When the goiter fenders came on the Javelins, Dick Teague wanted to keep the AMX as a two-seater, like the original series, so he built one car (I learned on the net--didn't know it beforehand). It had the unfortunate (imho) look of the new, goiter Javelins, but two seats, shorter body, etc. He could not sell the idea to mangement so they just made a high-trim Javelin with the goiters, called it "Javelin AMX" and the real AMXs were extinct. This seems a full 12 inches shorter than the goiter Javelins. Could be a "Teague." : o )
Absolutely correct.
Dick Teague's 1971 AMC / AMX
"I feel very strongly that the AMX could have kept going as a two-passenger car. It just needed a little bit more development."
-Dick Teague, 1986
Like most artists, Dick Teague had a couple of recurring themes in his designs.
First, the longtime AMC chief stylist and vice president of design injected sportiness into every possible product, often on a bare-bones budget. The first AMX perhaps became his greatest achievement along those lines-after all, it rose from the simple Rambler American. But Teague created a host of other sporty cars from simple passenger cars: the Marlin, the SC/Rambler, the Rebel Machine, the Gremlin X, the AMXs of the late 1970s and even his show car styling studies while at Packard.
Second, Teague seemed to love two-seaters. One of his earliest designs was a sort of convertible hardtop two-seater, powered by a Ford flathead V-8, penned for Kaiser-Frazer in 1946.
It never even made it to clay.
Teague followed with the Packard Panther-Daytona in 1954 and persisted with the various AMXs, including the one that made it to production and the AMX/3, which came within a camel's breath of being manufactured. Even the two-seat Gremlin, a cheapo model that booted the rear seat, ultimately came from Teague's AMX GT show car of 1968.
So one can imagine Teague's disappointment when Bill Luneberg, AMC's president at the time, killed the two-seater AMX after the 1970 model year, turning it into a trim level in the four-seater Javelin line. In an interview with Teague in the August 1986 issue of Special Interest Autos, Teague said Luneberg made that decision because he expected higher sales from the two-seater.
"(Luneberg) was a manufacturing man, and he said, 'Well, it's cluttering up the line. It's a lot of work to build that car.' I feel bad to this day that we didn't at least do one more AMX." Teague said.
It wasn't for lack of trying, though.
In HMM #22, we made brief mention of Teague's effort to sell a two-seater 1971 AMX to AMC management by installing a 1971 Javelin's front end on his personal AMX. While other designers have essentially or actually etched their names all over many of the cars they penned, just one car-this car-associates so strongly with Dick Teague that it remains known as his car.
Teague's AMX, though, actually enjoyed a sort of fame in a previous incarnation. It started out as his personal car, a right normal car for an AMC exec to drive. According to its VIN, trim and paint codes, it came with the 315hp four-barrel 390-cu.in. V-8, the three-speed automatic transmission, a black vinyl interior and Rally Green Metallic paint. The location of the five-digit AMX dash plaque-on the glove box door-suggests an early production, but not in the first few hundred cars.
Teague, who spent his juvenile years as part of the Southern California hot rod scene of the 1930s and 1940s, was no stranger to getting grease under his fingernails-according to his friend Jack Leynnwood, in an Automobile Quarterly interview, "We were both early hot rodders in our '32 Fords, and chased all over by the police... they never could catch us."
So it made sense that Teague would tweak his AMX. According to C.L. Zinn, in his book, AMX Photo Archive: From Concept to Reality, AMC's chief exterior stylist, Fred Hudson, had the front bumper of his black 1968 Javelin painted body color. Teague liked Hudson's idea enough to paint his front bumper white. Along with the painted bumper, Teague added 1967 Valiant turn signals in the grille, a chin spoiler, 8-inch-wide Kelsey-Hayes wheels, Sidewinder side exhaust pipes, a faux fuel filler on the driver's side sail panel (hearkening to the actual fuel filler door in that location on the Vignale prototype AMX-production AMXs moved it to behind the rear license plate), hood pins and twin racing stripes down the center of the car. Special AMX 390 emblems graced the front fenders. A deep-red interior with a custom fold-down armrest between the seats replaced the stock black vinyl interior.
Several of those modifications made their way to the production AMX and Javelin. The body-colored bumper idea sprouted on the Big Bad AMXs and Javelins that AMC introduced in January 1969. The twin racing stripes had already debuted on the Go-Package in 1968, but the Sidewinders-previously an aftermarket item made by Tadco-started appearing on AMXs as an option in 1969. The 1970 Javelin Trans Am and the 1971-74 Javelin AMXs both used chin spoilers, though of different designs.
