1953 Mameco-Ardun

This month’s awesome Hidden Treasure was discovered in 1995, sitting behind a house in Glendale, Arizona. How awesome? You tell me. It raced at Pebble Beach, was 1st in class at Santa Barbara with Bill Pollack at the wheel, was road raced with an Ardun-Mercury built by the legendary C.T. Automotive team…and that’s just for starters. The car is the 1953 Mameco-Ardun and what is so interesting is that a family discovered it in their own backyard after owning it for more than 25 years.

Bill Tritt is an American automotive legend. He’s credited with producing the first postwar fiberglass sports car, an achievement so important that The Smithsonian has one of his cars in their permanent collection. As part of a marketing campaign to promote his high-quality Glasspar fiberglass bodies, way back in 1953, Tritt assembled a professional team to build a racecar. This was no backyard effort. Tritt chose Ed Martindale and Ted Mangles (Mameco frame builders) to construct a special racing chassis. And C.T. Automotive, responsible for so many land speed records at Bonneville, was hired to build and maintain a powerful Ardun-Mercury engine to make the beast grunt. Tritt, of course, provided a lovely Glasspar G-2 body.