he wasn't some billionaire with unlimited cash,
like Tony Stark, he had some fun money,
and he used some of that fun money to go racing.
(engine revs) (tires squeal)
It was at a local race that he met a guy
that would ultimately plant the seed
for him to build this thing standing right next to me.
That man was Dick Respess,
an emergency room doctor, and car enthusiast.
Dick said that he could build Mosler a VW
that came in at roughly under 1,200 pounds.
He got to thinking, if he could build
a sub-2,000 pound production car,
with good power-to-weight ratio,
it would not only outrun the competition,
but because it's so light,
it might get really good gas-mileage.
We're talking 30 miles per gallon for a supercar.
If that was the case,
people would be banging on his door to buy one.
At the tender young age of 36,
Mosler formed Consulier Industries, and his car-making days
(gong gongs) began.
So what goes into making a high-strength, lightweight
composite supercar that outruns anything else on the road?
('80s electronic music)
Now, the entire basis for this car being built
was that it should be lightweight,
so using what they discovered with the prototype,
the Consulier team began by designing
the carbon and composite foam monocoque,
and this thing? (car thumps)
It's rock solid.
Now, monocoques are nothing new.
They've been used in race cars since the early '60s.
But a production car, with a metal-free monocoque?
Now that's not very common.
Once it's complete, the monocoque weighs in
at roughly 275 pounds.
It literally weighs the same as Nolan.
Now, if you take a step back and look at the car,
it's certainly different,
and back when it was being shown around,
it was just as polarizing.
Actually, it's all for function.
Without a traditional framework chassis,
the body acts as a load-bearing surface,
so the shape you see in this car
is necessary for it's structural integrity,
hence the fact that it has this five inch radius
that runs all the way to the front.
And also, look at these massive air intake door seals.
They're just ginormous.
Everything on this car
was done to add more torsional rigidity.
Also, the entire car was designed without a single computer.
That's frickin' wild.
(mouse clicks)
So not only is the chassis light,
(car thumps) it's rigid.
More rigid than a metal structure,
and rigidity is a racers best friend.
This is, for all intents and purposes, a frickin' race car.
The GTP has fully independent suspension
on all four corners.
Mosler went to McKee Engineering,
who happened to be experts at the frickin' Indy car thing,
to design and engineer the inboard suspension setup.
The GTP is smaller than it looks,
but it still has a relatively long wheelbase.
That, and it's low center of gravity
allowed the car to pull 1G on the skid pad.
That's a huge accomplishment,
especially as your first time out building a race car.
This dude had something going for him.
In the brakes department, the GTP went with Pontiac,
specifically, the Pontiac Fiero,
for four-wheel, ventilated, 10-inch brakes.
Now because this thing is so light,
it can stop from 60 to zero miles per hour
in roughly 100 feet.
Just for a context, a modern-day supercar
sporting carbon-ceramic brakes
has roughly a similar measure to that.
So the Consulier GTP is light.
It's got good suspension, good stopping power,
all the makings of a quick car.
But what about the power plant?
Where does one Warren Mosler go
to seek out an engine for his American supercar?
('80s electronic music)
Okay, now, under the hood of the Consulier is
not an engine.
I didn't make that clear, this is a mid-engine sports car,
just like one of my all-time favorites, the NSX,
and my new favorite, the C8 Corvette.
Now in the front is your battery,
your brake booster, power steering.
I can see the spare tire down there, it's super small.
And the front end also has some odd features,
like this hole over there.
It's a NACA duct.
It's an air duct placed there
because the federal government requires
so many cubic feet of fresh air
to pass into the passenger compartment.
Speaking of, you know, regulations,
the monocoque exceeded all crash test standards of the time,
because of it's high tensile strength.
I mean, you can stand on the roof of this thing,
and it wouldn't buckle.
Front to back, Mr. Mosler went all Elon back in the day,
stood on the roof of one of these things,
took a sledgehammer to it, and it suffered no damage.
Also, because the monocoque made the car so safe,
it was one of the few cars in the '80s
without those ugly bumper extender things,
like the Countach, or the 280Z.
When sourcing a motor, well Mosler went to Chrysler,
and he picked out a Chrysler Turbo II.
This is a 2.2 liter, turbocharged inline four,
making 200 horsepower.
The Turbo II was, and still is, a bulletproof engine,
and it was used in all sorts of Chryslers at the time,
like the Dodge Daytona, and the Chrysler LeBaron,
along with a bunch of minivans.
Even Carroll Shelby used it in his Shelby Lancer,
and you know, the car that this engine was built for,
the Omni GLHS.
After Shelby used it for that car,
it basically was taken over by Dodge to be put elsewhere.
It's not your typical high-horsepower beast,
but from a power-to-weight perspective,
there was nothing around that could put up
those kinds of horsepower numbers,
and that was as light as this engine is.
Matched up to the Turbo II was the five speed,
also out of the Dodge Daytona.
Mosler actually purchased
as many parts from the Daytona as he could.
