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The story of Griffith motorcars is an improbable one. Homespun sports car programs just don’t crop up out of small regional dealerships and produce performance on par with the world’s elite. Sure, the likes of Briggs Cunningham and Carroll Shelby masterminded their own American sports car projects, but they both had the cachet of Le Mans success and the renown and resources that come with it to help lend their efforts legitimacy. Jack Griffith, for all his dedication and visionary nature, was a relative unknown by comparison, and thus every ounce of reputation that the Griffith
marquee attained came from the car itself.
Jack Griffith himself had become involved in the car business at just the right time—at the dawn of the post-war era. Most of that experience came in the affluent Long Island area, first as a salesman, and later as the owner of dealer franchises. Griffith got his start with Kaiser-Frazer, and then got his chance to open a Packard dealership of his own in 1949. He stayed with Packard for four years, but sold that business when the opportunity arose to open White-Griffith DeSoto and Plymouth with partner John White in 1953.
Plymouth performance came online two years later with the 1955 introduction of the
marquee's first V-8s and Plymouth company brass wanted to establish a performance reputation for the brand. So White-Griffith was tasked with prepping an early ’56 V-8 sedan for a top-speed run on the sands of Daytona. The driver would be Phil Walters—among other things, Walters had been a teammate of automotive entrepreneur and racing legend Briggs Cunningham at Le Mans in 1951. The Plymouth fell just short of a record, and there was little else on the performance front to keep White-Griffith in the Pentastar (Chrysler) camp, so the dealership subsequently jumped ship to Ford in 1957.
The Formative Ford Years
Each of the Big Three in Detroit was heavily invested in performance—on and off the track—by 1957. Jack Griffith was determined to have his dealership be an integral part of Ford’s performance legacy. The first significant step in that direction came with the 1962 introduction of the
small block “Windsor” V-8 in the midsize Fairlane. Though the displacements and outputs of the initial versions weren’t terribly sporting—221ci / 143hp and 260ci / 164hp—its compact dimensions, light weight and ample room for performance development clearly made it the
power plant of choice. If the first year small blocks underwhelmed, Ford got on the right track performance-wise with its sophomore season, expanding availability across the product range from compact (Falcon) to full-size (Galaxie) and, late in ‘64, enlarging the bore to yield 289ci. The base two-barrel 289 made 195hp, but the real news was the hot High Performance (HP) option for the Fairlane which came with a four-barrel carb, higher compression and a more aggressive cam. It made a robust 271hp and an equally impressive 312 lb-ft of torque.
Griffith’s first individual foray into performance involved an idea for mating Ford’s most compact chassis—the Falcon—with the HP 289 engine and a few other performance and appearance items. For 1964, the Sprint edition of the Falcon could be ordered with the 260 V-8, which was externally identical to the 289. So fitting in the more robust HP engine into the Falcon would be a relatively simple matter. But even the HP version was far from maxed out, so Griffith had his engine shop massage the heads and install a bigger cam. More complex was ensuring that the extra horses made it to the pavement, so the drag-racer’s favorite 9-inch Ford rear end was tucked under the prototype Griffith Sprint as well.
A Sporting Chance
Meanwhile Griffith was not sitting idle on the sports car front. Jack had added a Jaguar franchise as a sideline brand to the dealership, and shortly thereafter signed up to be an authorized dealer for Shelby’s newly hatched Cobra, which of course also sported Ford’s rowdy little V-8. It wasn’t long before Griffith had ordered a competition-prepped Cobra to campaign in local SCCA events.
Not yet on Griffith’s radar was the little-known British independent TVR, but its newly released Grantura III was about to change all that. Griffith’s friend and fellow SCCA racer Dick Monnich had been a regular fixture at Griffith’s shop throughout the Sprint’s development. Monnich was acquainted with another up-and-coming east coast sports car racer by the name of Mark Donohue. Donohue had been collecting trophies behind the wheel of a variety of machines, including a TVR he campaigned on behalf of an import dealer from New Jersey named Lew Schulz. This led to Donohue’s first fully- sponsored ride piloting a Schulz-sponsored Elva Courier, and later, Works TVR drives at Sebring in 1962 and ’64.
