This is one of the two original Mosler Raptor prototypes that were built in-period, and it’s now being offered for sale on FB Marketplace of all places.
Raptors were astonishingly fast cars by the standards of their time, largely thanks to their low curb weight and fire-breathing, mid-mounted American V8s. They could do the 0 to 60 mph dash in 3.9 seconds, which was almost unheard of back in the 1990s.
This is one of the two original Mosler Raptor prototypes that were built in-period, and it’s now being offered for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
History Speedrun: Mosler Automotive
Warren Mosler isn’t an engineer, though he has regularly been mistaken for one. He earned an economics degree from the University of Connecticut, worked his way through Wall Street, and in 1982 co-founded the Illinois Income Investors family of investment funds. What he did with his weekends was far more interesting to the average car guy – he used to club race a modified VW Rabbit GTI.
At one of these race meetings he met Benjamin “Dick” Respess, an emergency room doctor from Texas who reckoned he could build a composite monocoque, with no structural metal in it, around Mosler’s Rabbit.
Mosler paid for it, and Respess built the thing with ordinary hand tools, no computer analysis, no wind tunnel time, and perhaps unsurprisingly it came out kind of ugly – but immensely stiff. Mosler hired a team, leased an industrial building in Riviera Beach, Florida, and started Consulier Industries in 1985.
The first Mosler-developed Consulier GTP car was delivered in 1988. It weighed just 2,200 lbs, and it was built around an advanced foam-cored glass-composite monocoque on subframes front and rear.
Carbon fiber and Kevlar went into parts of the body, it was arguably one of the most advanced road-legal production cars in the world at the time – albeit with very low production numbers. McLaren would not show the McLaren F1 for another four years.
McKee Engineering, an IndyCar engineering firm, developed the suspension using hardware from a Dodge Daytona Shelby Z, which had also donated the engine – Chrysler’s 2.2 liter Turbo II with 175 bhp.
Raptors were astonishingly fast cars in their time, thanks to their low curb weights and fire-breathing, mid-mounted American V8s. They could do the 0 to 60 mph dash in 3.9 seconds, which was almost unheard of back in the 1990s.
The car soon proved it was more than just an engineering showcase, it won the Longest Day of Nelson 24 Hour Race in 1990, and in 1991 it went to the new IMSA Supercar series against factory Porsche, Corvette, and Lotus entries.
Chet Fillip and Lance Stewart won two of the seven rounds, and Stewart finished second in the championship to Hurley Haywood’s Porsche 911 Turbo, 107 points to 124, with Fillip fourth on 98. IMSA officials answered with weight and power penalties that didn’t necessarily target the GTP, but they certainly hamstrung the car. Despite this, Consuliers were still racing in the series through to 1992, three of them at Laguna Seca that July.
It’s believed that somewhere between 60 and 100 Consuliers were built, no one agrees on a fixed number, and this is mostly because cars kept being rebuilt as development mules and modified over time.
Consulier Engineering was a public company, but the sports car it was named for lost money hand over fist. In 1990 the board sold the car business to Warren Mosler personally, and put the company’s money into a securities firm instead. Probably a wise move.
Mosler sold the cars on to an electric vehicle maker in 1993, but crucially he kept the right to build special-order cars himself – it was that retained IP that resulted in the later development of the Intruder and Raptor models.
The Mosler Raptor
The Raptor was the third model based on the same fundamental automotive structure that had been laid down in the mid-1980s. It wasn’t a clean-sheet design or a series-production model, it was more of an evolution of existing Mosler Intruders, which were themselves re-bodied Consuliers.
The Raptor lineage began back in 1993, when Mosler Automotive shoehorned a 300 bhp Corvette LT1 modified by John Lingenfelter into a Consulier and renamed it the “Intruder.”
Mosler has said that Intruders weren’t built and sold as street-legal vehicles, and he described one car that started life as a road-going Consulier, was converted to Intruder specification, and later had a Raptor windshield fitted. This is a big part of why tracking down exact production figures can be so difficult.
The Raptor lineage began back in 1993, when Mosler Automotive shoehorned a 300 bhp Corvette LT1 modified by John Lingenfelter into a Consulier and renamed it the “Intruder.” The car won the Longest Day of Nelson 24-hour race in 1993 and 1994 and was then promptly banned from Nelson Ledges for its trouble.
In 1996 an Intruder producing 450 bhp won Car and Driver’s One Lap of America. The following year that same car received a V-shaped split windshield to cut drag, and with it the new “Raptor” name. It won One Lap again in 1997, won a third time in 1999, and was then barred it from the event.
Car and Driver tested the then-new Raptor in November of 1998 – it weighed 2,773 lbs, and the Lingenfelter-built 383 small block made 446 bhp at 5,800 rpm and 429 lb ft at 5,000 rpm through a 5-speed transaxle lifted from a Porsche 911 Turbo. 60 mph came up in 3.9 seconds and the quarter mile in 12.3 at 115 mph. Top speed was 163 mph, it was slowed down by drag rather than any issues with power or weight.
The parts-bin raids of the earlier 1980s-era cars was still a fact of life, as it often is with smaller manufacturers, as a result the steering wheel was out of a Chrysler minivan. The new split-windshield bought its drag reduction at the cost of a little visibility, and it blocked some of the dashboard vents, but this was a small price to pay for speed.
It’s believed that four Intruders were built in all, one was sold, one became a GT1 racing car, and the last two were converted to Raptor specification. The Mosler MT900 replaced both models in 2001.
The Raptor name resurfaced in 2011 on a modified MT900S, marketed as the Raptor GTR by Supercar Engineering, a company run by former Mosler engineer J. Todd Wagner. Though this didn’t come without controversy, as Warren Mosler disputed Wagner’s claim to be a Mosler distributor.
Car and Driver tested the then-new Raptor in November of 1998 – it weighed 2,773 lbs, and the Lingenfelter-built 383 small block made 446 bhp at 5,800 rpm and 429 lb ft at 5,000 rpm through a 5-speed transaxle lifted from a Porsche 911 Turbo.
The Mosler Raptor Prototype Shown Here
This is claimed to be one of the two original V8 prototypes built by Consulier/Mosler Automotive – the development car behind the switch from the Chrysler turbo four-cylinder of the Consulier GTP to the V8 that produced the Intruder and, in turn, the Raptor. It carries Warren Mosler’s signature on the inside of the front decklid.
The car is said to have been fitted with the Raptor’s V-shaped split windshield after production, which the seller says was done to satisfy homologation requirements while Mosler was still competing. That sequence matches Mosler’s own account of how these cars were built – none was built from scratch as a Raptor, and the windshield was retrofitted to existing cars.
Only two Raptor road cars are understood to exist, the other held in the Mosler collection in St. Augustine, Florida. Mechanically, this car runs early MT900-era hardware rather than its original specification, with a Chevrolet LS6 V8 and a Porsche G50/52 transaxle.
That transmission might be original but the engine likely isn’t – though this is very difficult to pin down as these were development prototypes and thus their specifications changed as development progressed.
This is claimed to be one of the two original V8 prototypes built by Consulier/Mosler Automotive – the development car behind the switch from the Chrysler turbo four-cylinder of the Consulier GTP to the V8 that produced the Intruder and, in turn, the Raptor.
Editor’s Note: Some of the images used in the listing for this car do appear to have been enhanced with AI, largely the background. The car itself is real and appears physically unmodified in the pictures.
The car is now being offered for sale on FB Marketplace, with an asking price of $125,000 USD. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Deryk Shepherd
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
