Vector W8 Twin Turbo
A world wonder or a great pretender?
9:00am. Monday, Wilmington, California — We arrive at Vector headquarters, nestled in an industrial ghetto between the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Jerry Wiegert has lured us with the promise of an exclusive first crack at test-ing his audacious exotic car, which has been the subject of great intrigue and speculation since we covered his first running prototype in December 1980.
The decade since then has been long and hard for Wiegert, who, like Ferruccio Lamborghini in the early sixties, decided to take on the established exotic car order. Unlike Lamborghini, however, who was a wealthy industrialist, Wiegert was a young industrial designer without a personal fortune. Although Wiegert often boasts of the Vector’s ten years of development, he spent much of the eighties scratching for cash.
That he survived is a testament to his dedication to his brain-child and his gift for self-promotion. He scored a financial victory in November 1988, when a public stock offer-ing in the newly reconstituted Vector Aeromotive Corporation raised lion. Wiegert’s company got $4.111 and the remainder went to his unit er, Blinder, Robinson & Cm which has since filed for bankru That cash infusion and a later floated what had been Wiegerei string operation into a 40,000 foot plant employing 82 work plant we have just entered. Pallets/ gines, bins of suspension parts, stacks of complex castings, half a dozen is under construction, and a score of busy employees fill the final assembly area. The vector operation is real indeed.