Summer Car Show

A local Chevrolet dealer hosts an antique, collector, and hot rod car show every July.  The tradition started thirty years ago.  The dealer would clear out part of his used car lot to make room for thirty or forty show cars.  The dealer would set up a tent and his employees would sell a few brats, hot dogs and hamburgers to the several hundred people who wold show up.

The show grew larger every summer.  It attracted more than one thousand cars this year and a crowd estimated at more than five thousand motorheads.  The Lions Club mans a huge food and beverage tent.  Nearby bars and restaurants are packed.  Cars that are to be displayed arrive beginning at 8 AM.  When the one-thousandth car arrives, the show is closed to any more entries.  That happened at 10 AM this year.  Quiet a few cars had to be turned away.

Fortified by a nice hot bratwurst for breakfast, I wandered around the grounds.

The first thing I did was look for my friend and dentist, Dr. Neal.  We've known each other since high school.  I found him with his 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner.

Neal bought this car new in 1969.  No one else has ever owned it. He drove it for about 30,000 miles, then parked it.  It now has about 36,000 miles and is entirely original, except for tires (which are reproductions of the factory originals), brake shoes, oil and filters.  It is a flawless, original, unrestored car.  Neal drives it a little in summer, but not very far.  The engine hasn't been modified to run on crappy unleaded pump gasoline, so he has to buy racing gas at $9 per gallon.  A $100 fill-up is good for an afternoon of driving.

When Neal parked this car, he bought a 1971 Dodge Challenger.  He drove that car about 30,000 miles, and parked it.  It's the other car in his garage.  Perfect original, and unrestored.  Neal drives a beater Toyota pickup truck to work.  No a/c, crank-up windows, AM radio, cloth seats.  A man has to have his priorities straight.

This 1923 Ford caught my eye.  This kind of hot rod is called a "Bucket T" because it's body is from a Ford Model T and it looks like a bucket.

Jan and Dean sang about it, back when.

There were a few 1932 Ford coupes made into hot rods.  These are called "Deuce Coupes" because of the number 2 in the year 1932.  Don't ask me to explain.

Can't be a hot rod without a song, right?  The Beach Boys recorded Little Deuce Coupe. I'm imagining Dust Bunny Queen in a flannel skirt with a poodle on it, saddle shoes and a blouse, sitting in a Deuce Coupe.






There was a Dagmar sighting!  Classic front end of a 1962 Cadillac Eldorado.

A pair of Shelby Cobras showed up, both driven to the show.  These are irreplaceable.  And brutal.  They are essentially race cars with turn signals and lights.  Jay Leno calls his Cobra one of the most uncomfortable cars he owns because the engine is hot, there is no insulation, there are no mufflers, and the suspension is not intended to absorb bumps, just corner flat.  And they have big stonkin' Ford 427 racing engine.

If you wanted to buy either one of these Cobras, you'd have to sit down with the owner and start the conversation somewhere north of $300,000.  If the owner was of a mind to sell, which few owners ever are.

Or maybe you have less than the $300,000 opening bid for a Cobra.  Maybe only $200,000 or so. That should buy this perfect, one-owner, low mileage, original, unrestored 1967 Corvette convertible. Dang, I want this car.  I've wanted it since it was introduced late in 1966.

In the middle 1960s you could walk into a car dealer and buy a brand new car set up for drag racing.  The one above is a Dodge.  It came form the factory with a roll cage, no heater, no radio, driver's seat only, no side windows, no interior trim, no mufflers, a manual transmission and a big engine.  It couldn't be licensed or driven on the street.  It was strictly a racer.  This Dodge came equipped with a 426 Hemi racing engine.

Ford and General Motors did the same thing - sell racing cars right out of the dealer's showrooms.  This big boat is a Pontiac Catalina.  Not a streetable car, just for drag racing.

In order to get a lot of horsepower out of engines, drag racers resorted to building massive engines, then trying to tame them to drive on the street.  The engines were complicated, and expensive, and fragile, and had the nasty habit of turning into a hand grenade when being raced.

This engine was probably good for 800 horsepower on the drag strip.  It would have to be torn down and re-built every 10 to 20 runs down the quarter mile, if it didn't explode before then.  I was thinking about this - about the times I turned a pile of money into a worthless mangle of ruined metal after an engine exploded and spotted this engine under the hood of a stock 2014 Chevrolet Camaro.

Good times are back!  You can buy a 780 horsepower engine from Chevrolet.  And unlike engines of yore, this thing is docile and happy around town, gets ridiculously good fuel mileage and has all the controls necessary to pass state emission tests.  Hell, you can get it with an automatic transmission.

Dodge is coming out with an 800 horsepower Charger later this year.  And Ford is over 750 horsepower with its latest hot Mustang engine.

With a smile on my face thanks to a great sunny day at the car show, I rolled over to the A&W for lunch.