The drivetrain, the shifter mechanics, the steering column,
ignition keeps, hubs, spindles,
all came directly from Chrylser.
Building the Consulier was only half the problem though.
Getting people to buy them was another hurdle,
so Mosler did what all car companies would do.
He called up the press to get some exposure,
and this is where things get even more interesting.
('80s electronic music)
To prove the worth of the Consulier,
Mosler put out a challenge.
This is exactly what he said.
"Beat this car around a track,
"and I'll give you $25,000 out of my own pocket."
Car and Driver wanted to take on the challenge,
so they got their hands on a Consulier
that was used at a driving school.
They took a beat-up, three year old,
driver school Consulier GTP, with no brakes and old tires,
and ran it against a brand new 1991 C4 Corvette.
The Consulier ran a 1:22 around the test track.
The Corvette, it ran a 1:21, and it had fresh tires.
Mosler thought that wasn't fair, and refused to payout.
He offered to redo the challenge with Car and Driver
if they swapped in new brake pads on the GTP,
and used a driver of his choice.
Well, Car and Driver rejected the deal,
then proceeded to print an article on the GTP
that painted it in a bad light.
This was the first of many feuds
between Mosler, and Car and Driver,
and it kicked of the GTP's failure in the media.
Should have gone to Donut, dude.
So what did Mosler do
when car reviewers wouldn't give them a fair shake?
He went frickin' racing,
but before we get into the racing legacy,
let's see what's going on inside the GTP.
(upbeat '80s electronic music)
Man, being in here is such a time capsule.
The interior is pretty basic,
but that is part of the cool factor.
Like I mentioned earlier,
Mosler went with a lot K-car components,
and I'm not talking Japan K-cars, I'm talking Chrysler.
It's a mix of really dope stuff from the '80s,
and some Dodge parts.
It's pretty rad.
Now the seats, they're leather-covered Recaro's,
and the dash looks basic, but it has so many gauges.
My favorite frickin' gauge of all time,
I've never seen this on a street car,
is engine hours.
That's really cool, that's really like race car stuff.
It still has some items that make it daily-driver friendly,
like this Alpine pullout CD system.
Dope.
And it's got frickin' AC, power everything, the windows.
This thing, it was so ahead of it's time.
After he didn't get a fair shake
from the major car reviewers,
Mr. Mosler took this thing racing,
to showcase it's true abilities, like I mentioned before.
It first ran in the 24 hour Nelson Legends in 1988.
After taking pole position,
it ran in first place for 12 hours,
until the turbo ran into some problems,
and it finished 14th overall.
Over the next couple of years,
the GTP went back to that race,
and won the entire race three times, to be exact.
But a rule stated that once you win three times,
you weren't allowed to race anymore.
Mosler found out many years later
that there was no such rule,
they just didn't want the GTP's to come back,
and you know, dominate the track.
After being kicked out of that race,
they wanted to race the IMSA Supercar series.
His team put the car in first, second, fourth, and fifth
during qualifying, and won the race.
It wouldn't be long before IMSA
gave the car a 300 pound weight penalty.
Imagine Nolan sitting next to me.
But even before they could enforce it,
the Consulier GTP was banned outright
from racing in the series.
So, what does an '80s street-legal race car sound like?
(hands clap)
I've been waiting for this, all day.
(car dings)
(engine rumbles)
Oh man, just seeing the turbo pressure go pfft.
Oh, that's so sick.
There's a Chrysler motor, and it sounds so rad,
from the '80s, dude.
I wanna drive this thing, on track.
All right.
That was way more exciting than I was expecting it to be.
Jesus Christ, this things loud.
(electronic music)
Eventually the bad press
and the inability to consistently race,
put the Consulier GTP straight in the hole.
All in all, only 83 GTP's were built
between 1985 and 1996.
Also, the Petersen Museum has one of the two electric ones
that were built back in the day, and sold at the mall.
Consulier Industries spun off their automotive division
into Mosler Automotive, in 1993.
They rebranded the car as the Mosler Intruder,
and Mosler Raptor, before halting production in 2000.
Mr. Mosler took a shot
at building his version of the American Supercar,
and while he didn't find commercial success,
he's done what a few have been able to do,
and what a lot of us wish we could do.
Also, the guy frickin' ran for president in 2009,
only to drop out to run for a US Senate seat.
This story is frickin' wild, and speaking of wild,
we'd really like to thank Ryan Wild
for bringing this thing out here.
He drove this, on LA streets,
all the way out here to this studio.
That blows my mind, I wonder what people were thinking
when they saw it on the road.
(video blips)
Yeah.
Yeah, this is him.
Oh, hi Mrs. Eddie.
No, yeah, he's behind the camera, he's directing today.
Oh, the Tupperware?
It's still at the office.
But I don't know, he keeps bringing lasagne,
but never eats it.
Yeah, I'll let him know.
Cool, yeah, I love you too, bye.
(laughing)