The car laid low for a year or so afterward, though still in Teague's hands. The Javelin sold well during its first three years, guaranteeing a second generation, but AMX sales stagnated-while they rose in 1969, the car's first full year on the market, from 6,725 to 8,293, they dropped by half to 4,116 in 1970.
AMC management, though, had already decided in mid-1968 to drop the two-seater AMX, citing the extra tooling and costs for its production as a hindrance.
AMC's plans called for the AMX to remain, but it would migrate to the unshortened Javelin platform in 1971, creating a four-seater. Teague, who whipped up the two-seater AMX from the Javelin platform years before and fought for the design, now had no prospects for the two-seater's continuance.
Teague felt he had one more shot at continuing the two-seater AMX, though. AMC's planned redesign of the Javelin platform for the 1971 model year would essentially update the front end from the firewall forward and the tail panel, then add an inch to the wheelbase. The existing door skins, windshield, unibody and decklid would remain the same. So he installed a front clip from a fiberglass 1971 Javelin mockup, according to former AMC designer Jon Alexander. The front clip included designer Eric Kugler's raised fender bulges and a red set of pre-production T-stripes, on his personal AMX.
Along with the front clip-which didn't include the grille insert that would later distinguish 1971-74 Javelin AMXs from Javelins-Teague installed a pair of round 1971-'74 Javelin turn signals in the grille, a set of 1970 Javelin taillamps in the fiberglass rear end and a strange fiberglass hood scoop that looked like a football hammered nearly flat, then cut open at the leading edge for a pair of nostrils. That same style hoodscoop would appear on one or two fiberglass or clay mockups of the 1971 Javelin, but would never make it to production.
The Sidewinder exhaust pipes would remain with Teague's car, as would its 390-cu.in. V-8 and its three-speed automatic. However, Teague jettisoned the race-style fuel filler and chin spoiler, replaced the 1968-era round fluted side mirrors with more contemporary units and repainted the car in what he called a silver-blue. On the trunklid, he installed an adjustable rear spoiler much akin to the spoilers used on the Javelins that competed in Trans-Am in 1968.
Mysteriously, at about this time, both the Trendsetters and a full dual-exhaust system exiting under the rear bumper appeared. Yet Teague's son, Richard Teague Jr., claimed the car's exhaust always ran through the side pipes.
Inside, Teague left the dash the same, but added a steering wheel of unknown vintage (Alexander said he simply had it laying around the interior department). He replaced the 1968 seats with pre-production corduroy 1971 buckets and the door panels with custom versions, both in the same red interior color. And then, either on a lark or to appease the powers that be, Teague fashioned a sort of rear seat.
All two-seater AMXes have a surprising amount of empty carpeted space behind the front seats. Not enough to fit anything more than a few cases of luggage, mind you, but more room than one would expect. Teague and the interior department decided to fill some of that space with four padded cushions - two bottoms, a back and a center hump cover -- fitted loosely directly behind the front seats. Frankly, not even a child could sit in the seats, but with those, Teague had produced a four-seater out of a two-seater.
"With that longer front on it, and the blistered fenders, it really went well," Teague said in the Special Interest Autos interview. "It looked right! We had a different grille on the one I did, and we put some gutsy wheels on it. It was quite a neat arrangement.
"As it was, (the two-seater AMX) gave the Corvettes a really hard time in some of the local races. If it had just had a little more development time, and had been kept in the picture for another year or two, I think sales would have started back up and it could have hung in there. Because the Corvette didn't do so well the first couple, three years either. It takes time to develop these things."
Teague presented the car, now considered a 1971 styling prototype, to AMC's board of directors on November 4, 1969. Luneburg and the board failed to recognize the potential of such a halo car and continued with the stated plan. Teague's other son, Jeff, said the front fenders simply didn't match the rear quarter panels.
"He would have had to redesign the rear quarters to make it work, but he didn't have the money or the time, with the strike that year," Jeff Teague said.
Interestingly, in a letter written in March 1975, Teague said not only that "had we not discontinued the two-passenger concept... we would have built the two-passenger model with that exact design," but he also stated that the car remained in evaluation through the summer of 1970, specifically for its interior trim design.
