Classic American sports cars always relied on the brute force of a big V8 for their performance, but Warren Mosler had different ideas. Mosler, an economic theorist who made his money running a hedge fund, founded an automotive company, Consulier Industries, in 1985 to create a different sort of American sports car. The lightweight Consulier GTP you see here was the result.

Bizarre in looks, the car was quite clever in philosophy. Inspired by race cars of the day, the Consulier GTP had a composite monocoque chassis and a carbon-kevlar body, the first road car ever to use such construction. An ad from the period claims the car weighed just over one ton. Impressive, especially considering a contemporary Corvette weighed more than 3300 lbs.

Mosler via Consuliergtp.com

Thanks to its light weight, the car makes use of a small, efficient engine, a 2.2-liter turbocharged four-cylinder sourced from the Dodge Shelby Daytona. It only made 175 hp stock, but that was more than enough power for the Consulier GTP's lightweight chassis.

The Consulier GTP certainly worked on the race track. In 1991, it won IMSA events at Lime Rock and Laguna Seca, and looked poised for more success. The car was so good, in fact, that IMSA imposed a 300-lb weight penalty before apparently banning the car outright, though it's hard to find details on this part of the car's history.

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So, the Consulier GTP was a fast car that brought racing tech to the street in the 1980s—what went wrong? Why do we rarely hear about Mosler's cars today? This is where the story gets muddy.

Consulier Industries, which later became Mosler Automotive, only built 83 Consulier GTPs between 1985 and 1996. The car never found its market, likely due to its combination of a high price (around $60,000 in 1988) and, let's say, challenging looks.

There was also Mosler's very public fight with Car and Driver. Mosler offered $25,000 to anyone who could beat a Consulier GTP in a timed lap, a challenge Car and Driver took up with a 1991 Corvette. The Corvette beat the Consulier GTP, but Mosler said it wasn't a fair fight, claiming the GTP tested was a well-worn example.

"From the start, it was a media failure," Mosler himself told Car and Driver in 2012.



The Consulier eventually gave way to two later performance car experiments, the Mosler Intruder and Mosler Raptor—which were defined by their controversial split-windscreens—and in 2001, Mosler rolled out an all-new car, the MT900. With the MT900, Mosler had a car whose looks matched its performance, but again, it struggled to find buyers. Mosler left the car buisness in 2013.

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With this story in mind, you can imagine our delight when the Consulier GTP LX shown here turned up for sale on Bring a Trailer this morning. It's a 1990 example that's currently in Connecticut, where it sits with just 17,500 miles on its odometer.

Bring a Trailer notes that it's the 17th Consulier GTP ever built, and it's been subject to an ECU upgrade that raises the 2.2-liter's output to 200 hp. It looks nice and clean in pictures, though the listing notes that there's some damage to the front spoiler from towing.

A Consulier GTP LX like this is a rare find that we think is worthy of your consideration. It's easy to lump the GTP, with its oddball looks, in with all the never-succeeded supercars that have come and gone over time, but this was a genuine innovator. Maybe now, 2018, is the perfect time to reconsider the Consulier GTP.

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