History

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Context

The story of this brand is often resumed around the Manic GT (1969-1971) model, simply referred as "the Manic". The history starts with a man, Jacques About, a Frenchman living in Quebec, Canada in the 1960's who wanted to create a sports car. Jacques About practiced judo and failed to participate in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He was one of the precursors of the sport in Quebec, and founded judo schools. But somewhere in 1965 or 1966, he became a public relationist for Renault Canada, which sold many models of cars thoughout the country at the time. He met Pauline Vincent, a journalist and together they moved in a rental house in Longueuil, Quebec, a house that had a garage in which Jacques has started transforming a Renault 4 into a sports coupe.

At this time in Quebec, there was several hydro-electric dams being constructed under a project called Manic. From this project, there was a song created by Georges Dor which was played on the radio regularly. It is from these fact that Jacques About decided to use the name Manic for his endeavours.

Another Frenchman, Maurice Gris, hired by Renault in France to work as a mechanic in Canada, met About in 1967 at the Renault Canada's St-Bruno headquarters and subsequently moved in with About in Longueuil. Jacques had acquired a damaged Renault R8 Gordini with which they started racing at the St-Jovite (later Mont-Tremblant) circuit for a time and this evolved into a racing team. They then moved to Greenfield Park in a bigger location to start the Écurie Manic, a racing team, which raced the R8 Gordinis and Formule C single-seaters with the help of a Gitanes cigarettes sponsorship.

Maurice Gris also traveled to Valence, France to buy a GRAC single-seater racing car which the Manic team reproduced under licence. From all accounts, only two Manic GRAC cars have been built. They entered the Formule C Canadian racing series with a lower engine capacity than the original Renault engine of the French GRAC for regulations. In July 1968, the Manic GRAC has started being raced at the St-Jovite circuit in the hands of the popular Quebec automative journalist Jacques Duval. During the 1968 and 1969 seasons, the Manic GRAC cars have also been raced with other drivers at the wheel : Tim Eddington, Marcus Mussa, Eligio Siconolfi and Gérard Cellier, an important man at the Journal de Montréal.

The Manic GT

It is in 1968 that the Manic GT project starts to get pieced together. Yet another Frenchman named Serge Soumille comes to Quebec after following his singer wife going on tour in North America, escaping by the same way the turmoil of the 1968 summer in France. Soumille meet Jacques Duval during a visit with his wife at some television studios for a broadcast. Soumille ask Duval where he could drive race cars and About's name surfaces. He then meet Jacques About for a drive in St-Jovite but also learn that Soumille is a mechanic and studied aerodynamics. Soumille is then requested by About to work on the sports car project, the one currently based on a Renault 4, which Soumille qualifies at "awful".

Jacques About, who worked at Renault, also have connections at the Alpine company, a small French sports car manufacturer that use Renault parts. His brother-in-law, Jacques Cheinisse is a director at Alpine. Technical knowledge is then carried over but the Manic sports car project differs in many ways in that it is then made to use the Renault 8 underpinnings. A fiberglass body is fitted on and other decisions are made in an attempt to save costs compared to the Alpine cars. A tubular chassis is fitted to the Manic's body for rigidity. Many other parts of the Renault 8 are used, along with Renault 16, Renault 4 and Renault 10 parts. The development of the car progresses as the team moves to Terrebonne in larger facilities. Unpaid enthusiasts students comes to regularly assist Soumille's developments of the Manic GT which takes a fast pace in order to make it to the 1969 Montreal Auto Show.

The first prototype of the Manic GT is then presented to the general public at the Montreal Auto Show in April of 1969. The enthusiasm is real and rapidly, 10 units of the Manic GT are produced artisanally by using, cutting and fixing damaged Renault 8 cars. One of the pre-production cars is even sent to Renault in France for testing.

A racecar, the PA-II is also realised and enter 1 race.

Using grants from various Canadian development funds and private investors, the Manic GT starts low-scale regular production. A factory is setted up in Granby to build the cars. However, parts supplied by Renault comes late or orders are incomplete, which puts Jacques About into a bind, having to wait for parts to complete some cars. This creates a chain-reaction that lead the company to be unable to pay for duties on parts that arrived from France. Having thought about the difficulties, About had set to create a new prototype to use American parts instead, but concrete development didn't materialize.

Inconsideration from Renault leads About to put the key into the door of the Manic GT assembly facility on May 11th 1971, despites having presented the car at the 1971 New York Auto Show and captivated vast interest from American investors that confirms, too late for About, orders for up to a thousand vehicles.

Conclusion

Jacques About passed away tragically in 2013 but his legacy and the Manic GT car is well remembered by Quebec car enthusiasts and the like. Out of the 157 or so produced, only about 30 Manic GTs are believed to still exist and of that number, approximately 12 are in running condition. The car sent to Renault has been restored in France by Serge Soumille, who went back to France a few months only after the closing of the Manic's Granby assembly facilities.

All of the informations in this history section have been manually translated from French by Specfreaks from a Guide de l'Auto article linked at the bottom of this page, which itself recounted information obtained from the persons mentioned.
Another notable owner of a Manic GT car is the Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk Member of Parliament, Gérard Deltell, from the Conservative Party of Canada.

Below, the Manic PA-II racecar, sold off to a buyer in Ontario when the company assets were liquidated and never seen again. Any information of the whereabouts of this car would greatly contribute to the Manic story. If you have any information, please contact us ASAP.

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To see the complete list of "Alpha 3" country codes used in these pages to specify the market in which the model was sold, please visit the following website :
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/country_code_list.htm
(We added (EUR) for Europe, (NAM) for North America, (SAM) for South America and (GCC) for Gulf Cooperation Council)