Allard Rides Again; First drive of the roadster that revives this legendary marque.(News)(Product/Service Evaluation)

Byline: Kevin A. Wilson

Watkins Glen on its fall vintage festival weekend was the perfect setting. The Allard marque has been revived in the form of a J2X roadster faithful to the original's appearance, updated with modern technology, and we drove it over the Glen's original 6.6-mile public road course. When we pushed the start button on the machine-turned dashboard, the odometer read less than 40 miles, but we piled up quite a few more. It's a blast to drive and appears to be a solidly engineered piece, with looks authentic enough to please not only the informed racing fans, but also the owners of the originals, assembled for the club's annual Allard Gathering.

Built in Champlain, New York, by Montreal-based Allard Motor Works, the new J2X Mk1 has its own intriguing story. AMW founder Roger Allard knows of no familial relation to Sydney Allard, whose firm stopped making cars in 1959. To his own embarrassment, the Canadian marketing consultant admits to having been a car enthusiast for years before discovering the Allard marque. Searching for Austin-Healey literature at a swap meet in England, he tripped across some Allard material instead.

"A car with my name on it was interesting enough, but the more I learned about it, the more excited I got,'' Allard remembers. As he researched, he found a California company with rights to the trademark, building kit cars with an authentic-looking body in fiberglass using a mold pulled from an original J2X. The owner was ready to get out of the business, and sold Allard the brand and molds. Allard founded AMW in 1999, to build replicars based on mechanicals from GM's F-body Camaro/Firebird, in partnership with SLP Engineering. Having arranged with the Allard Registry in England to have the cars included in the register, assigned serial numbers in continuation sequence from the end of the original line in 1959, AMW announced availability of the new J2X as a 50th anniversary edition for 2001. Then GM pulled the plug on the F-body.

"SLP went bankrupt, and had a lot of my materials. I even had to buy my own molds back from the bankruptcy court,'' Allard says.

Not easily discouraged, Allard reset his sights on this year's 50th anniversary of the last J2X built, and took the opportunity to upgrade his car. A new tube-frame chassis with independent suspension all around was engineered and the powder-coated steel frame is a bit longer than the original's, yielding a four-inch-longer cockpit. It incorporates dual roll hoops under the cowl, side-impact protection (the thicker doors are one of the few visual cues that the body isn't an original), ...