This all began nearly twenty-five years ago with a brochure sent to me by my friend Allan Meyer. It was produced for a company called PlastiCar Inc, of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and was distributed at the 1954 New York Auto Show. Featured in the brochure were two cars, the Marquis and Rogue. So I wrote a story about the cars, and a few days after it was published I was put in touch with the owner of the Rogue. Amazingly, the car had resided its entire life in Pennsylvania, the same state it was built in. Even more interesting the car still resides there today. Also of note, it turns out there are two Rogues, but that story will have to wait until later. While I was not nearly as lucky initially with the search for the Marquis, though I did receive a few bread crumbs in the way of two old photos that had been pinned to a bulletin board for decades, they were from a race in Cumberland, Maryland in 1956. So, that began the search for the Marquis. Though not much to go on, I tracked down the driver of the car that day was Bob Holbert. A few years later, I found the car’s owner, Mary Ann Buckwalter, amazingly also in Pennsylvania, and not far from where it was last seen nearly a half-century earlier. So I wondered were there other Renault 4cv based cars still out there, either lost to time or not yet discovered. So I grabbed up every old magazine I could find, and soon I came across an article on a car called El Tiburon. Surprising, it only took me a matter of minutes to find its Owner, Geoff Hacker, and after a conversation, it turned out that he had four of the twelve or so examples that had been made. It turns out, Geoff first became aware of the Shark when he was a teenager, and he had actually bought his first one when he was only seventeen years old. In 2012, when Geoff decided to restore that original Shark Roadster he bought when he was a teenager, I sourced many of the mechanical components, and was honored to debut it with him and his team the following Spring in Amelia Island, Florida. Needless to say, the car was a huge success, receiving significant international coverage not only in print but digitally as well Around this time, Geoff sent me pictures of another 4cv based racer that had been sitting out in the California desert for a very long time. He then proposed that we partner on this car, and nearly ten years later we were Renault 4cv Based Specials Reasoning Behind the Index Pinned photo of Marquis from 1956 Original Rogue with Rogue #2 Mary Ann with the Marquis
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