Is it a dance? A new type of chocolate candy? Actually, you’d need to be a real vintage sports car junkie to know that a Jabro was a small, American-built sports racer from the 1950s.
First of all, it’s pronounced jA-bro, a combination of the first few letters of builder James Broadwell’s first and last name. The car is an odd assembly of parts (common in the 1950s) put together to compete in sports car races against the more expensive, “proper” sports cars of the day.
Broadwell conceived the car to compete in the Sports Car Club of America’s H-Modified class of small engine racecars. Broadwell purchased a 1949 Crosley and used its drivetrain to power his design, which he carved in scale from a block of wood.
When Paul Wilson first saw the Jabro behind Oliver Kuttner’s dealership, it looked like this; basically just a fiberglass body. The small, lightweight cars were usually powered by Crosley, SAAB, and even outboard boat engines. PAUL WILSON
Broadwell’s space frame, which was styled after a Jaguar C-Type, was actually constructed from 11/4-inch television antennae tubing and weighed just 49 pounds. His “hotted-up” Crosley engine was capable of revving to 8,500 rpm, and he was very successful with the car on the track, taking trophies in a number of races.
Broadwell’s concept of a lightweight racecar spurred a small business of producing bodies and chassis, allowing the customer to provide his own drivetrain.
Now restored and raced frequently, Wilson’s Jabro is powered by a BMC Sprite drivetrain. Here it is racing in the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. PAUL WILSON COLLECTION
Enter Paul Wilson. Paul doesn’t know which drivetrain originally powered the Jabro he found sitting behind a building in Virginia, not far from his home in Fairfield. “I bought it from Oliver Kuttner, a dealer who traded sports cars and racecars in the 1980s,” Wilson says. “He had all sorts of stuff—even wrecked Maseratis—sitting behind his dealership. Just a bunch of old, interesting stuff.”
That’s usually the best kind of stuff to be found. And that’s where Wilson found the Jabro body. As he remembers, he paid a “couple of hundred dollars” for it in 1993, and took two years to rebuild it. “What I wanted was a miniature version of all the cars I had admired my whole life,” he says. “These cars were an interesting hodge-podge of parts and powered by Crosley, Saab, and even Mercury Outboard engines.”
Wilson began constructing a new chassis for the car, one that would both be safer than the original but also accommodate his more than 6-foot-tall frame. He decided to use Austin Healey Sprite components, including wire wheels and a 1275 cc drivetrain.
“According to legend, Broadwell’s buddies welded the frames in his basement and were paid with all-you-can-drink beer,” Wilson says. “I have no direct confirmation, but the welds suggest the story may be true.”
He met with a professional chassis designer who educated him about calculating length, suspension pick-up points, and spring rates. “It was the most informative three hours of my life,” Wilson says. The result was a Jabro-styled chassis midsection, but with modified front and rear sections.
Wilson races his Jabro at several vintage events each year at tracks like Virginia International Raceway and Summit Point (West Virginia) since unearthing the unique car more than 20 years ago.