Car Making on the Rise
Car making is a growing industry in Orange County.
No big factories here, but there are several limousine companies that build stretch limos from special stripped down vehicles supplied by companies like Ford and General Motors. One of them, Brea’s Krystal Koach Inc., makes virtually everything but the engines and tires in its own factory. Krystal, which has about 290 employees, also makes hearses and shuttle buses that are sold all over the U.S.
There also are several race car makers in the county, including Dan Gurney’s All American Racers in Santa Ana--where the man whose All American Eagle once was widely used on the Indy car circuit is deeply involved in perfecting the new Eagle that he built for Toyota. The new model made its debut on the Indy CART circuit this year.
(CART is the “old” Indy group that split away last year and held its Memorial Day 500-mile race in Michigan while the new Indy Racing League ran at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in cars built to different specifications than CART uses.)
CART driver Hiro Matsushita’s San Clemente-based Swift Engineering Inc. also is a race car builder. The company announced earlier this year that it will make and sell a Swift IndyCarCQ for the CART circuit. The first six cars have been sold to Newman Haas Racing, the team owned by actor and racing enthusiast Paul Newman and Swift distributor Carl A. Haas. The team will have exclusive use of the Swift cars for the 1997 season, after which Swift intends to begin selling to all comers.
The company’s 60,000-square-foot production and engineering facility in San Clemente boasts one of the world’s most advanced automotive wind tunnels, designed to test 40% to 50% scale models of race cars at wind speeds of up to 140 mph. Swift, which has grown to 70 employees from the 35 who worked there when Matsushita bought it in 1991, uses the high-tech tunnel for its own testing and also brings in big bucks leasing it to other race car developers.
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John O’Dell covers major Orange County corporations and manufacturing for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5831 and at john.odell@latimes.com
