AMC Built A Mid-Engine 170-MPH Supercar 50 Years Before The C8 Corvette
Fifty years before Chevrolet put a Corvette engine behind the driver, one of Detroit’s smallest automakers explored the same idea with far fewer resources. The plan called for American V8 power, Italian engineering, German development work, and enough speed to bother the best exotics in Europe. Engineers built running cars, found their problems, fixed them, and pushed one to 170 mph. The machine worked, but, unfortunately, the math surrounding it proved much harder to fix.
America Wanted An Exotic Supercar, But Detroit Hadn’t Cracked The Formula
By the late 1960s, Europe had changed the shape of a serious performance car. Lamborghini’s Miura put its V12 behind the cabin and made the mid-engine layout part of the supercar vocabulary. The layout carried real engineering benefits: concentrating mass near the center of the car could improve balance and response, while moving the engine away from the nose gave designers the freedom to draw something impossibly low and dramatic. Detroit had no shortage of horsepower, but most of that horsepower still sat ahead of the driver.
A mid-engine halo car offered more than better weight distribution. It offered proof that an American company could play by a different set of rules. Ford had already found a clever shortcut – its relationship with De Tomaso produced the Pantera, an Italian-built, mid-engine machine powered by a Ford 351 Cleveland V8 and eventually sold through Lincoln-Mercury dealers. Buyers could get European proportions, an American engine, and a roughly $10,000 price instead of Ferrari money. For any rival considering the same market, the Pantera was about to become a very uncomfortable measuring stick.
Detroit’s Unlikeliest Automaker Assembled A European Supercar Dream Team
The smaller Detroit company working on its own answer did more than simply bolt a V8 into a fiberglass show car. Its styling team set the shape in America, but much of the serious engineering work crossed the Atlantic. Giotto Bizzarrini helped develop the chassis and suspension, and that name carried weight. Bizzarrini had worked on Ferraris and later created cars under his own name. His job here involved turning a wild American styling proposal into something that could cope with big-block levels of torque, sustained speed, and real corners. The result used a steel structure, four-wheel independent suspension, and a low center of gravity rather than muscle-car hardware hiding under an exotic body.
The project became even stranger, and more impressive, from there. ItalDesign contributed structural engineering, including work on the steel body and its rigidity. Interestingly, Giorgetto Giugiaro had earlier submitted a competing styling proposal that lost to the in-house American design, but losing the beauty contest did not end his company’s involvement. Research into the program has since documented ItalDesign’s engineering role, including an image of the unfinished body on a rigidity test rig. Meanwhile, Italian defense and engineering company OTO Melara developed a four-speed rear transaxle strong enough to live behind the American V8. Detroit had effectively assembled an Italian supercar supply chain around one very American lump of iron.
Then BMW joined in. American Motors contracted the German company in 1969 to evaluate and develop the prototypes, and BMW assigned the work its internal Project E18 designation. The early car gave BMW plenty to do – testing uncovered concerns with stability, cooling, structural behavior, and other areas that would have been easy to ignore on a show stand. Engineers instead fed those lessons back into later cars, and Bizzarrini incorporated changes into the chassis.
The AMC AMX/3 Hit 170 MPH At Monza
The company was American Motors Corporation, and the car was the AMC AMX/3. AMC design chief Dick Teague had pushed the automaker toward more exciting products at a time when many Americans still associated it with sensible Ramblers. The AMX and Javelin had already started changing that image, and the AMX/3 aimed far higher. Teague’s team created a low, wide two-seater with its engine behind the occupants and styling that could have come from Turin rather than Kenosha. At roughly 43 inches tall, with a 105.3-inch wheelbase and a body wrapped tightly around its mechanical parts, it looked nothing like the practical cars that paid AMC’s bills. That was precisely the point.
