Man versus machine. The epic conflict is top of mind for many of us these days. Though AI’s inevitable takeover may have us humans feeling defeated, it’s comforting to consider that this battle has been raging for decades—and that we have a secret weapon up our sleeves.

Enter the World’s Strongest Man competition. For nearly 50 years, this series of spectacular events has been the recognized gold standard for finding, well, the world’s top strongman. When it comes to machines, these men mercilessly bend them, lift them, and throw them. As far as vehicular opponents go, these legendary titans have gone up against some equally legendary classics over the years:

Car Lift

This event has a storied history in the strongman universe dating all the way back to the inaugural 1977 World’s Strongest Man competition, held at Universal Studios in California. Competitors had to wrap their bare hands under a car’s rear bumper and successfully complete a full deadlift of the vehicle, with nothing but a pair of basic Adidas sneakers and possibly a weightlifting belt to support them. 

Among the cars was a 1977 Datsun B210 hatchback, though this proved too easy for the skilled giants (including Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk), and they inevitably had to add more weight.

The following year, the competition was again held at Universal Studios, though the producers made a more concerted effort to embrace the spirit of their setting. Competitors lifted Jack Benny’s 1916 Maxwell Model 25 tourer, a Ford Model A coupe used in The Sting, and Columbo’s 1959 Peugeot 403 cabriolet (which the owner was looking to sell in 2022 for a mid-six-figure price), though this time with a slightly more ergonomic metal bar attached to the back end.

Though the World’s Strongest Man seemed to take a break from the Car Lift in the 1980s in favor of other car-related challenges, the event made its triumphant return in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Highlights included a squat-off featuring a 70-series Toyota Land Cruiser in 2001, a classic deadlift of a Chrysler PT Cruiser in 2007, and, at the 2018 contest in Manilla, Hafþór Björnsson (“The Mountain” of Game of Thrones fame) took on the Filipino “King of the Road,” the Sarao Motors Jeepney. For those unfamiliar with Sarao, at one point the Jeepney outnumbered vehicles from other brands on the roads of Manilla by almost 7 to 1. It’s good to be the king.

Car Rolling 

This next event gives the strongmen a chance to unleash their appetite for destruction (though sadly not in time for Mr. Ferrigno to show off his Hulk pedigree). While the rules of Car Rolling, occasionally referred to as the more benign “Car Turnover,” vary—sometimes it’s flipping one car a full 360 degrees, other times it’s flipping multiple cars 90 or 180 degrees—the discipline is always an entertaining bout of sanctioned rampaging. 

What poor cars bore the brunt of this madness?

To start, French ones. At a lovely park in Nice in 1986, the strongmen had to berserk their way through a sequence consisting of a Renault 5, a Renault 3 (the budget-friendly Renault 4), and a Citroën 2CV. Considering the 2CV’s reputation as the great un-flippable wonder, it’s fair to say it made a worthy foe. This wouldn’t be the last time the pride of France gave the strongmen a good fight, either.

By 1989, Jón Páll Sigmarsson (a.k.a. “The Viking,” and one of the sport’s most magnetic showmen) had developed a new technique to clear the course: grabbing the tires. This time, the foes were a Fiat 127, Renault 5, and finally a Renault 4.

Moving forward all the way to 1996, the event consisted of just one Austin/Morris 1800 Mk III that had to be rolled a full 360 degrees. The winner, Gerrit Badenhorst of South Africa, managed to accomplish this feat and run to the finish line in just under 12 seconds.

Car Walk

Possibly one of the most adorable—and challenging—of all strongmen events, the Car Walk brings to life Fred Flintstone’s prehistoric means of transportation. In preparation for this event, a car is hollowed out to varying degrees, has its roof removed, and is fitted with enormous shoulder straps. The strongmen must then climb inside, lift the weight of the car onto their massive shoulders, and take their turns yabba-dabba-doo-ing down a course of varying lengths.  

The first Car Walk, in 1993, featured all-time Icelandic great Magnús ver Magnússon hauling the strongman nemesis Citroën 2CV (engine still inside) almost 25 meters.

