1949 Kurtis Sports Car - The First First Test

It’s never too late to put the original motortrend cover car through instrumented evaluation

- Kim Reynolds

It’s not every day that a company buys a valuable heirloom, an actual piece of its history. But as MotorTrend lights 70 candles on its birthday cake, it’s this car—this obscure frog-green 1949 Kurtis we recently purchased—that’s beingwheeled up as our present to ourselves.

Why the Kurtis? The easy answer is that it’s the automobile on the magazine’s first grainy, three-color cover. Not just any Kurtis. The exact car.

Another reason is that 70 years is time enough for everybody present at MT ’s birth to have now packed their desks and relocated to that great printing pressin the sky, most notably our founder, Robert Petersen, who started the magazine on Hollywood Boulevard andmoved it to a black-glass tower on Sunset Boulevard and then to a monumental bronze one on Wilshire Boulevard. We finally caravaned here, near the beach, to a remodeled El Segundo tilt-up that was originally used for engineering the Apollo space program in the 1960s. We’ve been Los Angeles vagabonds, then, with no single home as a touch- stone. An Ancestry DNA query would more likely pop up a picture of this green roadster rather than any particularaddress. The Kurtis Sport Car is our earliest fingerprint.

According to Ken Gross (virtuoso car historian, “Pete” Petersen’s longtime pal, and frequent MT contributor), L.A. race car builder Frank Kurtis was even a coauthor of this magazine’s origin story. Although Petersen’s Hot Rod magazine (founded in 1948) found quick success, it wasn’t attracting the big-buck ads from major car companies. Kurtis—already working on his car—was a booster of a second magazine oriented around production cars.