The American Sports Car That BEAT the Corvette by Two Years

Name the first American sports car. If you said the Corvette you are in good company, and you are also wrong. Two years before the first Corvette rolled out of Flint, Michigan, there was already an American sports car sitting in showrooms. It had a British chassis, an Italian body, and an engine borrowed from a company best known for plain family sedans. Almost nobody remembers it today. The people who do tend to own one, and they are not in a hurry to sell. If you had walked into a Nash dealership in the spring of 1951 and asked the salesman about the low two-seat roadster in the corner, he might have struggled to explain it. This was a company that sold sturdy, sensible cars to sturdy, sensible families, and there, parked between them, was a real sports car wearing the same badge. That car was the Nash Healey, and to be exact, it was the first sports car after the war built by a major American car maker. There is a fair argument to be had here. A tiny outfit called Crosley had sold a little roadster called the Hotshot back in 1949, so if you want the first American sports car of any kind, that one gets there first. But Crosley built tiny economy cars, and the Hotshot had an engine smaller than some motorcycles. The other name that comes up is the Kaiser Deron, and that one reached showrooms in early 1954, meaning after the Corvette, not before it. So the claim, said carefully, holds up. Among the big American car companies, the Nash Healey got there first. It beat the Corvette to the market by about two years. How does a company that built family sedans end up with a sports car at all? The answer starts on a boat. In December of 1949, a British racing driver named Donald Healey boarded the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth, not the famous later ship you are probably picturing, the original one. He had won the Monte Carlo Rally back in 1931, and after the war he had set up a small company in Warwick, England, building fast, costly sports cars in tiny numbers. His problem was engines. The British engines he could get his hands on were not strong enough for what he had in mind. He was going to America to ask Cadillac to sell him their new V8, a strong, modern engine that would have changed his cars. It was a good plan. It did not work. Cadillac, busy and tied up elsewhere, turned him down. But somewhere out on that crossing, the trip stopped being a failure. Healey got to talking with another passenger, a large American businessman busy with a stereo camera. The American turned out to be George Mason, the president of Nash. The exact words they said to each other have been told and retold so many times that the details have gotten fuzzy. But the basic story is clear. Mason knew Healey needed engines. And Mason had quietly been thinking that Nash, a maker of solid sedans, could use a little shine. By the time the ship docked, they had the rough shape of a deal. The setup was unusual. Nash would give Healey the engine and running gear from the Nash Ambassador, their big family car. Healey would build the chassis and the body around it in England. The finished cars would be sold through Nash dealerships across America. And because Healey was carrying about 50,000 pounds of debt at the time, Nash agreed to help carry it, with Healey paying them back in finished cars. It was a handshake between a small English workshop and a medium-sized American company, worked out on a boat, and out of it came one of the strangest production cars of the decade. Here is how that car actually got built. The engine and the gearbox came from Nash, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Those parts were shipped across the Atlantic to England, where Healey's people built a chassis and dropped the American drivetrain into it. The engine did not stay standard. Healey added a lighter aluminum cylinder head, raised the compression, and put in twin-side draft carburetors. The Nash Ambassador 6, an overhead valve engine of about 235 cubic inches, went from a sleepy family car motor making around 115 horsepower to something closer to 125. With a three-speed gearbox and overdrive, it would run to around 104 miles per hour, not blazing fast, but real. Stopping came from drum brakes at all four corners, which were fine for the open road and a little hopeful on a racetrack. And then, for the second year, the car got more complicated. Literally. Mason wanted it to look the part, so he brought in the Italian design studio, Pininfarina, run by Battista Farina, one of the most famous car designers alive. For 1952, Pininfarina gave the Nash Healey a new steel body, with the headlights set into the grille, a smooth one-piece windshield, and a cleaner, more expensive look. The trouble was where the car now had to be built. Follow the path, because it is hard to believe. The engine