Rich Teague also told current owner Mike Spangler that the car ran a variety of AMC V-8 engines for testing purposes, thus the 401 emblems and stickers that Teague added to the fenders and air cleaner. Spangler said the 390 engine currently in the car dates to 1969.
Teague and AMC considered breaking the AMX away from the Javelin. A styling photograph from April 1968 features a two-seater, mid-engine car that much resembles the later AMX/K and AMX/3, but labeled simply AMX. Teague had a big hand in developing the AMX/3-according to one account, his eyes sparkled when he talked about the car. His design for the car trumped Giorgetto Giugiaro's and ultimately became the basis for the planned 5,000 cars per year, to be built by Giotto Bizzarrini in Livorno, Italy.
But as the AMX/3 approached consummation, cost and safety concerns drove the planned production numbers first down to two per month, then to the five that Bizzarrini finished before AMC canceled the program shortly after the car's unveiling in March 1970 (another was built later in Italy out of spare parts to bring the total to six).
Aside from the outlandish 1981 AMX Turbo, built only as a one-off, and the aforementioned two-seat strippo Gremlin, Teague never again professionally designed a two-passenger car.
The 1971 prototype remained in Teague's hands after the board presentation, though he handed it down as a high school graduation present to Rich Teague, who traded it in on a Gremlin in Detroit about a year later. The subsequent owner allegedly trashed the car street racing on Detroit's Woodward Avenue before Unique Motorcars in Rockford, Illinois, bought it and performed a cosmetic restoration.
Unique Motorcars then took out an ad in Hemmings Motor News around 1975, trying to sell the car to a museum, but another private owner, then 16 years old, bought the car, drove it for five years, then parked it for another five in a garage in Whitewater, Wisconsin, after racking up too many receipts for towing on account of electrical gremlins-the AMC employees who added the 1970 taillamps simply snipped the rear wiring harness and left several wires bare.
At about the time the car went into its garage, Don Loper, the man often credited with founding the American Motors Owners Association, showed a young Mike Spangler, now of Jefferson, Wisconsin, some pictures of the car, but neglected to inform him of the car's whereabouts-about 12 miles from where Spangler lived at the time. Spangler expressed some interest in it, but not until 1985 did Loper take Spangler to see the car.
Spangler said the garage in which the prototype sat changed hands, and although the garage's new owner gave the car's owner time to remove it, the garage's owner started throwing some items out to the curb, including the rear spoiler, which a neighbor managed to save. Spangler struck a deal with the prototype's owner and brought it home, where he assessed its need for a restoration.
Though he'd never restored a car before, he decided he'd best start by disassembling the prototype. Spangler then left it in that stage for the next 14 or so years, through a divorce, a couple of moves and an aborted attempt to have a professional restoration shop finish the car. Spangler managed to contact Teague during this time and get documented proof of the car's prototype status, but Teague died in 1991 and didn't get the chance to see the finished car. He did make mention in a 1988 letter that several other similar cars had been put together, though he said AMC built just one.
Not until Darryl A. Salisbury, the current head of AMO, asked Spangler to finish the car for the 1999 Eyes on Design tribute to Teague, did Spangler finish and assemble the prototype.
Rich Teague had damaged the fiberglass hood and hood scoop during the time he owned it, replacing them with a flat steel hood. Though Spangler recently located an enthusiast in Oregon who reproduces the scoops in fiberglass, he hasn't yet installed one on the car. Spangler also had to replace the damaged rear spoiler with a reproduction spoiler for a Trans Am Javelin, but nearly everything else remained from the 1971 prototype stage.
With less than a year to do all the work, Spangler restored the car to the version documented in a set of photos taken November 4, 1969, and made it to the Eyes on Design show in Detroit, where he met Teague's widow, Marian, and both of Teague's sons, Richard and Jeff, both of whom have had a hand in designing new cars since the late 1970s.
Teague failed to sell a number of other concepts that he pushed with all his might. The AMX GT traveled the auto show circuit, then rolled onto the scrap heap rather than the assembly line. A proposed hardtop Javelin station wagon died in the fiberglass stage. Teague even passionately pushed for production of the AM Van, a brightly festooned four-wheel-drive minivan that would have beat even Chrysler to that segment.
But nobody's cared to restore or recreate any of those concepts or prototypes, save for the one that goes by Teague's name.
From Hemmings.com
