Thursday (car)

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Thursday
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Thursday (car)
Presentation year: 1962
Vehicle fair:
Class : Sports car
Body shape : Cabriolet
Engine: Otto engine :
1.5 liters
Length: 4600 mm
Wheelbase: 2400 mm
Empty weight: 800 kg
Production model: none

Thursday is a car - a prototype of 1962/63. Fritz Thursday, the owner of a privately run car body construction company in Frankfurt am Main, and Fritz Meißnest, who is considered to be the source of ideas, played a major role in this . Depending on the source and the progress of the project, the vehicle was also known as DoMe (shortened from Thursday-Meißnest), DoMe 15 (because of the 1500 cm³ engine), Meißnest Roadster and Condor GT .

description

The vehicle was manufactured and presented to the public in the early 1960s. After that Thursday and Meißnest offered it for small series production. Special features were the unusually long, flat and smooth body in the pontoon style and the roof of the four-seater convertible based on Volkswagen , which, unlike VW, could be folded completely flat behind the rear seats; The use of components from the new VW Type 3, including the flat engine, and the use of plastic as the body material instead of sheet steel or light metal were also unusual .

technology

Fritz Meißnest started the project in the summer of 1961. He wanted to create a four-seater luxury version of the Karmann Ghia. He bought a new VW 1500 for the project. After removing the body, he contacted his friend, the coachbuilder Fritz Thursday. Together they made the positive form of the body made of wood, over which they laminated the body skin from fine plastic mats and resin using the hand lay-up process. A tubular space frame was welded and the two-part body was assembled. Working with a positive mold meant that the final body was initially only smooth on the inside and the outside had to be smoothed in a complex process. It had been more than a year by then. The long, deeply drawn-down front of the car showed distant similarities with the Jaguar E-Type with its recessed headlights, but the lamps were not clad with plexiglass half-shells. Bonds to the Karmann Ghia can be seen from the side. From the rear, the car is reminiscent of other Italian models. The windshield came from a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL . The door handles were borrowed from a Volkswagen. The direction indicators came from the Mercedes-Benz 220 S Ponton . Still other components came from the Auto Union 1000 . The driver and front passenger sat on the rather spartan-looking seats of a Fiat 500. The round tail lights originally came from a Ford 17 M (P3) . The finished vehicle, in racing style without bumpers, was 4.60 meters long, weighed 800 kilograms empty and was first presented to the public on November 1, 1962. This made the car around 30 centimeters longer and more than 100 kilograms lighter than the VW Karmann-Ghia 1500 (Type 34), which was produced exclusively as a coupé in series from March 1962 .

Attempt at marketing

Fritz Meißnest demonstrated the roadster to TÜV in 1963 and offered the sports car he had initiated to several automobile manufacturers for production, ultimately unsuccessfully. The plan to set up Condor Car GmbH to market the roadster recently advertised as the “Condor GT” had to be abandoned at short notice. Fritz Meißnest put around 30,000 marks into the project, which ruined him financially, so that he withdrew from the automotive business, disappointed. Part of the cause was Volkswagen's well-developed plans to have its own, cheaper convertible version of the Karmann-Ghia 1500 S (Type 34) mass-produced at Karmann in Osnabrück .

The vehicle today

The vehicle was registered in the summer of 1963. After that, it stood in a garage for years, where it was damaged and some parts were robbed. In 1976 the great nephews Edmund and Klaus Meißnest took over. They planned the restoration . They installed square taillights from the Simca 1000 and changed the electrical system from 6 volts to 12 volts. Due to lack of time, they couldn't manage much more. In 1977 the vehicle ended up in a barn. Around 1987 her brother Mario Meißnest bought the vehicle. He restored it until the summer of 1990. He fitted round taillights from the BMW 02 . For the full acceptance, the TÜV requested a nameplate and a chassis number. Since then, the car has been shown occasionally at classic car events.

The vehicle is described in a four-page report in the magazine Oldtimer Praxis , issue 5/1993.

literature

  • Hans-Rüdiger Etzold: The Beetle IV - A Documentation . Alfred Bucheli publishing house, owner Paul Pietsch, Zug, Switzerland. 2nd edition 1998. ISBN 978-3-7168-1890-9 , p. 18 under Thursday .
  • Thomas Braun: Durchgeboxt - The great encyclopedia of small series and self-made vehicles based on VW Beetles and buses; also many Porsche examples . Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2018.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roger Gloor: All Cars of the 60s. 1st edition. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 978-3-613-02649-0 , p. 392.
  2. ↑ a b c d Hans-Rüdiger Etzold: The Beetle IV - A Documentation. 2nd Edition. Verlag Alfred Bucheli, Inh. Paul Pietsch, Zug 1998, ISBN 978-3-7168-1890-9 , p. 18.
  3. ↑ a b c Table of contents of the book Durchgeboxt (PDF; accessed on December 23, 2018)
  4. ↑ a b c d Heike Benetti: Everything is handmade! In: Oldtimer Praxis , issue 5/1993, pp. 62–65.
  5. ↑ Thomas Braun: Durchgeboxt - The large encyclopedia of small series and self-made on VW Beetle and bus basis; also many Porsche examples . Schneider Media, 2018.