To understand the Muntz Jet, you have to start at the beginning of the story, which would be about 1949. That year, Frank Kurtis, a racer turned builder, started building two-seater fiberglass sports cars using Ford powertrains. He sold maybe thirty-six Kurtis Sports Cars by 1955, which was surprising given how sleek and sporty they looked for 1949…you can see where a Chevrolet engineer or designer might have started thinking long and hard just by looking at one. But regardless of whether or not you make a gorgeous or quick car, if you can’t sell them at a profit, there’s no point. And even with Road & Track and Hot Rod Magazine both lauding the Kurtis Sports Car (specifically, serial number KB003) for what it was capable of, even with Wally Parks himself running 142.515 at Bonneville in 1949, Kurtis didn’t move many cars. But there was someone who could…
Enter Earl William Muntz, better known simply as “Madman”. Muntz is the original television pitchman. Somewhere between P.T. Barnum and Marshall Lucky from the movie “Used Cars”, Muntz, a high-scool dropout from Illinois, had quickly figured out how to market, how to have fun with marketing, and how to annoy the hell out of the Office of Price Administration in the process. But by 1951, he had his eye on the Kurtis Sports Car and bought everything to make it himself…the manufacturing license, the tooling, and so on. The Ford-powered Kurtis was then rebadged as the Muntz Jet, stretched the body thirteen inches to make it a four-seater, and powered it using Cadillac V8s…at least, for the first 28 Jets. Afterwards, production moved to Evanston, Illinois, the cars were stretched an additional three inches and the Cadillac engine was ditched in favor of the Lincoln 337ci flathead. 
It seems like a match made in Hell. A racer and an advertising mouthpiece, making their own car? How good could that be? Well…if you ignore the amount of money lost on the operation and simply focus on the car itself…they were good. They were fast for the time and the Jet actually had some safety features that ordinarily you wouldn’t find in a car at that time, like a padded dash and seat belts. So long as you can ignore the “Madman” cartoon in the hubcaps and steering wheel center, it still comes off as a surprising droptop that is handsome. Shame they were so expensive, like a thousand dollars more than a Cadillac or Lincoln when those cars were selling for maybe four thousand dollars. Muntz was done by 1954 and went back to what he knew best: tinkering with electronics and selling the hell out of them.
