Greg Wapling

1941 Buick Roadmaster owned and restyled by Frank Kurtis.The car is known as the "Kurtis Buick Special", and was the forerunner for the Kurtis Sports Car. Frank bought the car after it had been totaled with less than 500 miles on the odometer. After acquiring the car, he stored it away until 1946. In 1946 he began the build. Frank designed and built this car for himself and it became his personal driver. He discarded the complete Buick body and kept only the chassis. A four passenger convertible body was hand formed out of aluminum panels over a steel tubing framework. The cowl and windshield frame were custom aluminum casting. The grille was built from tubing, and the car was fit with a removable padded top. The build was completed in 1948, and it looked quite futuristic compared to the rest of the prewar designed cars of Detroit. Frank drove the car regularly, including a trip to Indianapolis in 1948. In 1949 he advertised it for sale in Motor Trend. The ad was snapped up by Earl Muntz who went on to buy out the Kurtis Sports Car Assembly line.

September 1 thru September 4, 2011 the Kurtis Buick Special will be auctioned away at the Labour Day Auburn Collector Car Auction.

From Hemmings

One of the most unique American cars to cross an auction block this fall will do so not in Monterey but in Auburn, Indiana, where the custom 1941 Buick that Frank Kurtis built will go up for sale.

Just before World War II, Kurtis found the Buick – a 1941 Roadmaster with less than 500 miles on its 165hp overhead-valve straight-eight – as a totaled wreck. He bought it, then stuffed it away for the duration of the war, while he managed Joel Thorne’s machine shop. With the war over, Kurtis removed the body from the chassis, removed the X-member from the frame and boxed the rails (to facilitate a much lower seating position), then set about building a new four-passenger convertible body. To do so, he welded steel tubing to the chassis, cast an aluminum cowl and windshield frame, then hand-formed aluminum body panels over the steel tubing and capped it all off with a removable top.

The custom Buick, completed at a cost of $17,000, made its public debut in May 1948, when Kurtis drove it from California to Indianapolis for the 500. There it created a minor sensation and caught the eye of Tom McCahill, who featured it in the October 1948 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. As Gordon Eliot White wrote in “Kurtis-Kraft: Masterworks of Speed and Style,” taking the Buick to Indy led to much greater things for Kurtis.

The reaction of McCahill and indeed throngs of spectators at Indianapolis intrigued Kurtis. With midget production declining as 1948 drew to a close, Kurtis considered building a sports car version of the Bill Hughes vehicle with a light engine, to be called the Kurtis Kar, but that idea died stillborn. The custom Buick offered a better prototype for a road vehicle, and Kurtis decided to build his own car along its lines, producing an attractive sports car that could be sold based on its style and the publicity his race cars had brought him.

Thus Kurtis drew from the Buick to design and build the two-seater Kurtis Sports Car, which went into production in 1949. The same year, Kurtis ended up selling the Buick – which he had used as his personal transportation – to Earl Muntz, who ended up buying the production rights to the Kurtis Sports Car and renamed it the Muntz Jet.

The Buick has since been treated to a full restoration and made its way back to Indiana and Indianapolis, most recently at this year’s Celebration of Automobiles at the Indianapolis 500. Now Auctions America by RM will be selling it at their Labor Day auction in Auburn, Indiana. The pre-auction estimate on the Buick ranges from $240,000 to $280,000.