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You could say that there were no two more
diverse individuals than Frank Reisner and Alejandro DeTomaso. And yet
there were certain parallels in their lives that led to them both
producing American-engined cars in Italy.
 De Tomaso was born of the landed gentry, on an estate in Argentina that
was owned by his grandmother. His father was politically
influential and was elected Prime minister. He died very young at only 38.
As a young lad, Alejandro was bounced on the knee of the Presidente,
Juan Peron. But then as a college student, DeTomaso fell afoul of El
Presidente, and had to flee to Uruguay with the Peronista goons close on
his heels.
He
married a wealthy American heiress, Isabelle Haskell, and spent the next
few decades in Italy building semi-exotic cars. We say "semi” because
though they had exotic styling and Italian coachwork, they had
off-the-shelf, low-cost engines like Ford V8s.
Then there was Frank Reisner. Born in Hungary in 1932, he fled
with his parents to Canada just before WWII. He became an engineer and
worked in the paint industry. In 1957, he married his wife Paula, and
since she was equally crazy about cars they started a car company. This
is markedly similar to DeTomaso, who met his wife while she was buying
parts at the Maserati parts counter.
And where, thought the Reisners, would be a better place to
begin a car company than Italy, specifically Turin. Reisner had some
experience in the automobile field already, having designed racing
chassis for Giannini Automobili SpA in Rome before settling in Turin.
Reisner did not start out building cars, but manufacturing parts. This,
in contrast to DeTomaso who started
right out with cars, though some would argue that he built OSCAs with
OSCA's money and called them De Tomasos. This may actually have led to
his expeditious departure from the OSCA firm.
The first Intermeccanica products were, innocently enough,
speed equipment kits and free-flowing exhaust systems for various
automobiles. In 1960, things got more interesting when they began to
market a Formula Junior racing car, one of the first mid-engined types,
with a highly-modified Peugeot motor. These cars were in competition
with the DeTomasos in Modena, as well as MBM, a company started by Peter
Monteverdi, yet another man who would later introduce an American
engined GT car.
That
same year, the Reisners developed a prototype of an aluminum two-seater
coupe called the IMP (short for
 Intermeccanica-Puch), with a top speed
of 160 km/h. It was based on the small rear-engined Steyr-Daimler-Puch
500cc car. The IMP was approved by the Austrian company and 21 were
produced in various forms. A racing version of the IMP won the 500cc
class at the Nurburgring.
Then came the American connection. An American enthusiast from Oakland,
named Milt Brown, came up with a sports car design based on the aluminum
block V8 made by Buick, the same engine that Carroll Shelby had been
trying to get for his sports car. Milt Brown’s car was called the Apollo
GT, and was developed under the aegis of Brown's firm, International
Motor Cars. The body was designed by the Italian Franco Scaglione from
sketches made by Ron Plescia. The San Francisco area firm produced 90
coupes and 11 convertibles between 1961 and 1965. They were well built
cars, and considered to be deluxe, since they featured leather
upholstery and came equipped with, among other things, Borrani wire
wheels. There was even a 2-plus-2 version, but then the factory had a
fire and production ceased. Milt Brown might have been a little ahead of
the curve, coming out with an American-powered Italian sports car before
the Americans really appreciated Italian design.
And, like DeTomaso, Frank Reisner was continually innovating.
In 1965, he introduced the Veltro prototype, which was based on the
British Ford 106E. He also built a one-off Mustang Station Wagon
 for a
U.S. advertising executive. Another U.S. project that year was a
joint-venture with Jack Griffith of Long Island, New York, which was
planned as a big (at least by Intermeccanica standards) production of an
all-steel automobile called the Omega. Unfortunately, just as production
began, Griffith's company folded and one of its customers, Steve Wilder,
who was a journalist from the East Coast, took over and production was
continued by Holman & Moody in North Carolina, where 33 of these Omegas
were sold.
Why would Holman & Moody, a firm famous for building stock car racers,
take on such a project? One can only assume they were jealous of
Shelby's deal with Ford and wanted to show that they, too, could produce
cars in quantity.
Although the deal with Griffith failed, an Intermeccanica distributor
was identified in the U.S. and the production of the
 Ford-V8-engined
Italia, based on Ford mechanicals, was started. This car was initially
called the Torino, until Ford pointed out that they already owned the
name. Over 500 Italias were built by 1970, which makes them more
numerous than the DeTomaso Mangusta.
Then came a short lived association with race car driver John Fitch.
Fitch was an American war hero who was shot down over Germany in a P-51,
and survived internment in a German prison camp. For him they built a
Corvair powered one-off car called
 the Fitch Phoenix. The Phoenix came
to no good end, however, because GM had soured on the Corvair and was
never that co-operative with others wanting to use their engines.
The following year, Reisner again visited the high performance wagon
realm with a sexy macho wagon called the Murena GT. Only eleven were
made of this car, which was a luxury automobile powered by a
429 cu. in. Ford drive train.
