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Oldsmobile F-88 (XP-20) Motorama Show Car

Oldsmobile F88 (XP-20) Motorama Show Car

At the January 2005 Barrette Jackson Classic Car Auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, a record was broken when the last remaining version of the F-88 Motorama Show car sold for a whopping three million, two hundred and forty thousand dollars!

I had been tipped of by a friend that the car was coming up for sale and that my name was on the “ticket".

The Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event "ticket" in part described the vehicle as follows:

"The XP-20 project, commonly known as F-88 was the pet project of Harley Earl (working with him was Bill Mitchell, Ken Pickering, Zora Arkus-Duntov, etc...). Four cars came out of this project, but only styling order #2265 (this car) survived."

1954 Oldsmobile F-88 (XP-20) and GM Futureliners

Believe me, when I was originally associated with this model, I did not have near the stature of these three giants of the industry.

I believe my name came up on the BJ information ticket because of an article about the model written the previous year by Mike Lamm, the noted West Coast automotive author. About a year or so earlier, Mike and I had corresponded prior to the publication of the article and my name was included in his write-up. More about that later---

My association with the F-88 was with two events, separated by several months.

The first association, in 1953, was when I was working at GM Styling Experimental Engineering for Fred Walther. I was involved in engineering convertible tops for Motorama Show Cars. John Himka and I had worked out the folding mechanism for the F-88 which stored in conventional fashion horizontally over the rear wheelhouses. We had tried every trick in the book to make the stack lower, but the inverted header bow curving upward at the ends was a deterrent to a lower stack.

Armed with this rational, Walther went up to the Oldsmobile Studio on the tenth floor and told Harley Earl about the inability to store the stack. Fred said that it would require raising the deck profile on the clay model about an inch to accommodate the folding top mechanism. Earl listened intently, then told Walther he was not going to raise the profile, he was going to LOWER it an inch, so go back and figure out how to make that work.

So we did. Himka and I developed a system whereby we stacked the top vertically and then dropped it behind the seats in a two track guidance system. I did not get the patent on the dropping stack, but was able to claim and still have the Patent on the four bar top cover.

This directive from Earl was typical of his way to challenge the ordinary and force the development of new solutions in both design and engineering.

Then in 2004 while researching the history of the F-88, Mike Lamm came across a shipper from GM Styling to a Mr. E.L. Cord (founder of the Cord Motor Company) authorizing the shipment of F-88 body parts to him. The shipper was signed by me.

Lamm wanted to know just why I did that. I searched my brain and checked my minimal records but could find no reason except the Earl wanted it done and Bob Lauer (as I was now Staff Assistant to Director of Engineering at GM Styling) told me to go ahead and do it.

Ken Pickering, February 2008
Retired 1989 as Executive Director
Engineering and Design Services
GM Design Staff

The winning bidders at the 2005 prestigious Barrett-Jackson Auto Auction in Scottsdale, Arizona were John and Maureen Hendricks. The Oldsmobile F-88 is now part of the Hendricks Collection, which is on display at the Gateway Colorado Automobile Museum.

Michael Lamm's article "Mysterious Ways: The Long, Strange Trip of the 1954 Oldsmobile F-88," was published in Collectible Automobile and won the 2004 Carl Benz Award, which was presented by the Society of Automotive Historians for the best Automotive history article published in a periodical.

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