left Wisconsin and sailed to England. In England, Healey built the rolling chassis. Then that chassis was shipped again, this time down to Italy, where Pininfarina put on the body. And then the finished car was shipped one more time, back across the ocean to the United States, to be sold. One car. Three countries. Two continents. By the time a Nash Healey reached a dealer, it had traveled something like 8,000 miles before a single customer had laid eyes on it. For the cars that followed, Nash gave the engine more room to breathe, growing it to just over 4 liters and around 140 horsepower, fed by two American Carter carburetors. They called it the Le Mans engine, which tells you how much that one race meant to them. On paper, it was a beautiful idea. American muscle, British craft, Italian style, all in one car. But in real life, that long ocean trip was quietly building toward the thing that would doom it in the end. But nobody was worried about that yet, because the car was about to do something no Nash had any business doing. It was going to go racing. And it was going to win. The 24 Hours of Le Mans is the oldest and toughest endurance race in the world. You enter to find out whether your car can survive a full day and night of being driven flat out. Even before the production car went on sale, a Healey running the Nash engine showed up at Le Mans in 1950. Driven by Tony Rolt and Duncan Hamilton, it finished fourth overall. It was also the first car ever to run Le Mans with an overdrive gearbox. That result is a big part of what sold Mason on the whole thing. They could have taken that result, gone home happy, and left it there. They didn't. They came back. In 1951, a Nash Healey finished sixth overall. Solid. Not the headline. The headline came the next year. In 1952, a lightweight Nash Healey driven by Leslie Johnson and a car writer named Tommy Wisdom finished third overall at Le Mans. Third. The only two cars ahead of it were factory team cars from Mercedes-Benz. And the Nash Healey that pulled it off was no showroom car. It was a special lightweight, tuned far past the road car, but it carried the same name and the same basic engine as the one a dealer would sell you. A car wearing the same badge as a Wisconsin family sedan had just outrun almost the whole field at the toughest race in the world. That finish reads even better once you know how punishing the race was. Only 17 of the 58 cars that started were still running at the end. The Nash Healey did not just go fast. It survived a full day and night when most of the field could not, which at Le Mans is the harder trick of the two. It raced in Italy at the Mille Miglia, the grueling thousand-mile road race run on open public roads, where it once again held its own against cars built only for racing. And at the 1951 Carrera Panamericana, the long dangerous road race across Mexico, a Nash Healey was trusted to run ahead of the whole field as the official lead car. But the Le Mans result was the one that mattered. It is the kind of finish you build a whole ad campaign around. So Nash did. They named one model of the car the Le Mans, just to make sure nobody missed the point. The car went back in 1953 and, oddly enough, ran even harder than the year before. It covered more laps and ran a higher average speed than the third-place car had done in 1952. And it finished 11th. The other teams had simply moved on. That was the end of the factory racing effort. But the record stood. Whatever else you wanted to say about the Nash Healey, it had earned its stripes on the one stage that could not be faked. If you have made it this far, take a second to subscribe. This channel digs into the forgotten corners of American car history every week. Now, while the Nash Healey was collecting trophies in France, something far less exciting was happening back in the accounting department. Remember that long ocean trip? Shipping engines one way, chassis another, and finished cars a third time was an expensive way to build anything. Add in the hand-built Italian bodywork and the small number built, and the math stopped working almost right away. Look at the price tag. A Corvette, when it arrived in 1953, started at around $3,498. That same year, a Nash Healey convertible cost $5,908, and the hardtop coupe cost $6,399. The Nash Healey cost nearly twice what a Corvette did, and more than a Cadillac. You could buy a full luxury car and still have money left in your pocket, or you could buy the sporty two-seater from the company that also made ice boxes. And here is the part that makes accountants cry. Nash was not even making money at those prices. The company lost more than $9,000 on every single Nash Healey it sold. $9,000 per car, on a car that sold for five or six. A giant like General Motors could afford to lose money on a flashy car for a while and call it advertising. Nash was a medium-sized