Eventually, Monnich brought Donohue around to the Griffith shop to meet Jack, and was offered the competition Cobra drive virtually on the spot. It proved a savvy choice, as Donohue enjoyed considerable success driving Griffith’s Cobra. Griffith’s head mechanic at the time was Roger Teck, and he was charged with maintaining the Donohue race Cobra, but he also maintained another car—a TVR Grantura III—for driver Gerry Sagerman. Not coincidentally, Sagerman had been Donohue’s co-driver in the Works TVR at Sebring in ’64. As Jack and Roger both tell it, this connection is what ultimately led to the concept of the
Griffith Series 200. One day, while Jack and Gerry went off to lunch, the TVR and the Cobra sat parked side by side in a bay in the White-Griffith Ford garage. While they were out Roger decided to pull a prank on them, so he lowered a spare Cobra engine into the vacant engine bay of the TVR. On the pair’s return from lunch Roger told Gerry that he had made some modifications to the TVR to make it a real winner on the track. He tilted the bonnet forward exposing the very-modified 289 inside. Sagerman went into a rage, telling him to remove it immediately, but as the dust settled Jack turned to Roger and presciently inquired, “Can we do it?” Roger just responded with a “yup!” That was the complete extent of the evaluation of the Griffith project.
Two for the Road
With the Sprint and the Grantura III conversion now underway in the shop, Jack had some politicking to do. After all, neither project would proceed any further than the prototype stage without approval from Ford management in Dearborn, headed up by Lee Iacocca. Jack made arrangements to show his two concept cars to the Ford brass. And in November of 1964, when both cars were complete, he, Monnich, and project mechanic George Clark trailered the two prototypes from Long Island to Dearborn for an audience.
Despite the fact that the Grantura III conversion had a much shorter gestation period, it received relatively easy approval. The Griffith Sprint, however, had one insurmountable obstacle on the horizon. Ford’s factory engineers had been hard at work at a sporty little car based on the Falcon that would also feature the new HP 289, as well as some sleek new coupe bodywork. It was a little something called the Mustang, and Ford management worried that the Griffith Sprint could threaten the Mustang’s performance image before it ever got out of the gate, so they nixed Griffith’s Sprint concept as a defensive measure.
Getting Rolling
With the ink drying on Ford’s authorization for the TVR-Ford hybrid, Jack and company set about establishing Griffith Motorcars. He sold the dealership and leased a building in nearby Syosset to serve as a manufacturing facility. Ford was onboard to supply engines. Meanwhile, Dick Monnich served as liaison with TVR in the UK, alternately begging, threatening and cajoling them to increase their leisurely production pace, as they would be supplying both chassis and fiberglass bodywork for the newly christened
Griffith Series 200.
Even with the raw materials secured, there was still a fair bit of engineering to get Griffith’s first production vehicle rolling. The design concept of the
Griffith Series 200 mirrored that of the Shelby Cobra in many respects, so the technical challenges were similarly complex, but, the fledgling Griffith company had significantly less resources than Shelby’s operation. Among other things, the Grantura III’s tube frame chassis was smaller than the Cobra’s, and while the V-8 itself did fit with some wrangling, the clearance was so tight that there was no room for conventional rear-exit exhaust manifolds. The solution the Griffith team arrived upon was to fabricate forward-exiting manifolds that then looped down and back in between the chassis tubes. This sort of seat-of-the-pants engineering was quite creative, but lacked the thorough testing and development of more expansive manufacturing operations. This is one of the reasons that Griffith cars—particularly the early models—exhibited so much “character” and why many of them received custom work after delivery to address unresolved issues.
Up to Speed
As Griffith Series 200 production progressed the Griffith crew made a series of line changes to streamline production and improve reliability. In addition, since Grantura III’s were largely hand-built, the Grantura components upon which the
Griffith Series 200 was based were constantly evolving. The cars reflected those changes, making the
Griffith Series 200s effectively of a range of vehicles rather than a series of a single model. This constant evolution, plus the inconsistent records keeping at TVR UK and Griffith make an exact count of 200s produced problematic, but Mike Mooney’s book
The Griffith Years puts the best estimate at about 190.
