You've Probably Never Heard Of The Coolest Canadian Car Ever Built

Name a car from the early 1960s built by a famed racing driver with curvy, lightweight aluminum bodywork, a big American engine, and a reputation for being unruly and fast as all hell. Your first thought was probably the famed Shelby Cobra, did you know there was a Canadian racer named David Greenblatt who built the radical 400-horsepower, 1600-pound Dailu Mk I? And he did it in 1961, before ‘ol Shelby ever talked to AC about supplying the Cobra’s chassis. The hand-built Canadian monsters were accelerated so quickly and had such unruly mid-corner behavior, that Belgian superstar driver Olivier Gendebien allegedly refused to race it.

DAILU MARK 1

The 1960s were packed to the gills with so-called Garagiste racers building their own wild specials to try to race against the best sports cars from Europe. Greenblatt and his co-conspirators built dozens of race cars over the years, but none of them had the success of the Mk I. In 1961 and 1962, the Dailu was consistently quicker than the competition, winning five of the ten major races it entered. It even qualified on pole for one of the biggest races at the 1962 Nassau Speed Week in the Bahamas, but a fuel line broke in the race and the resulting fire severely damaged the car, sidelining it for the next 15 years.

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In the late 1970s the car returned to the race track, though a bit like the ship of Theseus, it’s difficult to tell how much of the original car remains. The chassis and much of the bodywork needed to be fabricated and replaced in order to get it wheeling again. Greenblatt raced the car on the vintage stage for a few years before losing interest and digging into cigarette boat racing around 1980.

As for the Gendebien comment in the opening paragraph, I will refer you to a highly interesting forum post by Mr. Greenblatt in 2006:

Gendebien practiced in the Dailu Mk I, (Dailu Bardahl Special) in June 1962. The engine was leaking oil from a valve cover gasket on to the floor by the pedals. Oliver wanted to drive his Porsche instead., so the car was sidelined.

Upon meeting Olivier a few years later he admitted it was not the oil leak, but the terrifying acceleration up the back straight was unlike any F1 car he had ever driven, and the not so nimble handling [compared to] his Porsche. He opted out.

One of Greenblatt’s former employees, Pasquale Cerasuolo, bought the restored car in 1980 and raced it for an additional 11 years. A condition of the sale was that Cerasuolo one day retire the car from its life of racing and convert it into the street-legal car Greenblatt always wanted to build. That’s exactly where it is today, roaming the Quebecois streets.

This is a gorgeous little video with the owner telling the whole story from beginning to the current day. It’s well worth a watch, and comes to us from a tiny channel on YouTube with 68 subscribers. Give it a watch. I promise you’ll enjoy it.