The Wonderful Monster Faces Of Vintage Race Cars

It’s not technically a requirement for a race car to have a face, let alone a monster face, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s better for a race car to have a face, and even a greater amount of better if that face is monsterized. While at the Laguna Seca Historics this past week, I happened to encounter a fantastic variety of vintage race cars, and noted that a good number of them had faces.

Monster faces.

My purpose while at Monterey Car Week was to be the eyes, ears, nose, and perineum for all of you, so you can appreciate as much of car week as possible even while stuck, well, wherever you’re stuck. So with that in mind, please thrill to the best, most monstery vintage race car faces I could find:

Let’s start with one of the best monster faces in the racing world: the Kurtis 500S. I’ve always thought of it as the gold standard of monstervisagery in race cars: a big, toothy grin, bulging eyes, funny little fender hands. It looks like a comically unhinged little beast that you can keep under some limited control by feeding it a lot of wet, dripping hams.

Other Kurtis racing cars, like this 1953 Kurtis Sorrell GMC Special, have more refined bodies but still manage to keep a nicely monsteric punim. This one has a wider mouth, chubbier cheeks, and wide-set eyes. It also feels a bit aquatic, something we’ll be seeing more of here.

This OSCA Special also has a very aquatic feeling to it, looking like a catfish, kind of.

This MG Special has a more crustacean thing going on, still quite pleasingly monstery. It also sort of reminds me of the crab aliens from the old Imagic Atari 2600 game called Demon Attack.

Let’s keep going with MGs; this MG TD race car has essentially the same front end as the production TD, but it still manages to have a sort of monstery quality, perhaps even a bit avian.

What I really find fascinating is this really monsterized version of the MG TD, with a front end clearly designed to evoke the basic MG look, just very exaggerated and grafted onto an exuberant body that feels like something between a bat and a sting ray. It’s so good.

Look at this screamer! It’s a Manning V8 Special; these usually had Mercury V8 engines and were quite competitive, but at this moment I’m more taken by that angry shrieking beaked face.

Look at this Triumph TR2! This one feels more like some manner of mammalian monster, wild-eyed and feral.

This 1952 Tatum GMC Special, which used a GMC inline-6 engine and a special intake manifold that mounted three Corvette carbs, is another one of those sting ray-feeling sorts of monster cars.

This red-lipped Cooper is quite aquatic, and feels a little less threatening or aggressive than many of these other monsterized racing cars. This one just seems a bit confused.

Speaking of non-aggressive, can we count the famous Bugeye Sprite face as a monster face? There can be friendly monsters, right? I feel like Grover taught me that, long ago.

This 1954 Sutton Jaguar Special isn’t particularly menacing, but I think it has a more determined monster face than the Bugeye. Maybe it’s that wide mouth.

Allards always have distinctive faces, with that particular shape of grille; the very wide-set eyes of this one give it a bit of a derpy look, but I still like it.

The production-style Jaguar XK-type face feels a bit like a monsterificated owl.

Finally, there was one car that genuinely and unashamedly leaned into its monster nature, this 1955 Chevrolet-powered Mistral. With vertical-slit cat/snake pupils and a pair of fangs, this quick crimson beast is fully embracing its monsterism, and that’s delightful.

What a glorious pack of monsters!