Of all the questions I’m asked by car owners and readers alike, there is one that I cannot quickly answer: “What’s the toughest shoot you’ve ever been on?” I think back on rain delays, traffic tickets I’ve had to pay for (from a park ranger, no less!), leaning out of moving vehicles, the time my feature car owner T-boned someone during an action shot, and the time I stood on the seat of a new Corvette convertible, facing backwards, sitting atop the windshield as a driver...
1953 AEC Matador
You thought I meant AMC? Not even close. Cheffins Cambridge Vintage Sale last month was mostly farm implements and tractors, but about 40 pages into the 1,200-item catalog (ah, the glamorous life of an autowriter), two Matadors appeared.
The first of the Cheffins Matadors, the ‘53 above, looks like a civilian production model, but it’s hard to imagine what you’d do with that big steel box. Then, we’re used to the thought of something like that turning...
Actually, based on the grille, that appears to be a LeMans-amino. In the comments to the post about the Grand Am-amino that I spotted in the GM Heritage Center, Louis pointed us to some photos that his buddy, Dave Simmons, took of a Pontiac-nosed ElCo sitting forlorn in the Orlando U-Pull & Pay junkyard.
All the sheetmetal appears the same shade of the same color, though none of the photos show the fine detail behind the sheetmetal that would likely not have been painted had somebody just...
Here’s a I sight that I absolutely guarantee you’ll never seen anyplace other than Hershey, a car that actually raced at the Indianapolis 500, on one of the world’s fastest, most intimidating race courses, trundling around the outside of a high school football field. If you’ve never had the pleasure (and you should), the AACA National includes a live-fire exercise for restored racing cars around Hershey Stadium on Friday mornings, when the weather cooperates. This,...
As I mentioned previously, the speedster had a few issues that needed taking care of before race season. The biggest concern was the ignition coil. Jim Menneto said the car seemed to have a skip when he was test-driving it so we started poking around.
We thought at first it might be because of the three butt connectors within a foot of each other on the distributor lead wire, but determined that even though they were pretty cobby-looking, they were all still tight and electrons were still...
No, that 1939 Pontiac isn’t a trick, an optical illusion. It’s genuinely see-through, one of two that GM built for the 1939 and 1940 World’s Fairs. Or, at least, two that are known to have been built at the time of this article’s publication in SIA #34, May-June 1976. And, fitting for that bicentennial year, the same issue also featured a three-pager on a 1942 Packard Clipper Custom that Douglas MacArthur originally owned and that narrowly escaped a pancake fate...
* This is why we should cry for the decline of vocational programs in our schools. According to Dennis Eichenberg, writing at amcpacer.com, a group of Cleveland-area high school vocational teachers got together once the AMC Pacer came out to form Electric Vehicle Associates specifically to convert Pacers to electric power. They then sold the Pacers to fleet buyers, and apparently built more than 100 such Pacers (they called it the Change of Pace) before AMC discontinued the Pacer in 1980. Are...
* This is why we should cry for the decline of vocational programs in our schools. According to Dennis Eichenberg, writing at amcpacer.com, a group of Cleveland-area high school vocational teachers got together once the AMC Pacer came out to form Electric Vehicle Associates specifically to convert Pacers to electric power. They then sold the Pacers to fleet buyers, and apparently built more than 100 such Pacers (they called it the Change of Pace) before AMC discontinued the Pacer in 1980. Are...
* This is why we should cry for the decline of vocational programs in our schools. According to Dennis Eichenberg, writing at amcpacer.com, a group of Cleveland-area high school vocational teachers got together once the AMC Pacer came out to form Electric Vehicle Associates specifically to convert Pacers to electric power. They then sold the Pacers to fleet buyers, and apparently built more than 100 such Pacers (they called it the Change of Pace) before AMC discontinued the Pacer in 1980. Are...
* This is why we should cry for the decline of vocational programs in our schools. According to Dennis Eichenberg, writing at amcpacer.com, a group of Cleveland-area high school vocational teachers got together once the AMC Pacer came out to form Electric Vehicle Associates specifically to convert Pacers to electric power. They then sold the Pacers to fleet buyers, and apparently built more than 100 such Pacers (they called it the Change of Pace) before AMC discontinued the Pacer in 1980. Are...
* This is why we should cry for the decline of vocational programs in our schools. According to Dennis Eichenberg, writing at amcpacer.com, a group of Cleveland-area high school vocational teachers got together once the AMC Pacer came out to form Electric Vehicle Associates specifically to convert Pacers to electric power. They then sold the Pacers to fleet buyers, and apparently built more than 100 such Pacers (they called it the Change of Pace) before AMC discontinued the Pacer in 1980. Are...
Corvette
1953 AEC Matador
You thought I meant AMC? Not even close. Cheffins Cambridge Vintage Sale last month was mostly farm implements and tractors, but about 40 pages into the 1,200-item catalog (ah, the glamorous life of an autowriter), two Matadors appeared.
The first of the Cheffins Matadors, the ‘53 above, looks like a civilian production model, but it’s hard to imagine what you’d do with that big steel box. Then, we’re used to the thought of something like that turning...
Actually, based on the grille, that appears to be a LeMans-amino. In the comments to the post about the Grand Am-amino that I spotted in the GM Heritage Center, Louis pointed us to some photos that his buddy, Dave Simmons, took of a 
Here’s a I sight that I absolutely guarantee you’ll never seen anyplace other than Hershey, a car that actually raced at the Indianapolis 500, on one of the world’s fastest, most intimidating race courses, trundling around the outside of a high school football field. If you’ve never had the pleasure (and you should), the AACA National includes a live-fire exercise for restored racing cars around Hershey Stadium on Friday mornings, when the weather cooperates. This,...
As I mentioned previously, the speedster had a few issues that needed taking care of before race season. The biggest concern was the ignition coil. Jim Menneto said the car seemed to have a skip when he was test-driving it so we started poking around.
We thought at first it might be because of the three butt connectors within a foot of each other on the distributor lead wire, but determined that even though they were pretty cobby-looking, they were all still tight and electrons were still...
No, that 1939 
* This is why we should cry for the decline of vocational programs in our schools. According to Dennis Eichenberg, writing at amcpacer.com, a group of Cleveland-area high school vocational teachers got together once the AMC Pacer came out to form Electric Vehicle Associates specifically to convert Pacers to electric power. They then sold the Pacers to fleet buyers, and apparently built more than 100 such Pacers (they called it the Change of Pace) before AMC discontinued the Pacer in 1980. Are...