Serendipity

By Bob Brandys – Producer

My first direct contact with John Delorean happened in Puerto Rico, when he was inspecting the old Ramos Air Force Base in 1979. I was playing golf their on the weekend while working in Puerto RIco and walked over to his party who was at the clubhouse. John was talking about building his new gullwing sports car in Puerto Rico with the various governmental officials. I knew about the gullwing design and with my interest in the 1955 Mercedes gullwing, this piqued my interest in him and his car company.

In 1979, I met Jack Martens, who worked with John Delorean on the prototype air bag Deloreans. Jack was an automotive safety consultant in the Chicago area. We became good friends with Jack because we not only knew about the air bag Oldsmobiles from the 1970s but we bought and restored the one that Jack owned. Jack was another missing piece in the Delorean story.

In 2002, at the Delorean Car Show, John Delorean spoke and presented documents to the audience showing tiny pieces of the false narrative. The one thing that struck me as very unusual, was that Delorean was unable to get the secret state department communications with the British government for his defense. At that point, I knew there was more to the real facts, but it would take another 13 years before some of this information was to be made public.

In 2020, we met Colleen Booth who had been John Delorean’s secretary from 1975 to 1979. Colleen helped us put together more of the missing pieces to the real story.
We took this car to various car shows, around the country, and were shocked by all the repeated insulting comments about John Delorean, drugs, still in jail, false accusations, and so on. The story of John Delorean that was ingrained in the public was a false narrative based on disinformation.

In 2021, we also met Byron Block, who consulted for Delorean on the Delorean Safety Vehicle. Byron also owns one of the airbag Chevrolets that Delorean built while at Chevy. We also met Mike Withers, an automotive safety engineer who worked for Delorean in the early 1980’s.

Next, I got in contact with Fred Dulles. He worked directly with John on the development of the turbo charged 250HP 1984 Delorean. However, that was not the end of his involvement. He and John were working on a plan to produce new Deloreans in the US. Unfortunately, again this was stopped by politics.