Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i Classic American

Richard’s passion for fast cars and loud engines began way back in 1971 when along with a good friend, he took up stock car racing: “We had a Mk2 Jag each,” Richard smiles. “My friend had a 3.8 while I had a 3.4.” These were the days when £40 or £50 would buy you a running MoT failure, even something as exotic as a Jaguar. “When I look back now, I reckon we were responsible for chopping up around 15 Mk2 Jaguars over the early years in order to feed our stock car habit,” Richard recalls, “I’m sure some classic car fans would be horrified now at what we did, but these were just disposable old cars back then and stock car racing was hugely popular.” It was while attending…

An intermittent water pump noise had been coming from the front of the engine of my ’64 289 Mustang, which I suspected was the water pump. Removing the belt and running the engine for a few seconds gave the confirmation. The power steering pump, albeit on a separate belt, was an unlikely culprit as I had fitted new bushes and seals to it in the past. I find it easier to remove coolant hoses when there is a bit of warmth in the engine; if that’s not possible then a heat gun can make hoses easier to deal with. To give a bit more room, I removed the power-steering pump. Normally, I’d follow this with the radiator, however, in this instance, there was enough space to remove the fan/pulley parts;…

1. We are back in Speedway Auto Salvage, which is in East St Louis, on the Illinois side of the city. Last month we rolled back the clock and explored the Eighties cars in this yard, and this time we’re looking at some of the Nineties residents, including this 1995 Camaro. 2. The employees at Speedway Auto Salvage are extremely proud of this late Cadillac hearse and insisted I take a photograph – not that I needed much persuasion! Built by Superior in the late Nineties, it is one of the first vehicles visitors see upon paying their $1 entry fee. Emblazoned along its side are the words: “We sell used body parts.” 3. Just like the first-generation Capri, which was a captive import from Ford of Europe, the third-generation…

Have you seen this missing Chevrolet? Classic American reader Jonathan Dabbs contacted us after his right-hand drive (a very rare Australian import) 1936 FC Chevrolet Roadster registration RSU 793, in bright red, vanished. He had put the vehicle in for some light restoration with a business in Hailsham, East Sussex; however, despite having paid several thousand pounds, Jonathan’s car, along with several other American cars and the business itself and its owner disappeared. The police have been alerted to the situation, but as of yet no trace of the car has been found, even though Jonathan has employed a solicitor and a private investigating firm to track it down. Jonathan’s letter and further background to this sad story appears in our Letters section on page 22. If you have seen…

Chrysler reinvented itself as a style leader during the Fifties, working hand in glove with Ghia on a raft of show cars and small-series offerings. Fiat brokered the introduction. At the dawn of the Fifties, the Turin manufacturer was still in the midst of postwar reorganisation, making full use of monies endowed via the Marshall Plan. Fiat and Chrysler discussed collaborating on future projects, none of which came to pass. However, as a sidebar to negotiations, Chrysler’s president of exports C.B. Thomas mentioned to Fiat’s sales manager Luigi Cajal de La Chenaye that Chrysler was looking for a coachbuilder to build a couple of concept cars. The latter suggested Ghia and Pinin Farina. Both built prototypes, but Ghia became the preferred partner during the Fifties and into the following decade.…

Ford may have created the mid-size niche with its launch of the Ford Fairlane and the Mercury Meteor in 1962, but arguably it was GM who finessed that market with their intermediates which were launched in ’64, spearheaded by Chevrolet’s Chevelle and its other GM sibling models. American car buyers couldn’t get enough of them and 343,894 Chevelles were sold in that first year. Using body-on-frame construction and coil springs all round (as opposed to the rear leaf springs used over at Chrysler and Ford) GM’s intermediates exuded an air of comfort and big car handling, unlike Ford’s intermediates which seemed to many buyers to be simply ‘senior compacts’. GM’s intermediates were facelifted for 1966, but the really big restyle came in 1968, which just happened to coincide with the…

Truth is, we’d been chasing this Ranchero for around two years before we finally got it in front of our camera, even though we knew it lived only an hour away in deepest Wiltshire. The reason for the delay was that Andy Loizou, the owner at the time, had been in the process of running his garage business in North London, and buying another garage in the village of Downton, near Salisbury, plus moving house too. It just never seemed to be the right time. And for this reason, Andy hadn’t driven it to hardly any shows in the UK. As such, nobody has really seen this car since it was imported some years ago. We hadn’t either until Andy brought it along to The Vultures Car Club ‘Giant Killers’…

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When I was a boy, the term ‘supercar’ didn’t exist. In the early Sixties, if I was extremely lucky, I would spy a Ferrari or Maserati road car parked in the car park or paddock at Silverstone race circuit on the odd occasion that my dad took me to watch the motor racing. Such ‘exotica’ as it was known then, was really rare. In 1959, Bournemouth-based Ford dealer Colonel Ronnie Hoare, who had purchased a secondhand Ferrari for himself, approached Enzo Ferrari and asked if he could become the authorised British importer. Enzo asked him how many Ferraris did he thought he could sell a year, to which the Colonel, as he was known, hesitantly replied a lowly ‘four’, thinking he would be chucked out, but much to his surprise…

In a prelude to the Roadkill Nights drag racing event in Pontiac, Michigan, this August, Dodge hosted a press conference with the brand’s new CEO, Matt McAlear, choosing to arrive in an example of the upcoming Charger Daytona EV. The twist was that the audience was treated to a rumbling sound not unlike that of a late-model Hellcat V8 thanks in part to the Daytona EV’s much-touted Fratzonic exhaust system. For months, Stellantis has teased us with information on the upcoming Daytona EV, which is billed as an all-electric muscle car. The term itself seems almost a contradiction since your typical EV is about as far removed as you can get from the tyre-smoking, fuel-guzzling, V8-powered experience that muscle cars are all about. Dodge hopes to change that by appealing…

Of all the places a car-mad young man could call home, Battersea in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies must take some beating. Even in the Fifties, when austerity maintained a tight grip over the country, Battersea had more than its fair share of Flash Harry types cruising around in fancy Yankee motors, and by the mid-Seventies, with Dream Cars having sprung up and the Chelsea Cruisers congregating in Battersea Park, it had become pretty much the beating heart of Britain’s American car scene. The sight and sound of all those gleaming tailfins and rumbling V8s was sure to leave an impression on a few young minds, just as it did on Roger Heapy’s. “I was born in 1950,” says Roger, “and I’ve liked American cars since I was in primary…