The following year upped the ante, employing two 2CVs in a heated walk-off. The strongmen had to not only make it down the track, but now had to avoid any disastrous fender-benders with their meet-mate while doing so.

It should also be noted that this is the same year competitors also had to survive the so-called “Sampson’s Barrow,” a version of a wheelbarrow race in which the wheelbarrow was a Mitsubishi L300 flatbed truck with two kegs and a full-grown man as cargo.

Unfortunately, for most of the remaining years when audiences were treated to the Car Walk, the models used were merely referred to as anonymous “saloons.” One announcer in 2006 went so far as to comment about the Citroën AX being hauled around that year: “Now, the only redeeming feature as far as I can tell with this car is the outstanding head room.” Ouch. 

Honorable Mentions

Beyond those impressive feats of strength, other automotive highlights of the World’s Strongest Man have included the time they made the strongmen push a Hummer H1 roughly 20 meters, the time competitors had to hold up a BMW E46 sedan for as long as humanly possible, and even some less-official Strongman content, where 2017 British champion and real-life Gears of War character Eddie Hall squeezed himself into a tiny Peel P50 replica and attempted to drive into a McDonald’s. Here’s to hoping that last one makes it to the main stage.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Big Men, Small Cars: The Vehicles of the World’s Strongest Man Competition appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In The High Window, a 1942 detective novel by Raymond Chandler, the main character and private investigator Philip Marlowe earns the less-than-affectionate moniker “the shop-soiled Galahad.” In the new Apple TV+ series Sugar, a genre-bending sendup to film noir, our titular hero and knight errant John Sugar is not yet the sort of cynical, world-weary detective that Chandler would make famous in Marlowe.

From the very first episode, there’s something strange about Sugar (Colin Farrell). The character is an oddity, an anachronism, an outsider in a lonely place. He is softer than his heroes, detectives in the hardboiled American mold, like Marlowe or the compassionate Lew Archer. Filmmaker Robert Altman wrote of The Long Goodbye, a 1973 adaption of another detective novel by Chandler: “While we were making the film, we literally called [Phillip Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould] Rip Van Marlowe, as if he’d just woken up 20 years later and found out that there was absolutely no way to accommodate himself.” That particular portrayal of the iconic detective is clearly in the DNA of Sugar.

With an encyclopedic knowledge of the classics, Sugar is nostalgic for a past he never lived, a past that never really existed—except for on the silver screen. The editing of the series reflects the way Sugar’s mind functions: When something reminds him of a particular film (e.g. Gilda, Johnny Guitar, Kiss Me Deadly), a clip from that film flashes on screen. Although Sugar is undeniably good at what he does, his PI persona is an invention. He has modeled himself after his celluloid idols: a little bit Mitchum, a little bit Bogart. His gun was used by Glenn Ford in The Big Heat. So it’s not surprising he chooses a ride that is as cinematic as it is old-school elegant: a Corvette Sting Ray. 

To be specific, Sugar drives a pristine ’66 convertible in Nassau Blue with a white and blue interior. A private eye should probably drive something a little less showy, but Sugar’s so good at what he does—locating the lost and the missing—that it doesn’t really matter.

The first fictional detectives operated like roving eyeballs: Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, a Parisian, and Sherlock Holmes kept their distance from the action. But John Sugar is made in the mold of the 20th-century American detectives. When the granddaughter of Jonathan Siegel goes missing, Siegel (James Cromwell) seeks out Sugar. Siegel is a legendary producer, the patriarch of Hollywood royalty. No one loves film more than Sugar. His handler Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) assigns his cases, but Sugar decides to investigate this Chandler-esque mess on his own, despite Ruby’s attempts to stop him. He’s only meant to observe, but Sugar becomes involved, immersed. He detests violence and cruelty, and the mystery becomes something bigger for him than simply finding a missing girl; it becomes an awakening, a soul-jarring lesson in the evil that men do.