When TVR reworked the Grantura III into the “Manx tail” Grantura Mk IV, that, plus the revisions to the 200 added up to the first official model redo. The Griffith part deux was given the designation “400” when it came out in late 1964. Meanwhile, Griffith had now moved his manufacturing headquarters to a much larger plant in Plainview, NY to accommodate demand. Besides the elongated tail, enlarged rear window and distinctive “peace symbol” tail lights, the power-train selection was simplified for the
Griffith Series 400. The standard engine for the 200 series had been the lo-po two-barrel 195hp 289 (the
Griffith Series 200 series model designation was based on the mid-1964 revised horsepower rating of the two-barrel equipped 289), with the four-barrel 225hp hydraulic lifter and the top-of-the-line 271hp HP solid lifter motors optional. With the
Griffith Series 400, Griffith dispensed with the agricultural low option and made the HP 289 standard. By all accounts, the
Griffith Series 400 was a superior vehicle and should have handily outsold the
Griffith Series 200, but circumstances conspired against it.
As it happened, the conspiracy involved the dock workers union, whose strike dried up the supply of TVR UK supplied Grantura Mk IV bodies after just 59 had been delivered. With TVR in serious financial trouble and clouds on the horizon with the Ford engine deal as well, design of the third Griffith was hurriedly undertaken. Still, the dock strike caught Griffith off guard and the 600 was not yet ready for production when the 400 pieces stopped coming, so there was a considerable—and ultimately critical—interruption in Griffith production.
TVR had sorely wanted to have their newly designed Trident model to become the
Griffith Series 600 but Jack Griffith wanted to have a completely and independently designed car as the showcase design eventually choosing the Bob Cumberford and Frank Reisner’s Carrozzeria Intermeccanica offering.
The foundation for the Griffith Series 600 would be a new chassis designed and manufactured by Carrozzeria Intermeccanica, an independent design house located in Italy. The body was penned by Bob Cumberford, a former GM designer. Unlike previous Griffiths, the 600’s body would be rendered in steel and mounted to the chassis on site by Intermeccanica rather than assembled domestically at Griffith. Engine installation and other necessary assembly work would still be done at Griffith, with none other than Mark Donohue now heading up the engineering department.
With Griffith Series 400 production ground to a halt, Griffith could not keep the Ford contract afloat during the delay until the
Griffith Series 600 came on line, so other power-train arrangements had to be made. Capitalizing on contacts he had with Chrysler from back in his DeSoto/Plymouth days, Jack made a deal for 10 engines and transmissions—the number of complete bodied chassis’ that he had received from Italy to that point. The engines were Chrysler’s smallest small blocks—LA series 273ci V-8s, nine of which were backed by 4-speeds, and the final one by Chrysler’s excellent 727 TorqueFlite automatic transmission.
The 273 V-8 presented Donohue with several engineering hurdles. To begin with, Chrysler’s LA was considerably larger and heavier than the Ford 289 despite its marginally smaller displacement, and it produced much less power—the top-of-the-line four-barrel was rated at just 200hp. All of which negatively affected the
Griffith Series 600’s power-to-weight ratio and performance of course, but even more damaging to a sports car, it threw off the weight balance, causing the car to understeer terribly—something that Donohue, even with all his race-engineering savvy could not entirely compensate for. To top it all off, the
Griffith Series 600 now carried a base price of more than $6000—half again what the
Griffith Series 200 had cost just a few years previous—while offering significantly lower performance. This, along with the dock strike and other economic concerns, proved decisive and ultimately spelled the end for the
Griffith Series 600—and Griffith Motorcars as a whole—after just 10 of the
Griffith Series 600s had been finished.
Thus, by the end of 1967, the Griffith was gone from the market, leaving a scant 260-odd cars to carry the nameplate forward and establish it in the annals of sports car history.
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