The 1959 Troy Roadster is a one off, road legal race car designed and built by Wally Troy in 1959. Wally was the first Jaguar dealer licensed in Illinois but his real passion was racing and his great dream was to design and build a road legal race car that could rub shoulders with the Formula 1 cars of the era.
He succeeded.
The Troy Roadster is powered by a 350 Chevy V8 with 4-barrell carburettors, the drive-train is Chevy front to back but the chassis and body was built by hand, by Troy and his men. Wally elected to use aluminium for the body in order to keep weight down, each panel was hand-beaten and then tweaked to fit, the chassis is a tubular steel frame with a steel belly pan.
The design of the Roadster is open-wheeled perfection, I’ve often wished there was a car very much like this with all 4 wheels open, a hefty engine up front and function-first design aesthetic. It’s a testament to what hot rods used to be and what they could have become, before looks and chrome became more highly valued that performance and cornering ability.
The Troy Roadster was recently put up for sale on eBay but was pulled when the owner had a private offer, it was sitting at $50,800 when the bidding ended.
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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.