John Sugar tools around Los Angeles, often with the dog he accidentally adopted as his passenger, or his new rockstar friend Melanie, played by co-star Amy Ryan. The car shimmers under city lights, almost changing colors as it passes by neon signs. Atmosphere partly drives the story of creator Mark Protosevich, but these scenes are not without purpose. They give us a sense of Los Angeles’ bizarre geography: built in these little enclaves that eventually came together to form some semblance of a city, but its sprawling layout still keeps its denizens isolated from each other. L.A. is the perfect place for someone to disappear and for a mystery to unfold.

Sugar provides one of the greatest pleasures of the detective story, and of television and film in general: watching someone drive through the city in a pretty car. Next to stepping into a movie theater, driving is the most cinematic way you can see L.A.; the windshield becomes a widescreen framing the city. And Colin Farrell loved the experience, describing himself driving the Corvette “like a kid in a sweet shop.”

Farrell tells the Movie Podcast that he got to actually drive for the series, sometimes for hours a day, rather than getting hauled around on a rig like a process trailer. So “it was a lovely little door to experience the character through.” He also discusses how his character’s idealization of the past “takes form in his visiting to his local picture house and watching old noir films and the driving of this car, the appreciation for the kind of tactility of old-fashioned cars, the shape of them, the lines of them, and how aggressive they are to drive at times.”

The Sting Ray is a perfect car for Sugar. The C2 debuted in 1963 and would be replaced by the more beast-like, Mako Shark II–inspired C3 in 1968. In both looks and in performance, the C2 was a dramatic departure from the C1, its predecessor. At just 22 years old, Peter Brock sketched what would eventually become the Sting Ray. The car was a dream made real by a crew that included (but was not limited to) designers Brock, Chuck Pohlman, Anatole “Tony” Lapine, the brilliant Larry Shinoda, and engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, director of high-performance vehicles at Chevrolet. Arkus-Duntov earned the nickname “the father of the Corvette.” 

It was a dream they had to chase after hours, in secrecy, migrating from GM’s Head of Design Bill Mitchell’s basement Research B studio to the Hammer Room and finally landing in the legendary (and legendarily clandestine) Studio X. The C1 hadn’t reached its full racing potential, it was a relatively basic car, but there was a major roadblock in the team’s way to improving on it: following the Automotive Manufacturers Association’s ban, GM had outlawed factory-supported racing. The recession of 1958 hadn’t helped their cause much either. So Mitchell had quietly taken on the Corvette racing program on his own.

The secrecy and perseverance of the design team paid off, and their gambit was a success. Motor Trend’s Roger Huntington wrote, “This is a modern sports car. In most ways it’s as advanced as the latest dual-purpose sports/luxury cars from Europe. The new Corvette doesn’t have to take a back seat to any of them, in looks, performance, handling, or ride.” The “solid-axle” generation of the C1 had been exclusively made and sold as a convertible, but the C2, which debuted with independent rear suspension, offered two body styles, a coupe and a convertible. (Mitchell’s split rear window also made production for the 1963 model year. It caused some turmoil: although it looked cool, and is a revered feature today, it diminished rear visibility, even causing some in-period customers cut it out.)

The second generation also brought better transmission options and Chevy’s 327-cubic-inch V-8. Chevrolet continued to beef up the engine through the years, and by 1966, it introduced new big-block V-8s: As the brochure for that year boasted, “two brand-new 427-cu.-in. turbo-jet V8s cap Corvette’s quartet of engines.” The most powerful engine offered 425 horsepower. Chevrolet had also finally jettisoned drum brakes in 1965 and replaced them with “Sport-Master” discs. 

The Sting Ray design team bid farewell to the era of American “fat cars,” opting for a leaner European look. Mitchell had found inspiration at the Turin Auto Show in Italy, where he was especially impressed by the Abarth 750 Streamliner and the Zagato-bodied Alfa Disco Volante. But the final product was an unmistakably American car with a European flavor. (Duntov famously said of his Sting Ray: “For the first time, I now have a Corvette I can be proud to drive in Europe.”) In that way, the Sting Ray is not unlike the hardboiled detective: a concept with European styling transformed into an American icon.

Before the events of the first episode of Sugar, the detective has been keeping his Sting Ray in storage. He soon reunites with it. As Sugar rolls out of the garage in the Corvette, his handler Ruby tells him, “I hate that you drive this relic.” 

