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Life with the first Bugeye Sprite

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If you’re new to our universe, you may not know that we own the very first production Bugeye Sprite, AN5L 501. If you’re unfamiliar, I purchased this car in 2021 from its previous owners in Australia and brought it here, at which time we completely disassembled it and made it exactly factory correct. 501 is now a perfect match of its former self from March of 1958 when it was constructed, and when this very car launched a series of 48,986 more Bugeyes that followed until the end of production in late 1960.

501 as she looks today. Note designer Gerry Coker’s signature on the front plate.

I had first seen this car in 2012 when it was a wreck; at that time, it was painted red with wire wheels and a roll bar installed. It looked like way more of a project than I had the time to take on at that time, so it made its way to Australia. 10 years later, I had an opportunity to purchase it again, now restored in its correct green color. However, many personalized modifications were made by the restorer, and I was much more interested in turning such a historically significant Bugeye into an accurate machine.

501 as it appeared upon arrival in July of 2022. It may not look like it, but this car is a far cry from the car it is today. Note the wire wheels and wood steering wheel, both easily identifiable incorrect features that needed to be fixed in order to achieve our goal of Concours gold certification.

So when 501 landed in Bugeyeguys world headquarters in July of 2022 after several months of ocean travel, our team completely disassembled it, and restored it with proper original hardware and features. This included replacing nearly every fastener on the car with the correct period hardware, as most of the bolts holding the car together had been replaced with modern yellow chromium grade 5 bolts.

Almost every original fastener on 501 like the one on the left shown above had been replaced with incorrect modern Grade 5 bolts (right). We had to locate and restore over 500 original fasteners or we would loose a half point per bolt with new limit on the deductions!

It took seemingly every minute of 68 days to complete 501’s re-restoration and countless hours of research. We then had the car judged at the National Austin Healey Club enclave in Pennsylvania, where a team of judges certified the car as a gold medal example. That it was quite an honor to take this car and rebuild it to exactly match the day that it rolled off the factory floor in March of 1958!

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Sweating the details

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When you turn a screw, where do you stop? Do you agonize about keeping all your slotted screws horizontal and your Phillips screws perpendicular? On the very first Bugeye Sprite, we sure do… and thus this post is all about the most insignificant of details… yet we still thought you might enjoy seeing our thought process.

Are you a 45er?

I have said many times the dashboard is like your living room and it needs to be perfect. It has to feel right and calm your nervous system. But when something is out of alignment, or otherwise out of whack, we intervene.

Or horizontal?

So today we are obsessing about the turn signal bezel… what is correct orientation of the slots? We have 30 Bugeyes in our building, and all 30 are different. So we turned to our supply of early promo literature from Austin Healey and find that… it’s not so easy to tell.

(There may not be a right answer.)

Check out the pre-production promotional photo shown below, complete with prototype early steering wheel. It looks like the bezel has no slots!

All other literature is inconclusive. They’re all over the place with their bezels!

In the original parts manual, the bezel has the slots horizontally oriented.
In a 1960 edition of the driver’s handbook, the bezel is oriented at an angle.

The right picture (above) shows the bezel at 45 degrees, so one could conclude this is the correct angle. But this always looks wrong to me, so with “calm” firmly in mind (and with confidence that there is no conclusive “answer”), we went with horizontal. That feels right to us. And if anyone wants to know how it should be done in the future, now people can say, “well, on 501, that thing is horizontal!”

Bugeye Sprite #1 at the 2023 Audrain Concours D’Elegance

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It is hard to describe the experience of showing a car at a world class event such as this. All the cars are at such a high level, that you can’t help but feel honored to be in such company. And it is quite humbling to be judged against the best examples (of everything) in the world.

Deliberating 501’s Concours fate… note the full Bugeye tool kit laid out in front of the car (read more about that here).

It was completely unexpected that we would win an award given the competition in our class… every car in every class was award-worthy. But our story is good, and the judges appreciated the hard work that went into rescuing this particular car, and returning it to accurate factory specs, and that seemed to help us get second place in our class.

The winning car in our “British Icons” class was a 1935 Riley Sprite (below), a supercharged and sequential shifting mechanical marvel, well worthy of first place. Were I a judge, I would have awarded that car first place too. It was that wonderful.

Third place went to an original 1952 C-Type Jaguar. How did a Bugeye Sprite get ahead of a C-Type? Perhaps we were aided by the great signboard below (made by Samantha)!

Out driving 501, I often find myself trying to recreate May of 1958 in my mind, when the first production Bugeye was built. I try to imagine what it would be like to have just built a car that is unlike anything else for the price, and meeting in the board room with my peers to conclude, “Yup, let’s make 50,000 of these, the folks in the States (and elsewhere) will love ’em.”

And love ’em we did.

“Your vehicle has won an award!” Thank you Leslie (and Bodhi) for making this moment possible!

It seemed at Audrain that more than 50% of the people who passed our display had a story of how a Frogeye had impacted or touched their own automotive story. Here we were surrounded by the greatest and most storied Automotive crowd, and so many could connect some part of their journey to this very car. That is one of the more special pieces of daily life with Bugeyes. Bugeye Sprite dust seems sprinkled in the DNA of a shocking number of automotive enthusiasts.

Thank you Audrain Motor Week for inviting us, and for a memorable experience! We made a new video showcasing all the hard work that everyone involved with this restoration has done and the significance this car holds; check it out below!

In the driving video above, I mention that I am on the way to the YMCA in 501 and I thought you would like to see how parking looks when I arrive. Notice I choose an end space, hard up against the curb for maximum buffer zone, and notice too the contrast of the Bugeye with the rest of the world!

Click “read more” for more photographs of 501 at Audrain!

[Read more…] about Bugeye Sprite #1 at the 2023 Audrain Concours D’Elegance

501 fuel pump foibles

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Even after 400 Bugeyes, sometimes last-minute failures happen and need to be addressed, even on 501! As we prepared the first production Bugeye, AN5L/ 501 for its appearance at this weekend’s Audrain Concours D’elegance in Newport, Rhode Island, we noticed a fuel smell upon startup. Upon inspection, we found a steady drip coming from the fuel pump. You can see in the photo below the peeling paint, a tell-tale sign that we had a fuel leak.

Original Sprite fuel pumps were painted green along with the rest of the engine. The peeling of this paint tipped us off to the origin of the fuel smell.

We just rebuilt this fuel pump a little over a year ago, so the reason for the leak is currently unclear, and we didn’t really have time to investigate, as 501 was due to be loaded on the trailer for Audrain at 9 AM this morning. Leaks like this are why we strongly recommend installing our solid-state electric fuel pump kits (available here or by clicking the photo below) on all of our Bugeyeguys builds. They are infinitely more reliable, never leak, and significantly reduce the likelihood of leaking fuel into the crankcase.

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Can you blend old with new?

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1958, say hello to 2023!

E3 will be our latest and greatest Electric Bugeye build to date!

Here’s the engine bay of our newest Electric Bugeye Sprite “FrogE,” followed the power plant for AN5L 501, the first production Bugeye Sprite (restored to factory-correct standards), and “Gumby,” my own personal expression of how to power a Bugeye Sprite… take your pick (we’ll build it any way you like).

AN5L 501 represents how Austin-Healey Sprites came off of the assembly line in March of 1958. Every nut, bolt, and screw exactly as it was that day.
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