Unseen For More Than 60 Years, One-Off Manta Ray Will Return To The Spotlight

Story by Daniel Strohl, images courtesy Geoff Hacker.

A half-century is a long time for a car to hide out, away from prying eyes and offers to buy it, even longer when that car looks like a jet engine on wheels and graced many of the hot rod and custom magazines of its day. Yet the Manta Ray of the early 1950s has remained unseen by the general public since before 1959, a 57-year absence that will end this spring.

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Like many other dreamers and creatives enamored with cars in the first half of the Fifties, Glen Hire and Vernon Antoine of Whittier, California, found their imaginations running wild after their first glimpses of Harley Earl’s 1951 XP-8 Le Sabre, one of two GM concept cars that would pave the way for GM’s Motoramas and dozens of other XP-designated concepts.

Related: Harley Earl’s scrapbooks

Unlike most of those other dreamers, however, Hire and Antoine - both employed in aircraft design at North American at the time - decided to act on their dreams. They converted a backyard garage into a workshop, bought a 1951 Studebaker Commander to serve as the foundation for their project, and in 1952 began to transform the Studebaker into what they called the Manta Ray.

Off came the stock body and on went a three-seater roadster body made entirely of fiberglass, one that Hire and Antoine infused with as many jet-age styling elements borrowed from their day jobs as they could fit onto a car. The nosecone they scratch-built by first making a wooden pattern and then casting a ¼-inch shell. The fiberglass body they molded in 14 sections. And the triple taillamps they nabbed from a 1952 Lincoln. Underneath the fiberglass skin, they left the Studebaker 232-cu.in. V-8 and chassis stock save for chopping three inches in length from the frame rails.

The finished Manta Ray featured in a number of car magazine articles in 1953 and 1954, among them one written for the February 1954 issue of Rod and Custom, in which Dean Moon notes that Hire and Antoine sold the Manta Ray to jet car builder Bob Yeakel. Hire and Antoine claimed they weren’t done with the Manta Ray just yet, though: With Yeakel’s permission, they intended to go into production with the Manta Ray, using their already developed molds to pop out more bodies that they intended to place on steel-tube chassis powered by Cadillac V-8s.

“If we can get the car into some production, it was (worth the time and money to build it),” Antoine told Motor World for its June 1953 issue. “Otherwise, no!”