Saab Sonett II

Karlström drew aircraft for a living, and the Sonett II reads like something shaped by a man used to thinking about fuselages. It stands 48 inches tall on an 85-inch wheelbase, with a curved wrap-around rear screen and a nose that hinges forward in one piece, the whole front of the car swinging up out of the way like an Austin-Healey Sprite's. The steel roll hoop is not an accessory, it is structure, buried in the fibreglass. What the shape does not have is a boot lid. The rear glass is fixed, and luggage goes in through a slot barely bigger than a letterbox, a decision the Sonett III finally reversed with a proper hatch. Then there is the bulge. When the Ford V4 arrived it stood too tall for Karlström's bonnet, so Gunnar A. Sjögren drew an asymmetric blister over the offending bank, and it is now the fastest way to tell a V4 from a two-stroke at fifty paces. American magazines of the day were unkind about all of it. Saab handed the next Sonett to Coggiola in Turin.

Wikipedia's own line is that the Sonett II was designed as a race car, and the record supports the intent more than the results. In American SCCA club racing it went up against Austin-Healey Sprites and Triumph Spitfires and did well enough to be worth entering, but its problem was arithmetic rather than pace. 258 cars was too few to satisfy minimum-production rules, and one reason Saab pushed V4 output to 1,610 was to reach the numbers a class entry needed. What survives from the period is mostly privateer, and no class championship can be pinned to the car with confidence. The factory moment is Erik Carlsson at the 1966 Coupe des Alpes, in a Sonett II whose two-stroke had been bored out to 940cc and made at most 93bhp. It would only run to 140km/h flat out but reached 100km/h from rest in eight seconds, and Wikipedia records it as able to hold station with a Porsche 904. It never finished. The plugs let go, and the fuel was later analysed at Saab and found contaminated. Sabotage was suspected and never proven.

The Sonett's cultural footprint is thin, and it is worth saying so plainly. It was not a film car and it was not a poster. It was a fibreglass oddity in American Saab showrooms that the period press enjoyed at its expense, one Road & Track test opening on the observation that even the dimmest wit could find something funny to say about the way it looked. What it has instead is a reversed geography. Nearly the whole run was exported, overwhelmingly to the United States, so a Swedish sports car ended up as a largely American object, easier to find in Minnesota than in Malmö. Inside the Saab world it does real work as the answer to a standing question, which is whether Saab ever built a sports car at all. Officially this one is the Saab 97, and nobody has ever called it that, not even the people who own them. The name itself comes from a remark made about the 1955 prototype, 'så nätt den är', meaning how neat it is, and not from the poem.

A Sonett II asks you to accept a few things and then rewards you for it. There is no boot lid, so a weekend's luggage goes in through a letterbox slot behind the seats, one soft bag at a time. It is loud, particularly the two-stroke, and the V4 booms when it is working. The column shift takes a day to stop feeling wrong and then becomes normal. The freewheel is what new owners misunderstand most: coast with it engaged and there is no engine braking at all, which on a long descent is a conversation with the brakes you want to have in advance. Mechanically the news is good, because almost everything below the fibreglass is Saab 95 and 96, and those parts are still on shelves. The two areas that cost money are the steel frame, where rust repair means working under and sometimes into the structure, and the Ford V4's balance-shaft and timing-gear chain of failures. Sports Car Market also flags freewheel gear damage under V4 torque. None of it is mysterious, and none of it stops anybody.