Gordon Buehrig, the designer of the stunning Cord 810, was also responsible for the Ford Motor Company’s first hardtop, the 1951 Custom Victoria.
The name Gordon Buehrig (1904-1990) is a familiar one to every serious car enthusiast, for he was the designer of the 1936 Cord 810, universally regarded as one of the most beautiful American cars ever produced. In fact, the Cord’s stunning looks tend to overshadow the rest of his remarkable career—for example, his 16 years at the Ford Motor Company, where he retired in 1965.
Buehrig joined Ford on August 15, 1949 as manager of the Body Development Studio, one of six sections at Ford Styling. Its purpose was to create the production variants (station wagons, convertibles, and specialty models) of Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln passenger cars once the clay models were completed by their respective studios. Among his first major assignments was a crash program to create a pillarless two-door hardtop for the 1951 Ford body shell. Ford already had a hardtop in place for the proposed 1952 Ford, but the company decided that another year was too long to wait for the hot-selling body style.
Buehrig’s design was remarkably clever. The wraparound backlite was achieved with three panes of glass, standard practice at the time, but the C pillar is unique. The structure is actually quite substantial, yet two stainless steel trim pieces—a halo bar over the roof and a C-pillar cover, conceal its thickness. In side view, the roof appears to be cantilevered, almost floating on air.
Buehrig’s group was responsible not just for the styling of the hardtop but for its engineering as well, a significant technical challenge as the elimination of the center B-post eliminates a fair amount of the body’s stiffness. Also, Buehrig was required to use the existing convertible body shell and chassis with no changes in tooling. While Wettlaufer Engineering was brought in to consult, Buehrig was more than up to the task. He’d begun his career in 1924 as a draftsman at Gotfredson Body, which produced bodies for Peerless and Wills Sainte Claire, and he had extensive experience in body construction.
As was the fashion at the time in “convertible hardtops,” as they were then called, the interior of the Custom Victoria was fully decked out with leather and cloth upholstery in three two-tone color combinations, full carpeting, and extra chrome trim. With similar features, Ford had attempted to capture the convertible hardtop flavor with the ’50-’51 Crestliner, a customized two-door post sedan, with limited success. The Crestliner didn’t sell in anywhere near the numbers of the rival Chevrolet Bel Air, a true pillarless hardtop (see our feature on the Crestliner here).
The Custom Victoria was available only with the 239.4 cubic-inch, 100 hp flathead V8, as the Ford six was not available in the Victoria, Convertible, or Crestliner. However, the Ford-O-Matic automatic transmission was introduced that year as a $159 option. The base price was $1,925, 24 bucks cheaper than the Convertible. Of course, the Victoria name was borrowed from the close-coupled coupe-sedan body style that was a favorite of Edsel Ford and introduced on the 1930 Model A.
Despite its late introduction on January 28, 1951, Ford’s first hardtop was a red hot seller as more than 110,000 flew out the dealership doors, beating the Chevy Bel Air by 7,000 units.. Ford was so pleased that it scrapped its original 1952 hardtop proposal and used Buehrig’s design from 1952 through 1954. At Ford, Buehrig went on to develop the carmaker’s first all-steel station wagons in 1952, another sizable boost to the company’s bottom line. And while he wasn’t responsible for the styling, Buehrig also served as lead body engineer on the 1956-57 Continental Mark II, billed at the time as the finest car the Ford Motor Company could produce.
