Winfield Reactor 1965

Winfield Reactor 1965 by Autocult

An American Dream  
Gene "Windy“ Winfield was born in Springfield in 1927 and grew up in Modesto, California. Already at the age of 10 he made airplanes in his spare time, which he derived from photos. At the age of 15, he bought his first car. He immediately re-painted it in a different color – his first step into the customizing scene. His interventions into the vehicle architecture became more and more intense and he did not shy away from anything. The peak of his craft were his own created cars in his ’Winfield’s Custom Shop’. His ‘Strip Star’ – a converted 1946 Ford with a customized car body – attracted a lot of attention in the scene in the early 1960s. Most probably, this car aroused the interest of Joe Kizis, a show promoter form the East Coast of Amercia. The organizer wanted a very special, eye-catching car and budgeted 20,000 US$ for the construction.   Gene Winfield fulfilled the job by using the chassis of a Citroen DS with its distinctive suspension and equipped it with a six-cylinder turbo drive from a Corvette Corvair.   Under the name ‘Autorama Special’, the visually very abstract, shiny gold varnished show car was the eye-catcher at the ‘15th annual Hartford Autorama’ in 1965.   After this performance, Gene Winfield offered his car to ‘20th Century Fox’ and they staged it in some films. Among other things the car known as ‘Reactor’ was seen in the “Star Trek” episode “Bread and circuses”, in the “Batman” episode “The funny feline felonies” and in the 1968 “Mission Impossible” TV movie “The freeze”.   On August 20, 2017, the car was exhibited together with nine other film vehicles in the specially created rating of “American dream cars of the 1960s” at the popular ‘Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance’.