The First First Test

It’s not every day that a company buys a valuable heirloom, an actual piece of its history. But as MotorTrend lights 70 candles on its birthday cake, it’s this car—this obscure frog-green 1949 Kurtis we recently purchased—that’s being wheeled up as our present to ourselves.

Why the Kurtis? The easy answer is that it’s the automobile on the magazine’s first grainy, three-color cover. Not just any Kurtis. The exact car.

Another reason is that 70 years is time enough for everybody present at ’s birth to have now packed their desks and relocated to that great printing press in the sky, most notably our founder, Robert Petersen, who started the magazine on Hollywood Boulevard and moved it to a black-glass tower on Sunset Boulevard and then to a monumental bronze one on Wilshire Boulevard. We finally caravaned here, near the beach, to a remodeled El Segundo tilt-up that was originally used for engineering the Apollo