Roadster
Chassis number: 747513

Mistral - defined as a strong wind blowing southeast from France toward the Mediterranean.

Around 1955, a car designer named Bob Plass from Surrey, England, who owned Microplas (short for Micron Plastics), designed an extremely innovative sports car body and called it a Mistral. Several bodies were put on various smaller engine English chassis of that time. In 1955 a group of investors from Hollywood, California, decided to bring the molds back home, build cars with more modern chassis and larger motors and pay Plass a royalty for each car sold. This company was called Sports Car Engineering.

When no royalties were paid, the Englishman came and took his molds back, selling them to Pit Stop Engineering in Washington, D.C. The molds finally ended up somewhere in Australia, where production had stopped. Very few Mistrals exist today.

This one was found in southern California in the early 1990s, as an old race car in serious need of restoration. It currently has a Chevy 301 cubic-inch High Performance engine, a 4-speed close ratio Muncie transmission, and a 1956 Chevy 370 Posi rear setup. The chassis is from Sports Car Engineering - Racing, and it wears a fiberglass body. There are XK150 disc brakes in the front and Buick Al-Finn drums in the rear. In total, the car weighs 1,966 lbs.

Several famous English and American racecar drivers have found Mistral bodied sports cars, back in the day, some of the include Dan Gurney, Bob Eagleson, Arciero brothers, Joshua Saslov, Bob Bondurant, and Bill Stanton, who did 173 mph in the late 1950s.