The Bocar was seen here once before in 2019, @loudbang posted this photo of one on Pike’s Peak. IIRC the first time I became aware of the Bocar was in Popular Science magazine. Oh, one last thing, the Stiletto looked a bit ungainly to me, kind of like a platypus.
I think the front-end of all variants is a little awkward in appearance, but man... the ass end? Gorgeous.... Yesterday I talked to a guy named Lenny Davis that owned and raced a Bocar in SVRA events. He claims the power to weight ratio was akin to a cobra and that he passed many in his time with the car. This also helped with brake longevity obviously... The car's shortcoming, according to Lenny, was its tendency to understeer on high speed corners. Correcting it was a very fine balance as aggressively applying the throttle to fix the issue often lead to snap over-steer.
There was a nice one displayed at our local indoor show this last winter. It was from Neb. or Colorado. Someone posted a shot or two of it here. Still looking for the thread. You can see the Bocar here at about 15:46. Ignore the fugly modern PU on the link. You can also see HAMBers @rusty rocket and his son @Greenblade s cars parked next to it
Same ride! Looks like it was upholstered by a HAMBer as well. And is the DRE mentioned in the video @dreracecar from here on the HAMB also?
I dig it...I even really like the canted headlight, Kellison J-5 looking front-end. I just wish it was 10% - 20% bigger. It looks tiny...id never fit in that car, just like I couldn't fit in my J-5.
Exactly why we sucked at GP racing for so long... our shit was so big, we didn't have the power to weight ratio or the chassis balance needed to compete. This car (and others of the era like the Cheetah) was an early attempt to understand a lot of that. The first American car to almost get there was built on a British chassis. The Cobra. It had the power to weight ratio in spades, but didn't have the chassis balance to compete with Ferrari, Jag, etc... The car that finally roped big American power with weight and chassis balance also featured a chassis made in England. The GT40. In a lot of ways, we've just rolled back down the hill since then...
I am selfishly only talking about its practicality for me....6' 3" and about 250 makes cars feel smaller than they are.
I remember the opening line of an article in Mechanix Illustrated sometime in late '60 or early '61 that referred to the Bocar. "The rumble of an open exhaust echoes off the building down the street...". I read the whole article several times and was fascinated by the pictures and the whole process of building a car strictly for an individual. The parts about flying the prospective buyer into Denver and taking a body cast so the driver's seat fit no-one else but the owner was mind blowing. So was sitting the driver behind the wheel and measuring and cutting the windshield height so the airflow would pass directly over the driver's head. This was exotic stuff to a kid from Mustang, OK (population 500?) and one of the reasons I became really interested in performance automobiles.
Maybe 30 years ago now, I was treated to visiting a Bocar Stiletto resting in the basement of a home near St.Louis. It still sported its front mounted GMC blower. A case of American hot rod ingenuity trying to beat the European "sporty car" guys. Some ideas didn't always work, but that doesn't remove the cool factor.
Thanks for posting these. I hadn’t seen a frame picture as nice as this before. My grandfather raced this XP-5 for many years. He let me drive it a couple times which was a thrill.
One of my pastimes is looking street views from old ads and articles - looks like they are still doing car stuff there.
For some reason the hardtopped #1 car in this pic looks more badass than the roadsters to me. Can't put my finger on it. Would like to see more of it.
Years ago I was told that Bonner Denten had a fiberglass mold for the XP5 and then later that his son or nephew had the mold. Denton had raced an XP5 and later a Stilleto at Bonneville.
The Jalopy Journal