It can be argued that Intermeccanica's decline began to be played out
just as DeTomaso, ever the adroit politician, assumed a much more
influential position on the world sports car stage.
 In 1969, at the New York Automobile show, there were no less than three
Intermeccanica-developed cars displayed at various stands. This provided
ample demonstration of how far the firm had come since its humble
beginnings. Sales of the previously mentioned Italia finally began in
Europe in 1970, and really took off in Germany, where Erich Bitter was
doing the distribution. In addition, a modified Italia prototype, called
Italia IMX, was constructed and displayed at the Turin Auto show.
The succeeding year a one-off Corvette-based 2-door sedan called the
Centaur was made for a U.S. customer and a cooperative effort was begun
with Opel (GM Europe), which subsequently gave birth to the Indra. The
Chevrolet-351-engined Indra employed Opel mechanicals and generated a
phenomenal amount of interest at the Geneva Auto show.
Production got
under way in 1971, and by 1974, 125 of them were produced in various
forms. It appeared that things were going very well when suddenly GM
pulled the plug on the mechanicals and the engines, which of course
meant the end of Indra sales. To add to the confusion, Erich Bitter had
produced the Bitter CD. It was based on the Opel Diplomat and looked
remarkably like the Indra. The design of the Opel CD show car was
attributed to Charles ‘Chuck’ Jordan. Presumably, Bitter and Jordan were
instrumental in blocking Reisner from continued access to the GM drive
trains. Bitter later introduced his own car line in the US, which was a
dismal failure.
 Always a survivor, Reisner then moved into the replica field
after seeing how successful Excalibur was with their copy of a 1930's
era Mercedes Benz SSK. And circa 1972, Intermeccanica was making the
Squire SS-100, a Jaguar SS replica, for a U.S. company called Squire.
By 1975, it was becoming too expensive for a company such as
Intermeccanica to operate in Italy. Somehow Frank Reisner found out
that the city of San Bernardino, outside of Los Angeles, was funding new
industry in the area. So Reisner and his family made plans to move there
from Italy to construct the Indras. Two Indra prototypes had been
developed, this time sporting Ford engines, and they were shipped there
along with all the firm's belongings, including complete cars, jigs,
dies, and other things required for production. Unfortunately the
promised funding was diverted and except for a sole Indra, everything
else was impounded at the U.S. port of entry. Between the moving costs
and paying off all debts in Italy Frank was left with only $500 and one
car. And shortly thereafter, the remaining Indra had to be sold off to
raise some money.
But as we have already said, Frank Reisner was a survivor.
Still riding the ‘replicar’ wave, he developed a replica of the Porsche
Speedster. The fact that so many genuine Speedsters, very costly at the
time, could be seen on the streets of California greatly influenced his
decision to go retro. The tooling and prototype were created in Los
Angeles, after a long period of time carefully measuring the curves and
dimension of a rented Speedster. It is significant to note that ever
since he first saw it at an auto show in 1949, Frank had always admired
the beautiful Porsche 356 body and the wonderful sounds a Porsche
four-cylinder engine makes.
In order to produce the Speedsters, Reisner formed a
partnership with Tony Baumgartner in Santa Ana, California. This
company, called Automobili Intermeccanica, produced about 600 of these
fiberglass-bodied and VW-based beauties before Frank sold off his share
to Tony and the whole project was
sold to Classic Motor Carriages in Florida. At that point everything was
back to good times again.
Then Reisner made a misstep. He thought neoclassics were still strong,
and around 1979 he tooled up for the construction of a massive
neoclassic sedan with a 129-inch wheelbase (built on the Checker taxi
cab chassis. But then the California economy took one of its most famous
swan dives and the market for such a vehicle collapsed. A more
successful project in 1980 was the design for a soft-top conversion kit
for the Ford Mustang, which Reisner sold through Ford dealers, Ford
having inexplicably ended production of Mustang convertibles some years
earlier.
 Reisner began thinking about Canada, his adopted country, and moved
there in 1982. it was there that he revisited a Porsche body style with
the Roadster RS, a replica of the 1959 Porsche Convertible 'D' (D for Drautz), based again on a VW Beetle pan. Later, the RS was further
refined with the addition of fender flares, a modified front, a hardtop,
a new steel tubular chassis and the use of the mechanicals of the
6-cylinder Porsche 911. Another venture was a military replica, the
Kubelwagen Typ 82.
 The Kubelwagen (meaning "bucket wagon") was a copy of
the WWII German troop carrier that filled the same purpose as the Jeep
in the American Army.
Frank Reisner died in 2000, leaving behind a long and rich legacy of
experimentation, creative automotive design and a variety of memorable
automobiles. Henry Reisner, Frank's eldest son, learned the trade from
his father and has been successful in keeping the firm going.
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