Canadian singer Matt Dusk announced this week that he completed a very special restoration project.
The 40-year-old Toronto artist posted a photo on Facebook showing him in the driver’s seat of a brightly-painted 1974 Bricklin SV-1.
“Finally completed my resto of the first ever Canadian production car ever built,” Dusk captioned the image. “Took a long time to get this thing on the road but fun busting it out today.”
Dusk, whose 12th studio album, JetSetJazz, was released last year, debuted his Bricklin SV-1 on Twitter in November 2017.
Restoring this Canadian classic. A 1974 #bricklin pic.twitter.com/49Am8AWAOk
— Matt Dusk (@mattdusk) November 18, 2017
An estimated 2,854 of the two-seat sports cars were built in New Brunswick in 1974 and 1975 for American company General Vehicles (thanks to millions of dollars in support from the provincial government).
In 1974, when only 780 of the cars rolled off the assembly line, the sticker price was around $7,490 USD.
Named for owner Malcolm Bricklin, the cars had V8 engines and bodies made of acrylic resin/fiberglass. They were best known for their distinctive gull-wing doors and the absence of ashtrays. According to driving.ca, the cars “were poorly assembled even by 1970s standards. Electrical problems, warped body panels and a general aura of shabbiness dominated early Bricklins.”
General Vehicles collapsed in late 1975. It’s believed that roughly half of the Bricklin SV-1s that were built are still around.
Dusk performs Oct. 19 in Richmond, BC and then does a 10-city Ontario tour from Nov. 8 to Dec. 14.