“Relic?” Sugar says. “This is a work of art.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post John Sugar’s Sting Ray Is Perfectly Anachronistic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The action-packed buddy-cop story trope was hugely popular in the 1980s, whether it was Crockett and Tubbs on Miami Vice, Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs., or Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. At the same time, video arcades were booming, so it only made sense for a game developer to create an experience where players got to experience the thrill of two police officers in hot pursuit. This was the concept behind 1988’s Chase H.Q., which lets you hunt down exotic sports cars on busy highways while behind the wheel of a black Porsche 928.

Chase H.Q.‘s gameplay is similar to Sega’s classic 1986 game OutRun. The camera looks downward from behind your car, providing a wide angle at other vehicles and obstacles you’re speeding past. Whereas OutRun is a point-to-point race, with the player needing to reach a goal before a countdown runs out, Chase H.Q. adds a more exciting objective by tasking players with pursuing a suspect in a sports car and bumping into them until the criminal crashes.

The developers picked some of the coolest cars from the late 1980s for these criminals to drive. In the first level, you’re chasing “Ralph, the Idaho Slasher,” who is running away in a white Lotus Esprit. Next, “Carlos, the New York armed robber,” flees in a yellow Lamborghini Countach. For stage three, “a gang of Chicago pushers are fleeing toward the suburbs” in a white Porsche 911 Turbo. The game calls the villain in stage four simply “the L.A. kidnapper,” and he appears to be driving a blue Ferrari 288 GTO. The last level is about going after an “Eastern Bloc spy from Washington” in a red Porsche 928.

Chase H.Q. doesn’t use graphics with three-dimensional polygons like most modern video games. Instead, the artists worked with two-dimensional elements called sprites, so we can only view the cars from the angles that the developers wanted us to see. Judging from what’s visible, the player seems to be driving a 928 S4. This variant debuted for the 1987 model year, while Chase H.Q. came out in the latter half of 1988.

The real-world 928 S4 boasted an upgraded version of Porsche’s 5.0-liter V-8 that made 320 hp. Exterior styling differed from its predecessor with revisions like a smoother nose and a tweaked rear bumper with flush-mounted lights. Both of these elements show up on the car in Chase H.Q. The prominent wing on the tail was another addition and is also easily visible on the vehicle in the game.

While not accurate to an actual 928 S4, the arcade game’s high- and low-speed gearshift has a button for activating a temporary turbo boost up to three times each stage. This ability is especially useful if you crash while chasing down a bad guy and need to catch up quickly.

By late-1980s standards, the driving in Chase H.Q. offers a fantastic sense of speed. There are many obstacles along the side of the road, and they move past your Porsche rapidly to give you the sense of traveling at high velocity. There’s also heavy traffic to maneuver through, so the player is seldom steering straight ahead.

Beyond the cool vehicles to pursue, Chase H.Q. has some visual and audio flourishes that add to the crime-fighting excitement. At the beginning of the first stage, you hear the engine start and emit a rumbly V-8 sound. One of the cops then says, “Giddy up, boy,” and the Porsche peels out. When you get close to the villain, the officer in the passenger seat of your 928 reaches out and puts a flashing red light on the roof. Voice clips also encourage you to smash the bad guy’s sports car.

Chase H.Q.’s period advertising to arcade operators didn’t shy away from showing the game’s inspirations. One brochure depicted a cop in a white blazer and pastel purple T-shirt who was clearly taking cues from Miami Vice’s Sonny Crockett. Another ad included officers who looked a bit like Gibson and Glover from the Lethal Weapon poster.

Chase H.Q.’s major weakness is the game’s short length. The video embedded above shows a complete play-through in just over 15 minutes, including the “attract mode” gameplay demonstration at the beginning and the end credits. I played all the way through recently, and it took me about 20 minutes while using seven continues.

Chase H.Q. spawned a sequel, S.C.I. – Special Criminal Investigation, in 1989, where the cops swapped their Porsche 928 for a Z32 Nissan 300ZX with T-tops. Rather than crashing into criminals, one of the cops stood up out of the roof and shot at the fleeing suspect’s car. The spiritual successor, Super Chase – Criminal Termination, arrived in 1993 and added a first-person driving view.

