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Most of the cars I find for this project are lesser-known, but not exactly rare or rarely talked about. The friendliest, smallest, silliest, weirdest ones are all, to some degree, superlative in the general consciousness, and thus attain some modicum of a place in the zeitgeist.
But every once in a while, I find something that's truly bizarre and wonderful. I cannot in good conscience call the Shamrock forgotten--I did find it on the internet, after all--but there is nothing about it that is the most anything, and for that reason, I love it. It's the middle child of weird cars.
As the Shamrock is called the Shamrock, you might have already guessed (or suspected) that it hails from Ireland--or at least has an Irish connection. At first, I thought that it might embody another virtue of weird cars that almost forcefully endear me to them: the weird little gremlin car trying to embody, and thus become a source of, national pride. Sometimes it works, perhaps most clearly demonstrated when I mention literally any original Brazilian design (but especially Gurgel), and sometimes it doesn't, like with the post-War British micro-car explosion. But the Shamrock is not that. The Shamrock is something stranger.
Designed in the late 50s, the Shamrock is the project of an American businessman who visited Ireland once and a Canadian former Formula 3 race car driver with no previous automotive design experience. William Curtis, the American businessman, simply wanted to take advantage of the cheap labor he thought was available in the depressed Irish economy to make a "5 passenger sports convertible" for the American market. Alvin 'Spike' Rhino, the former Formula 3 driver, designed a car that looks like a medieval monk's illustration of a Ford Thunderbird and then gave it a 1.5L Austin A55 powerplant that put out 53hp on a good day. The Shamrock was never even intended to be sold in Ireland. William Curtis bought a factory and promised to make 10,000 cars a year in it.
They made 8.
The Shamrock is the kind of car you can only get from an act of incredible hubris--from the endearing, enduring kind of pride that leads people to say "Yeah, I could start a car company."
