For reasons unknown, a man named Salvatore Salerno chose to use a Willys “Hurricane” 2.6-liter inline-six cylinder engine to power his homemade sports car. The body, a fiberglass Devin shell, was draped over a Triumph TR-3 chassis and the full heart of the Willys was pulled out and transplanted into the lightweight sports machine. That Hurricane engine pushed power to the rear wheels through a 3-speed Borg Warner transmission, making a hellacious 90 horsepower. Maybe that’s just what he had lying around? Either way, you can go buy it right now on eBay.
The 1950s were a wild time for sports car fans in the U.S. The post-war boom of European-style motoring sports brought with it a cadre of small two-seat machines, and Americans absolutely adored them. Just in case a tiny MG, Jaguar, or Porsche wasn’t your flavor of motoring a cottage industry of American sports car manufacturers popped up on our side of the Atlantic, too. I mean, sure, by 1959 you could buy a boorish V8-powered Corvette or Thunderbird, but if you wanted something small, lightweight, and American, you went for a fiberglass-bodied “special” of your own manufacture.
Devin was without a doubt the most well-known of the American sports car body companies, delivering hundreds of fiberglass shells around the world from 1956 to 1964. The bodies were available in a variety of sizes to fit any number of chassis, and while early Devins were Panhard-powered front-wheel drive machines, buyers had the option to put whatever drivetrain configuration under the body they wanted. In this case an inline six from Willys.
Regardless of why the car was made the way it was, it intrigues me. These little sports specials of the era always do. It can’t weigh more than a wet beach towel and probably has about the same torsional rigidity, but it also probably goes like stink compared to almost everything else available at the time. A contemporary Porsche 356 made 70-ish horsepower, while an MGA was closer to 80. The Salerno Special fell short of Jag’s XK150 which had double the power, but certainly didn’t come close to matching the XK’s 3,000-pound curb weight.
OK, so we know the car rips. But can we make it rip harder without ruining the ethos of the build? As luck would have it, Willys made a higher compression 3-liter version of the Hurricane inline-six engine you could swap in without any further changes. The 3-liter Hurricane had a two-barrel carburetor and made a whopping 140 horsepower and 161 lb-ft (versus the 135 lb-ft of the 2.6-liter). If you wanted some stump-pulling torque, the 3.7-liter “Super Hurricane” dropped horsepower to 115 in exchange for more foot lubs, putting 190 of them to the ground. Yeah, that would be pretty damn rad. Maybe too fast, now that I think about it, for the Triumph drum brakes.
Anyway, go buy this thing so I can stop thinking about it. The car has some nice patina and you’ll definitely never see another one like it. The asking price is a mere $44,900, which is pretty fair if you ask me. Just promise me you’ll actually drive the thing.