With nonstop action during the game’s limited runtime, Chase H.Q. is a must-play if you ever see it at a local arcade, especially if it has the sitdown cockpit, which provides a more immersive experience than the stand-up version. In an ideal world, pair the experience by playing the Miami Vice theme song or Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight to set the mood.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post <em>Chase H.Q.</em> Captured the Essence of the 1980s Buddy-Cop Genre appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Cadillac’s history with the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race goes back to 1950, when millionaire Briggs Swift Cunningham entered two Cadillac-based cars to take on the motoring world. Fifty years later, in 2000, and then again in 2002, Cadillac returned to Le Mans with an LMP prototype racer powered by a 4.0-liter Northstar twin-turbo V-8.

Cadillac decided to return to the Circuit de la Sarthe for the 2023 running of Le Mans, and you can go behind the scenes as the team prepares for and competes in the race, thanks to No Perfect Formula, the exciting new film that documents the journey. The film debuts Friday, May 31 at 7 pm ET on the Hagerty channel #2545 on the Samsung TV Plus app on Samsung Smart TVs.

The film opens with scenes from the 2023 race. Shots of the crowd intercut with shots of the cars as they blast through the rain, then of the Cadillac team nervously looking on; all manage to capture the visceral thrills and palpable tension. 

Then the #311 Cadillac car spins out in the rain and crashes into a barrier.

Cut to Brian Scotto, co-founder of Hoonigan, who sets the stage: “As people, we love a good story. Nobody loves the story about the team that won last year wins again. They want to hear that story of the team that upset everybody. Stories come from struggle. You gotta give people a reason to care.”

By that metric, we as viewers come to care very much through a series of interviews with many of the members of the Cadillac team. We meet Laura Wontrop Klauser, sports car racing program manager; Vince Tiaga, sports car racing regulations; Kalvin Parker, assistant program manager; Aaron Pfeifer, vehicle technical lead, and Jim Igrisan III, engine build technician, to name just a few. Putting faces to names and hearing their stories, we become invested in the team members and can’t help but cheer them on.

Other cool, behind-the-scene highlights include sitting in with Tiaga, Parker, and Pfeifer as they discuss the reasons the team chose to go with a naturally aspirated V-8 rather than a turbocharged V-6. We get to join Igrisan as he accompanies the newly assembled LMC55.R V-8 to its first test on the dyno. Exhaust headers glow fiery red as the engine roars through its test cycles. As Igrisan sums it up, “Competitors, in my mind, took the easy way out. It’s easy to make power with turbos, easier to manage power with turbos. To compete with naturally aspirated engine is pretty cool. And who’s got the best-sounding car out there?” It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Igrisan is right: The Caddy sounds terrific.

The rest of the film follows the team through the testing of the Cadillac in the fall of 2022 and then on to opening of the 2023 racing season at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, then to the 12 Hours of Sebring, and culminating in June at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. No spoilers here—whether you know how the races turned out or not, you don’t know the stories behind them. For those, you’ll have to tune in on the Hagerty channel #2545 on the Samsung TV Plus app on Samsung Smart TVs. If you don’t have a Samsung Smart TV, you can watch on Galaxy Devices, and on the web. Global audiences can view on Hagerty’s Facebook.  After its premiere, No Perfect Formula will run all night, as well as every Friday at 7 p.m. ET in the weeks leading up to the 2024 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 15–16. It’s also available on Cadillac’s YouTube channel.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post <em>No Perfect Formula</em> Showcases Cadillac’s Return to International Sports Car Racing appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Twenty-five years ago, America was introduced to James Gandolfini’s signature New Jersey sanitation man/(alleged) mobster Tony Soprano as he recounted a high-speed “collection” in his nephew’s “$60,000” Lexus to his new shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Throughout the six-season run of The Sopranos, the vehicles became nearly as big a thread in the show’s tapestry as its locations, its characters, and its human drama, with so many important moments taking place in or around motor vehicles. Over 86 episodes, the on-screen automobiles were as perfectly selected as any cast in television history.