AMC supplied a 390-cubic-inch V8, rated at 340 horsepower and 430 lb-ft of torque, and OTO Melara’s four-speed transaxle sent that output to the rear wheels. Four ratios sounded almost old-fashioned beside the five-speeds appearing in European exotics, but 430 lb-ft made close spacing less urgent. Contemporary performance estimates put the sprint to 60 mph at roughly 5.5 seconds. That was serious pace in 1970, but top speed mattered even more – AMC wanted approximately 160 mph. Early high-speed work exposed front-end lift, and reports put the first attempts closer to 145 mph. The engine had more to give, but the nose needed convincing to remain friends with the pavement.
Development finally produced the payoff at Italy’s Monza circuit. Bizzarrini and test driver Antonio Nieri experimented with aerodynamic changes, including a small chin spoiler that calmed the front of the car. The revised machine reportedly reached 170 mph, beating AMC’s original target by about 10 mph. The Monza car had also gone through BMW development work, so this was the end result of a genuine test-and-improve process rather than one heroic speedometer reading on a quiet highway.
The AMX/3 Worked, But The Business Case Fell Apart
Making the AMX/3 work on a racetrack solved only one of AMC’s problems, though, because making money from it looked increasingly hopeless. Historical accounts put total development spending at roughly $2 million, a major commitment for a company that lacked Ford, GM, or Chrysler money. Early talk centered on a price near $10,000, already a huge number in 1970. As engineering and production estimates became clearer, the likely sticker moved toward $12,000 or more.
The timing could hardly have been worse. Ford’s De Tomaso Pantera was headed for Lincoln-Mercury dealerships at around $10,000 with the backing of a vastly larger company. Asking buyers to pay thousands more for an AMC badge, regardless of what sat behind the seats, required heroic optimism.
Regulators also had Detroit’s attention. New federal low-speed impact rules were coming, creating the era usually remembered for “5-mph bumpers.” NHTSA’s first version took effect in September 1972 and required new passenger cars to survive a 5-mph front impact and a 2.5-mph rear impact without damage to specified safety-related systems. For a tiny-volume exotic whose low nose and tail had never been shaped around bulky impact structures, that threatened another round of engineering and expense.
At the same time, AMC had suffered a damaging union strike that tightened an already difficult cash position. The company could justify spending on cars that kept factories busy, but an Italian-built supercar with a price problem sat much lower on the emergency list.
Production plans remain one of the messiest parts of the AMX/3 story, which is why a neat annual figure deserves suspicion. Period plans and later histories range from tiny hand-built batches to 1,000 cars and even 5,000 per year. Some sources cite a plan to start with only three cars a month, while others describe forecasts that moved from around 1,000 cars down to only a few dozen. The program never lasted long enough to settle the question, though – five cars were substantially completed during the AMC-backed project according to several histories, while Bizzarrini and former collaborator Salvatore Diomante finished a sixth from work and components left after cancellation.
The Mid-Engine American Supercar Arrived 50 Years Too Early
The AMX/3 wasn’t slow, ugly, or fundamentally broken. Its development team had already turned an ambitious shape into a running steel-bodied supercar, fixed problems revealed in testing, and found 170 mph at Monza. Cost killed momentum, and regulation promised more cost. AMC’s financial condition made both harder to absorb. What happened afterward made the cancellation look even colder.
Two cars reportedly remained outside AMC headquarters, exposed to Michigan weather as they deteriorated. Dick Teague, the man who had fought for the program, later helped save them rather than let the company dispose of them. The supercar dream had effectively gone from international engineering project to unwanted parking-lot furniture. Michigan winters rarely improve Italian metal.
Time reversed the insult. The same cars that once represented an expensive dead end became some of the most important artifacts AMC ever created. The Monza test car, commonly identified in AMX/3 histories as car or chassis No. 4, sold through Gooding & Company in 2017 for $891,000, then a record auction result for the AMC marque.
And when Chevrolet finally launched the C8, the Corvette became a production mid-engine car after decades of experiments and proposals. AMC had reached that layout around 50 years earlier with its own V8, a Bizzarrini-developed chassis, ItalDesign engineering, BMW testing, and enough speed to run with the serious machinery of its day. The AMX/3 arrived before its company could afford the future it had built.
Source: AMC, Gooding & Company, BMW
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