More than once, Cadillac has explored the idea of a luxury two-place sports car.  In 1953 the notion took form as the fiberglass-bodied Le Mans, a memorable Motorama show car.

In the early ’50s, General Motors was suddenly captivated by the sports car trend. All five GM car divisions created their own versions of the classic two-place sports roadster, and all were based on the same basic packaging: a shortened production car chassis sheathed in a sleek, lightweight fiberglass body. Of these five show cars, or “idea cars” as concept vehicles were sometimes called—Chevrolet Corvette, Pontiac Bonneville, Oldsmobile F-88, Buick Wildcat I, Cadillac Le Mans—only the Corvette eventually became a production car. The Cadillac sports car fared just slightly better, with four examples produced. Here’s the story behind the posh Le Mans two-seaters.

Built on a standard 1953 Cadillac sedan chassis with its wheelbase shortened from 126 to 115 inches, the Le Mans was powered by a production Cadillac 331 CID V8 hot-rodded from 220 hp to 250 hp and coupled to a Hydra-Matic four-speed automatic transmission. Sharing many of the familiar Cadillac styling cues of the time, including the tail lamps and P-38-style tailfins, the Le Mans was unmistakably a Cadillac, but only 51 inches tall at the windshield pillar. The design work was performed by the Cadillac styling studio under the direction of Ed Glowacke.

The thinking of Harley Earl, GM’s colorful styling czar, is plainly evident in this view of the Le Mans cockpit, from the wrap-around windshield (a new wrinkle in 1953) to the chrome instrument panel with a row of dials sweeping the full width of the dash. Note the roomy bench seat, the generous foot wells, the column-mounted shift lever, and the lack of a clutch pedal. Clearly, the emphasis was on comfort, not so much on sport. The Le Mans made its debut to the public at the GM Motorama show at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York in January 1953, which drew more than 45,000 spectators on opening day.

One Le Mans owner, shoe tycoon Harry Karl, sent his car to George Barris, Hollywood’s King of the Kustomizers, where it received a flamboyant makeover complete with gold-plated exterior trim. He gave the car to his wife, actress Marie McDonald, and years later (1985) it was reportedly destroyed in a fire. Another Le Mans has simply disappeared, somewhere in Oklahoma it would seem. For lost Motorama show cars, the search never really ends.

One of the Le Mans show cars was returned to Cadillac in around 1959 and updated with quad headlamps, later-style tailfins, and a 390 CID Eldorado Q-code V8 with dual four-barrel carbs and 345 hp. At this point the car was owned by James E. “Bud” Goodman, the general manager of the GM Fisher Body Division. Today this beautiful example, number four of the four units produced, resides in in the GM Heritage Collection in Sterling Heights, Michigan.