With Frua, British company AC Cars locked horns in a performance battle with brands like Ferrari and Lambo. However, it later lost the war.
What is Frua? Well, you can be forgiven for not knowing about a car with just 81 units produced. That’s right, just 81. AC Frua, also known as AC 428, is a British Grand Tourer (GT) built by the British automobile manufacturer AC Cars. The car was first released in 1965 and produced through 1973, during which time AC Cars built 49 Frua Coupes and 29 Frua Convertibles.
Barring the Peel P50, best known as the world’s smallest production car, AC Frua is the world’s lowest volume production car. Even the 2016 Bentley GT Speed Breitling Jet Team Series with just 7 made would hand the trophy to Frua since the Bentley belong with the modern hypercar exclusive.
AC Cars borrowed more than the GT nomenclature from Italy (Gran Turismo is the etymology of Grand Touring), although Frua featured a British chassis and the American BigBlock V8 engine. Frua also sported an Italian cosmetic design, effectively making it a true hybrid GT. The thing is, a hybrid personality sounds and feels excellent, except that this crisscrossing of the British/Italian manufacturing process placed an otherwise fantastic car with great potential on a slippery slope down the bottom of extinction. Here is the ill-fated story of AC Frua.
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Frua had a strong lookalike in those days, the Maserati Mistral-designed Pietro Frua. AC Frua is a super-rare collector car due to its limited production volume. You may have spotted it in the 1961 – 1969 Avengers TV series, driven by actors Patrick Macnee and Linda Thorson. As the GT emphasized, AC Frua was built to offer a blend of comfort and performance.
Your typical hotrods may sacrifice comfort amenities on the altar of speed, but the focus of a GT like AC Frua was on speed and long-distance driving. Little wonder, AC offered them in a coupe and convertible body types. You could picture your grandpa on Highway 60, his right arm gripping the steering and the elbow of the other arm resting lazily on the doorsill, wind slapping gently on his six-button crimplene shirt, the dog sitting beside him to his right with the tongue out and lolling. That's what AC Frua was offering; comfortable long-distance driving.
Frua and Cobra 427 Mark III shared the same race-bred coil springs British chassis, promoting the car’s high-performance attributes. The coil spring suspension allowed a wider range of suspension movement and therefore improved turning and cornering ability.
However, the chassis, built in-house at AC’s manufacturing plant in England, was extended by six inches in the Frua. It may have been British-made, but its construction was borrowed heavily from Italian supercars of those days. With rectangular and square tubing holding the steel body to the frame, AC Frua was very strong but prone to rust.
Ultimately, AC Frua was a high-performance chimera imprinted by British, American, and Italian DNA. Its Ford-made BigBlock engine gave it the oomph to race the likes of Maserati, Ferrari, and Lamborghini; the Italian-inspired chassis brought rigidity, and the British branding brought global recognition.
Like most fast cars of that era, AC Frua was an expensive ride that bequeathed class and status to those who could afford it. But it wasn't expensive just for the sake of it. It cost a lot to make the AC Frua, which made it an ill-fated car and a collector’s wet dream.
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The story of the Frua is a big lesson on sustainable development. Frua’s manufacturing process required the England-based automobile manufacturing plant to source powertrain components from America, build the vehicle’s chassis at home, ship the chassis out to Europe, and transport the chassis back to England with the body fitted on it, and then add the powertrain sourced from America.
The end product was fantastic, exotic even, but the system apparently wasn’t sustainable. In other words, the AC Frua was destined to fail. On top of all that, AC Frua suffered from the same sickness prevalent in BigBlock-engined high-performance cars of that era; heat from the engine sipping into the cabin.
Granted, Frua was a progressive GT, but it didn't help that it had competitors such as De Tomasos and Iso Rivolta offering similar value but at a much lower price. A new Frua Coupe came with a recommended UK retail price of £5,573. This was at a time when a new Ford Mustang coupe toting a V8 engine sold for less than $3,000.
Those who did buy the Frua had to source replacement parts only from Ford or the Cobra 427 suppliers because there weren’t many AC Fruas. On the bright side, Frua’s Ford powertrain and the Cobra-based chassis and coil springs suspension meant that repairs and replacement parts were comparatively inexpensive.
One could draw a parallel between Frua’s mournful story and the cash-strapped Lamborghini that nearly packed up in the 1970s. AC Cars did have prototypes to succeed Frua, including a 4-door Frua-inspired coupe and a soft-top with retractable headlights. Unfortunately, the company didn’t have the financial means to develop both concepts. Perhaps, Frua’s story wouldn't have had such a sad ending if it had a messiah like Lamborghini Silhouette.
Philip Uwaoma, this bearded black male from Nigeria, has single-handedly written more than a million words in the form of articles published on various websites, including toylist.com, rehabaid.com, and autoquarterly.com. Of all the websites and platforms Philip’s work appears on, the absence of his name attached to the articles published on Auto Quarterly is the only one that makes him moan; “ghostwriting sucks.” Albeit, Philip still won’t shy away from writing as a ghost. After all, it's the value he adds to human life with his pen that fuels his passion for writing. He has no dog, no wife- yet- and he loves Rolls Royce more than he really should.