Entries in Gullwing Motorcars (2)

Thursday
Jan052012

"Lost" Espada finds a loving home

My friend Syed over at IEDEI posted a heartwarming follow-up story about the car below, which he and I respectively featured on our sites a while back after a visit to Gullwing Motor Cars in Queens.  The metallic green car, which had a Chevy V8 swapped in for the original Lamborghini V12, was very straight and not rotten, but looking shabby as it languished outside in the lot.Had I the resources at the time (or now, come ot think of it), I would have loved to take this car under my wing and breath new life into it.  Thankfully, its new owner has done exactly that.  He's doing a light rolling restoration and keeping the car mostly as found (she sure polished up nice!), and although we'd love to see the original V12 back in the car, the current owner says the lighter, smaller V8 improves the handling and weight distribution.  We wish him all the best of adventures in his wonderful new ride!

Click HERE for my original post about the car.

Click HERE to read about its current whereabouts on IEDEI.

Wednesday
Aug252010

Lamborghini Espada - Wafer Thin sports sedan from the Space Age

For a long time I thought the Espada was an ugly car, but I gotta say, it has really aged into a unique and fascinating time capsule that has to be seen in person to be believed.  And thanks to its strange looks, Espadas are still relatively attainable exotics.  This weekend, I had the pleasure of inspecting this particular metallic green example up close. It needed a ton of work, but I was just blown away by the amount of awesome design details packed into the exterior and interior by Bertone's designers back in the late 60s - under Gandini's direction. The Espada was produced for about 10 years, and was praised for its road manners by magazine testers. If you want to buy this car, check it out here!

The hexagonal, stacked instrument cluster is a work of art that is strikingly contemporary today.

The interior's chrome accents are tasteful and look amazing in person.

At just under 4 feet in height (!), this compressed 2+2 looks like it is hurtling towards you even when it's wedged into the corner of an overcrowded lot in Queens.

The three-pronged knockoffs are pure Italian exotic.