During the late ’50s and early ’60s American racers were doing battle in a wide variety of homebuilt racecars and Specials. Taking production car engines and chassis and creating their own unique take on a competition car. They may have been quick, but many had a look only a mother (their creator) could love. This wasn’t the case with a car built by John Sabel.
Sabel was from the San Francisco Bay Area and like his friends, and many others, he fell under the spell of the automobile. Saving his money from odd jobs he finally scraped enough together to buy himself a Ford Model A. That car and successive others were his means of transportation. Sabel eventually picked up a hot-rodded ’29 coupe that was owned by Joe Huffaker and became, dare I say it, “fast friends.” They both became members of the Marin Coupe and Roadster Club.
In the ’50s Sabel started attending races at Pebble Beach and Golden Gate Park. John now had a new love, sports cars.
The draft found Sabel in ’55 and he was posted to Germany. Like any car lover in Germany Sabel made his way to the Nürburgring. He also witnessed part of the ’55 Mille Miglia when it came thundering through Florence.
Back from the army, Sabel started his life again in earnest. Step one: he got himself a degree in Production Management from the American University in Washington DC. Step two: he got married and made his home in Maryland. Step three: he created his first sports car from the ground up.
John picked up a Karmann Ghia and competed in autocross and hill climbs, but he had other things in mind.
Sabel had been working on a series of sketches while in the service. Drawing on his hot rod memories, and also the sports cars he watched competing in Europe, he was evolving a concept for the competition car of his dreams.
By the early ’60s, Sabel started in on his project. Working with an existing chassis and engine he would produce his own body to cover it all up. Instead of going with something American, Sabel decided to start the project with a stock 1952 Volkswagen chassis and engine. A mix of hot rodding and sports car went into the set up, the rear suspension was de-cambered and some leaves from the transverse torsion bars were removed to lower the front.
Sabel had worked as a technical illustrator, while in college, so he had a design well realized to turn into a 3D creation. He took styling cues from both American and European machines creating the best of both worlds.
Sabel put together a body buck made up of plywood ribs and added wire mesh and plaster creating the plug and mold for the fiberglass to be applied to.
Using a fine texture fiberglass mat, the body was fabricated in one piece. Woven roving, a material made up of continuous glass fiber interlaced into a heavyweight fabric, was used for additional strength in key areas.
He also created his own version of a Superleggera framework. Sabel welded up 1-inch square mild steel and using more fiberglass attached it to the body. The fiberglass body with a 3/16-inch coating of polyester resin and steel frame weighed in at around 120 pounds.
In Sabel’s mind, this was not to be a one-off, he wanted to produce multiple versions of his creation. His prototype was given the serial number designation 001.
Sabel took the mold to Anderson Industries in Jessup, Maryland, to continue the production of his bodies. The prototype would become John’s competition mount.
The sports racer was completed in 1964. The Special featured a mildly souped-up Porsche 356 motor. Other parts from a 356B made up the rest of the drive train and suspension. 550 Spyder lightweight steel and alloy rims and brakes were included in the build.
The Sabel Fiberglass Special made its first appearance at the Hershey Hill Climb, a short but technical course taking on a series of other small bore modified cars. Both John and his wife Pat competed that weekend with Pat winning the Lady’s class.
The next attempt at a hill climb was the Duryea hill climb in Reading, PA. Sabel had been given the loan of a Speedster motor from an old high school chum Jim Netterstrom, but other mechanical gremlins kept Sabel and his special from completing any runs.
Pat Sabel campaigned the Special in a number of SCCA solo events, as well as autocrosses. Jim competed at VIR, Marlboro and other tracks in the area.
Jim Netterstrom, after getting his motor safely back in his Speedster, offered Sabel a drive in the car and then gave him co-driving duty in his Trans-Am 911 on several occasions. Along with Group 44s John Kelly, they made a decent showing in the 911.
By 1966, Sabel felt it was time to sell the Mk.1 Special. Finishing college at night, working a full-time job and working on cars was taking up his every waking moment. Besides, like many constructors before him, John enjoyed the build more than the competition.
The one “woulda, coulda, shoulda” thought that plagued Sabel was that he wished he had put a more potent motor in his creation. But now he was on to the next project, the Mk.III.
In between, a Mk.II was built along the same lines as the prototype, but with modifications to accept a Corvair motor.
Sabel was doing repair work on Can-Am cars and also doing some testing on the side, with wings on racecars. The Texan Jim Hall tried to persuade Sabel to come ply his voodoo on his Chaparrals, but the connection was never made.
The Mk.III would be a whole new design. The new chassis would be a space frame with a 90-inch wheelbase.
Sabel created around 12 chassis and roughly 38 bodies, but by 1970 the dream had run its course. It had been a labor of love, never a full-time commitment.
Sabel’s Prototype eventually went on to a new home. Ralph Williams competed in a Lotus, so he was well acquainted with small displacement, lightweight cars. As soon as he got his hands on the Mk.1, he pulled out the 356 motor and replaced it with a 2.3-liter Corvair flat-six motor putting out around 140 hp. He also gave the Special a very patriotic paint scheme of red, white, and blue.
Williams did battle in D/Sports in 1967, at all the leading tracks in the Northeast. When the dust settled the pair had enough points to make an appearance at the SCCA runoffs that year at Daytona. Williams started fifth in D/Sports and fought his way to a second-place finish in class and fifth overall in the C, D, E, and F Sports Racing classes.
After another year, the Special was sold on to another Williams. Dick Williams. Dick took the car back to its original color of Maroon and added white racing stripes. Dick also had great success competing with the Sabel on track. This new pairing also put together enough points to go to the runoffs that year at Riverside. But soon the Fiberglass Special was off to yet another new home.
