Stutz

Stutz announced itself by finishing 11th at the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911 — 'the car that made good in a day' — and built its name on American sporting machinery: the Bearcat became the definitive pre-Great War sports car, and the 1920s brought genuine sophistication with the overhead-cam Vertical Eight and a near-win at Le Mans in 1928, the best American result there for decades. The Depression closed the company in the 1930s, but Bearcats and the later DV-32 cars remain fixtures of American pre-war collecting at its most romantic.