independent in a market about to be swallowed by the big three, and the clock had already started. The end did not come from one thing. It came from several things, all at once. First, the company itself changed shape. In the spring of 1954, Nash joined with the Hudson Motor Car Company to form a new business, American Motors Corporation. A money-losing sports car built in tiny numbers across three continents was not high on the new company's list. George Mason had been chasing something far bigger than a sports car. His real goal was to pull the independent car makers that were left together, Nash and Hudson, and if he could, Packard and Studebaker too, into a single company big enough to stand toe-to-toe with the big three. The Nash and Hudson deal was only the first piece of that plan. And then, in October of 1954, only months after that deal, Mason passed away. The one person inside the company who really wanted the Nash Healy to exist was gone. The man who took over was named George Romney. Romney was sharp, and he had no soft spot for a showpiece car. He looked at American Motors and saw that its future was not in beating Cadillac on price. It was in building a small, practical, low-cost car called the Rambler, just the kind of car the company knew how to sell and make money on. Within a few years, even the Nash and Hudson names were gone. And then there was Donald Healy. Back in the fall of 1952, he had shown a new sports car at the London Motor Show, built around a deal with the British carmaker Austin. It was called the Austin Healy. And it was everything the Nash Healy was not. It was simpler, it was cheaper, and it was built in one country, instead of three. It took thousands of orders almost on the spot. The quiet twist is that some of the money Healy earned from the Nash project helped pay for the car that would outshine it. The Austin Healy became a legend. The Nash became a footnote. For 1953, Nash added a handsome hardtop coupe along with the Roadster, sitting on a slightly longer wheelbase. For 1954, the Roadster was dropped for good, and the coupe carried on by itself, its price finally cut in a last try to sell the cars that were left. 104 cars the first year, then 150, then 162, then 90, and then nothing. When the line stopped in the summer of 1954, the total for the whole four-year run came to about 506 cars, barely a blip next to the numbers Detroit was used to. So why does almost nobody know this car? Part of it is simple math. 500 cars do not leave much of a dent in history. Part of it is timing. The car was finished just as American Motors was being born, and the new company had every reason to forget it. And part of it is the Corvette. The Corvette survived its own rocky start, in time got a V8, got years and years of work put into it, and became, on paper and in people's hearts, America's sports car. History tends to remember the one that lasted, not the one that was first. The Nash Healy did leave a few fingerprints. One of them turned up on television, where the actor George Reeves drove a Nash Healy Roadster as Clark Kent in a few episodes of the Superman series. Another showed up on the big screen, in the 1954 movie Sabrina. The forgotten car is now worth real money. A good Nash Healy today changes hands for far more than a similar early Corvette, the very car that buried its memory. One of those plain-bodied 1951 Roadsters sold at auction for $154,000. A Le Mans Coupe brought $93,500. The average sale sits up around $82,700. There are very few left. Of those 104 aluminum bodied first-year cars, only around 20 are thought to still exist, and only a handful of those still run. The people who own them know exactly what they have. Which is why, just like the owners we started with, they are not in a hurry to sell. That basic idea, American power wrapped in a light, foreign-built sports car, did not end when the Nash Healy did. Ten years later, a Texan named Carroll Shelby dropped an American V8 into a small British Roadster and called it the Cobra. The Nash Healy reached for that same idea first. It just never got the happy ending. So the next time someone tells you the Corvette was the first American sports car, you will know better. The first one came from a company that made family sedans, was dreamed up on an ocean liner, was built in three countries, raced at Le Mans and beat almost everyone, lost money on every car it built, and then quietly disappeared while the car it beat to the showroom floor took all the credit. Name the first American sports car. Now you actually can. The sources for everything in this video are listed in the description, so if you want to dig deeper into the Nash Healy, that is the place to start. If you want more stories like this one, the ones that got left out of the history books, subscribe and stick around. There is another one waiting for you on screen right now.