The elegantly disguised Volkswagen from Minneapolis
At the end of the 1960s, Gary Courmeya and David Bradley Fuller set out to realize their dream of building their own sports car. The result was the Bradley GT, a sports car on a VW Beetle chassis with a beautiful plastic body. You could buy it in various stages of completion and then complete it yourself. The parts used came from large-scale production; in addition to the VW Beetle, Chevrolet Corvairs were also used as spare parts sources.
By the early 1980s, around 6,000 of these kits had been sold and obviously some of them have survived and are in collectors' hands today. Most of them were equipped with gullwing doors and still impress today with their fashionable and appealing design with folding headlights.
After the GT, Bradley Automotive also wanted to sell a more refined GT II , some of which were even equipped with electric drive, but the company went bankrupt in 1981.
In 1973, however, Bradley still sold many cars and could even afford the Road & Track advertisement shown here. The kit could be ordered in 50 colors and no welding skills were required from the do-it-yourselfer. According to the advertisement, the "VW in Disguise" was not only pretty, but also economical and could reach 140 miles per hour with a little tuning.
