Automotive American – Classic Vintage & Modern
Category: Autoweek
The Clipper was the lowest-priced Packard of 1953, though the Deluxe Touring Sedan still cost $2,735 (about $26,500 today). Meanwhile, a new Ford Mainline Fordor sedan with flathead V8 went for just $1,766, and a Dodge Coronet sedan with Hemi V8 cost $2,220.
Want GTO or Mustang “wheels” for cheap? Magnificent mags? J.C. Whitney had you covered in 1972.
Chicago’s J.C. Whitney has been around for 104 years now, though most of its business today happens online. Back in the printed-catalog era, the J.C. Whitney catalog was the source for parts and accessories
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The famed custom is wearing fresh paint and a new set of light-up Goodyear shoes
If you had to guess the time and place for the grand re-emergence of the storied Golden Sahara II, you’d probably choose a traditional American rod custom show. Detroit Autorama, maybe, or the Grand National Roadster Show. Maybe even SEMA.
For our part, we were betting on Autorama. Sneak-peek shots of the George Barris-designed, 1953 Lincoln Capri-based radical custom — formerly owned by the late Jim “Street” Skonzakes, and purchased at auction last year by Chicago-area collector Larry Klairmont — loaded onto a car-hauler, sporting a sparkling new coat of paint, only seemed to reinforce the notion.
And then it turned up in Switzerland, on display at the Geneva motor show alongside the Bugattis and the Pininfarinas and Koenigseggs.
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A bit of fun from Autoweek
We return to the Car Clock of the Week series with a type of clock that was all the rage in the 1970s and well into the 1980s: the mechanical “digital” timepiece with motor-driven reels. Honda used this style of clock in Accords and Preludes and Ford installed them in Lincolns; General Motors ran mechanical-digital clocks in some higher-end cars of the period, but nearly every last one I’ve tested has been dead for decades. Yes, you were lucky to get five years out of one of these clocks, but I’ve found one in a discarded Olds in Denver and it works perfectly.
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With Detroit Autorama getting shockingly close, Scott Sheehan — our hero — has turned what looked like a car into a bare frame. That might seem like Sheehan is taking a backward step, which wouldn’t be ideal with the show’s move-in date approaching, but in order to get the Ford Model T’s hand-built frame finished and painted, everything had to go. At least, everything had to go away from the car’s frame.
The Sierra XR4i was very much the poor relation of the Sierra Cosworth in the UK back in the day. The Detroitified version of the German-built Ford Sierra XR4i, now in a Denver junkyard.
North America gave a lukewarm-but-not-inconsequential reception to the European-built Capri and Fiesta during the 1970s, and so Dearborn decided to give another shot to Euro-Fords during the 1980s. The Merkur brand offered two models: the Scorpio luxury sedan (aka Ford Scorpio) and the sporty XR4Ti hatchback (aka Ford Sierra XR4i). I used to see at least a couple of XR4Tis per year, during my junkyard adventures, but the supply appears to have dried up in the last few years. Here’s an amazingly well-preserved ’87, complete with biplane wing, in a Denver self-service wrecking yard.
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The ’93 Cobra and Lightning were the first machines out of the Ford Special Vehicle Team program. The Contour SVT came out a few years later and was the factory-hot-rod version of the Detroit-ized Ford Mondeo
Article from Murilee at Autoweek, I can say with some confidence that this car would not be in a junkyard in the UK 🙂
These days, it’s common for automakers to build road-legal tributes to their race cars; whether these have any extra performance to go with the extra carbon-fiber and graphics packages or whether they’re largely cosmetic affairs, they’re another way for automakers to capitalize on their ongoing investment — or at least their heritage — in motorsports.
Depending on how you look at it, that’s what the 1930 Packard 734 Speedster Runabout would have been … if Packard actually had a factory race effort at the time. Despite taking great pride in the engineering and performance of its engines, and despite its marine motors being used to great effect by the likes of Gar Wood, Packard brass never saw much value in competition. Packard people did not have anything to prove, so why would they bother to race? Or so I imagine went the official line.
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Back to work after the Grand National Roadster show, and explaining the thrash
It might not seem like a ton of progress has been made on Scott Sheehan’s Model T roadster project in over the past week — you can blame The Grand National Roadster Show for that — but the little Model T is still moving along. The major projects Sheehan knocked out this week might not be as glamorous as putting together an engine or laying paint, but are examples of the mundane-but-necessary tasks it takes to build a car.
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Scott Sheehan’s T.R.O.G. ready Model T will make its debut in Detroit … if it’s ready
With the Grand National Roadster Show wrapped, and America’s Most Beautiful Roadster inked into the history books, the hot rod world will start to shift its eyes further inland to the Detroit Autorama. Sure, most folks will have their eyes set on the next group of Ridler contenders, but traditional hot rodders will be waiting with bated breath to peek into the Autorama’s basement — home of the Autorama Extreme — to get a taste of what they could see at various shows across the country for the rest of the year.
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