THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING ROADSTER
Man hoping to track down award-winning sports car he built by hand in the 1950s
Dick Frew looks at photographs taken in the mid-’50s and wonders what happened to the sports car he built in the basement of his parents’ Kerrisdale home. The beautifully crafted, lowslung two-seater turned heads in Vancouver and won the Hobby Show grand championship medal at the 1956 Pacific National Exhibition.
Not bad for a young man who had been held back in elementary school because he was dyslexic, and had been discouraged from going into aeronautical engineering after taking a test before his King Magee High School graduation at the age of 19.
It was 1953 and he was an international award-winning model plane builder who was hooked on Road & Track magazine. He decided to use his skills to build his own sports car. He was influenced by the Jaguar XK120 roadster. But his design was unique and very advanced for the time given the fibreglass-bodied Corvette came out after he began his project.
First, he built a model of his design and then scaled it up to construct moulds for the roadster body, doors and hood. A neighbour’s garage yielded a clapped-out 1946 Ford for mechanical parts that he would install in a frame from an Austin A40. A mechanical shop near the Burrard Street bridge helped mate the body to the chassis and got the hopped up 1950 Ford flathead running. It had dual exhausts, twin carburetors, high compression heads and a heavy-duty truck clutch. He drove his car home without licence plates.
A high-school friend’s father was a master painter who applied the hand rubbed Sierra Gold bronze lacquer. The professionally trimmed interior that was deep red and cream. A windshield and folding convertible top were fitted and Dick Frew was on the road.
“The three-quarter race engine would pulsate and the dual exhausts were amazing. It was a dream. The only time I was naughty was on the highway near Bellingham, Wash.,” he recalls. “I had got the car up to 100 miles an hour when I was pulled over by the police. They liked the car, so I only got a ticket.”
Frew would drive the car for a full 10 years. Along the way, he was approached by a family friend to build a four-passenger fastback coupe model. He rented a shop in North Vancouver to complete the project. “I was going to go into the business of making these cars,” he says.
What happened next was completely unexpected. His convertible was rear-ended and severely damaged while parked in Vancouver’s west end. The insurance company paid him $600 and he was able to keep the car.
He subsequently sold the convertible to a young man in West Vancouver. Frew had used his moulds to create new rear body panels that he had installed on the car.
He would never see his convertible again.
“I thought I would be building the new one, so I sold the convertible,” he says.
Frew attended the University of British Columbia as an adult
student and graduated with honours, earning a teaching degree with a double major in art and design. In 1971, he moved to Australia, where he rose to become a department head at a major college in Perth.
He credits the time spent building his car with correcting the dyslexia that caused an inability to function in his early school days. “Doing the car was very complicated, with thousands of problems to solve. That must have helped the wiring in the brain,” he says.
He brought the partly built coupe body to Australia along with the moulds to produce the fibreglass coupe and convertible bodies.
“I planned to build the cars over there, but life got in the way,” he says. He raised three children and the car project went on the back burner.
Tragedy struck after he moved the car body and moulds to a new home in rural Bindoon, 80 kilometres north of Perth. Fires came through in 1996 and burned everything he had to build his cars. He was broken-hearted. He had constructed a special building to resume his car projects, but everything was lost.
I received an email with photos of the car from Dick’s daughter Alix, with the plea, “Can you help find my father’s car?”
“My father still has the original small Plasticine model of his car and a plaster mold of the cutthroughs for scaling up the car,” Alix said in the note. “He carved his name and the date in that and it says September 8, 1953. I think he still has some paper plan pieces for it too but they’re in pretty bad condition.”
She says her father thinks about the car all the time as he approaches his 87th birthday.
“Now I would like to know if it still exists. It was my heart and soul,” Dick Frew said by telephone from Australia. “I would love to see it one more time. Just to sit in it would be my dream.”
Does anyone recall this hand-built sports car? Is there a chance it still exists? Anyone with information can contact Dick Frew at richardfrew7483@ iinet.net.au