Dr. Gordon Kerr was a dentist from Manassas, Virginia and he was ready to go racing, but best laid plans don’t always work out. He never got the car on the track instead the racer went into 30 years of storage.
Then, in 2003, the Sabel was bought by Sean Kalil. After spending 30 years in storage, the special was in sad shape but the only thing missing was the tachometer.
However, personal matters got in the way for Kalil and he sold the project to IMSA driver Chuck Goldsborough and Dr. Michael Ballo.
Chuck hung in for a while, but with a tight racing schedule and other commitments, he didn’t have the time to spend on the resurrection.
It was up to Ballo to breath a new life into the now tired racer. He handed the car over to Pete Dawe and his team at Dawes Motorsports in Stroudsburg, PA.
Dawes and his team went to Maryland to pick up the car. It took hours to release it from its tomb. When all was cleared away the body was found to be broken in two. Dawe sent the body off to reinCARnations to work their magic on the body.
Dawe now went to work on the VW chassis. He created a cage that would go ahead of the cockpit along with a fire suppression system, as he felt the car would just be too dangerous to drive without them. He also added an energy absorbing steering column. Pete also discovered the roll bar was just for show as it was made of muffler tubing! He built a proper roll bar and gave it side bars for extra strength coming up from the rear pick up points. Additionally, a Petty bar was added from the shoulder height down to the floor.
Dawe had done a torsional deflection test on the chassis before he added the roll bar and front cage and the results were horrible, but with the safety additions it doubled the rigidity of the chassis.
For the interior, Pete took some liberties, he created a new gauge pod using 356 units angled to face the driver. The intake on the rear deck lid was what Pete referred to as a SWAG—a Scientific Wild Ass Guess.
John Sabel stopped by the shop to check out the work in progress. He hemmed and hawed about a few of the modifications, but in the end he was happy that someone was restoring his car, he even pitched in on the rebirth. Sabel created a new set of headlight covers from the original molds he had kicking around his garage.
The next step was the powerplant, the team picked up a dead stock 356B motor from a guy in West Virginia. Pete put it on the engine dyno and it was pretty lazy at 68 horsepower.
Pete took it apart and rebuilt it and brought it up to 120 horsepower, not a really killer race motor—it wasn’t exotic by any means—but it would do well in the Special.
Things got fast and furious when Pete got a call from the organizers of the Hershey hillclimb. They wanted the car to be there for the 50th reunion as it had won the first running of the event and they wanted Sabel to have a ride up the hill in it. At that point, Pete felt the car was a good three months from completion.
Pete went to Dr. Ballo and told him there was no way the Special would be ready. But Ballo convinced Dawe otherwise. Now everyone at Dawes Motorsports was working on the Special and at 11:00 PM the night before leaving for Hershey, Pete and his son were aligning and scaling the racer, before taking off at 1:00 in the morning for the hill climb.
Dawe arrived and unloaded the Special and the organizers really wanted the car to compete over the weekend not just do runs for show.
The car had not turned a wheel in anger in decades, but Mike ran the Sabel up the hill and started getting used to the Special, while Pete started making some adjustments, dialing the car in. The Special made it to the last day of the event and was up against several other fast cars.
Ballo lined up at the start and wound that poor little 356 motor up to what sounded like 12,000 rpm to Dawe. In his mind, the motor was going to blow. Ballo dumped the clutch and got a tremendous start off the block, ran up the hill and captured the fastest time of day.
From Hershey Ballo did the same as previous owners he went out and ran the car and Dawes Motorsports was there supporting him at the track.
Ballo was getting faster and faster in the Special and then one day he spun it on the downhill at Lime Rock and that got his attention. From there, he moved into a 356 coupe racecar built by Dawe for the sake of safety, at the same time he picked up a 993 RSR, so it was time to once again move the Special along.
Brett Sloan of Sloan Motors in Fairfield, CT was contacted about finding a new home for the special, but racecars were not in his wheelhouse his thing was road cars.
Brett contacted his friend Chris Turner to see if he had any ideas.
Brett told Chris the story of the Sabel and he started getting really interested, then he found out that Peter Dawe had worked on the car (Pete had built a number of cars for Turner) so Chris had to have it.
Turner got in touch with Dawe and got the lowdown on the Special and new he was getting something, well, Special.
Ballo made a complicated trade of several cars and wound up with an RSR racecar and Chris got the Sable.
The Sabel arrived at Chris’s shop, Gaswerks Garage in Paramus, NJ. The racer was just as it had been described, but it had not been run in a while so it would need a thorough going over.
Chris had a secret weapon though, in Master tech and air-cooled engine guru Gaspare Fasulo. The engine, as well as the suspension and drum brakes were rebuilt under the magic hands of Gaspare. Every inch of the racer was given his close attention.
The Special due to its lightweight moved a great deal, left to right, under hard braking. Chris was racing at the Thompson Vintage Festival in Connecticut. When he brought the car in after each run he would discuss the performance and Gaspare would make adjustments, very quickly the car was dialed in.
The Special has a longer wheelbase than a standard 356 so it has a more stable feeling. With the motor sitting right behind the driver the car is very evenly balanced.
Being so light, the Sabel is very responsive to driver input, so you have to use a light touch and be very smooth to keep the car from moving around too much.
Before the Sabel, Turner raced Porsche Cup cars and love his horsepower. But working with Gaspare and racing the Sabel with the VSCCA he has become addicted to the adrenaline rush of lightweight small output racecars. And he is mixing it up and coming out on top.
The latest custodian Chris Turner is using the Special just how John Sabel built it to be used.
