Crevier Classic Cars are offering a 1986 Clenet Series III convertible.
Clenet Coachworks was founded in 1975 by Alain Clenet, who placed an MG Midget body and doors on a Lincoln Continental Mark V chassis and fleshed out the combination in fairly typical neoclassical styling. While Brooks Stevens introduced the concept of the neoclassic with the Excalibur in 1965, the concept incubated for another decade or so, by which time dozens of neoclassics appeared on the market, many of them Volkswagen-based kits. Clenet was one of the handful that offered a complete car, assembled at its factory in Goleta, California. By 1982, the company fell into bankruptcy, leading former employee Alfred DiMora to purchase Clenet, build a new factory in Carpinteria, California, and resume production in 1984. By this time, the original Series I had been discontinued in favor of the larger Series II and Series III models, still based on Lincoln mechanicals. A fuel-injected Ford 302-cu.in. V-8 and four-speed automatic transmission powered the car and its 134-inch wheelbase, but contemporary publicity materials focused less on the Clenet’s mechanical specifications than on celebrity owners of the cars (among them, Sylvester Stallone), its price ($82,500 for a Series III roadster in 1986, compared to about $25,000 for that year’s Continental), and its luxury accoutrements (American walnut dashboard with Danish teakwood accents, Connolly leather upholstery, English wool carpet, automatic temperature control, etched glass vent windows, backlit crystal glass ashtray). According to ClenetCorner.com, the Goleta factory built 36 Series IIIs while the Carpinteria factory built another 15, all convertibles. The subsequent Series IV, which DiMora touted as a less-expensive Clenet, arrived shortly after, but only four are known to have been built, again according to ClenetCorner.com.