Now, a quarter-century after the show’s debut, the cars of The Sopranos make one of the most enduring and influential shows ever produced feel like a nostalgic period piece to those of us with fond vehicular memories of the late 1990s and early/mid-2000s. So, throw on your bathrobe, grab a handful of Gabagool, and come along as we explore the automotive world of the small-screen turn-of-the-century Jersey mob!

What Tony Drove

1999 Chevrolet Suburban (GMT410)

The vehicle most readily associated with Tony Soprano is the 1999 Suburban that served as the character’s daily driver in Seasons 1–4 and ferried Gandolfini over the New Jersey Turnpike in the show’s famed opening sequence.

Mercedes-Benz SL-Class (R129 & R230)

In Season 3, Tony briefly flirts with the idea of buying a Mercedes SL to cover his extramarital pursuit of Gloria Trillo (Annabella Sciorra), a lovely but ultimately volatile car saleswoman he first met in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room. Gloria works at the real-world dealership Globe Motor Car Company, and the scenes shot there are among the series’ most car-centric.

2003 Cadillac Escalade ESV (GMT830)

The maroon eighth-gen ‘Burb will always be known as “Tony’s car,” but that truck’s luxury-oriented sibling actually closed out the show with two seasons as the family patriarch’s ride of choice. He first upgrades to a short-lived black ESV early in Season 5 before taking delivery of the pearl white 2003 that would be with him through the finale. The Escalade was driven by the late, great Super Bowl Champion Tony Siragusa throughout his four-episode cameo, and it went on to sell for $119,777 at auction in 2015.

It Was a Cadillac World

Tony’s Escalade is far from the only Caddy featured in The Sopranos. In fact, the wreath and crest could be called the official marque of the certain subculture the show is concerned with. Cadillac’s fingerprints are all over the show; they appear in flashbacks and dream sequences and are driven by almost every major character in the main arc. The brand is so ever-present that a character owning one seems like more of a rite of passage than mere possession of a luxury good.

The whole thing makes one wonder what guys like Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri would drive today if such a person could still exist in 2024. Showing up at “The Bing” in a Lyriq would likely earn someone the “Fat Vito” pool-cue treatment; a present-day “made guy” could probably make do with a Blackwing-powered CT6 Platinum or Coach Door tenth-gen Continental. (It’s hard to imagine, but could a changing auto industry also push one of the crew to accept something like a Genesis G90?) As interesting as that is to ponder, maybe it’s a topic for a future Hagerty Community According to You discussion. Let’s get into our rapid-fire section of the show’s many Cadillacs:

Classics include the 1953 Series 62 from Tony’s lucid food-poisoned and test dreams; 1966 and 1968 DeVille convertibles driven by Tony’s dad, Johnny Boy, in recollections from Tony’s childhood; and the 1958 Series 62 convertible that Tony’s dad and Uncle Junior posed in front of long before our protagonist’s time. After getting out of jail in Season 5, Robert Loggia’s character, Feech LaManna, is seen driving a droptop 1975 Fleetwood Eldorado with Tony’s cousin, Tony (Steve Buscemi), who would keep the car in the show on a regular basis through the season after Feech is incarcerated.

The DeVille and rebranded DTS make up the bulk of the modern Cadillacs in the series, with multiple members of Tony’s crew regularly seen in the biggest Caddy sedan of the show’s era. Most notably, these include the 1996 and 2000 of Salvatore Bompensiero fame, Paulie’s ‘97, and examples from 2000 driven by Vito and Furio. After Paulie’s DeVille inexplicably goes missing in the top-rated episode “Pine Barrens,” he picks up a ’97 Eldorado ETC followed by a first-gen CTS, all in his favored shades of gold and beige, while Tony’s consigliere, Silvio, shows a preference for the Seville/STS.

The Moltisanti Kid

The undisputed car guy of the series—in a new money/rock star sense of the word, where vehicles are an extension of his wardrobe and the ultimate expression of wealth and taste but not necessarily something desired by the driving enthusiast—is Tony’s nephew, Christopher Moltisanti, played to perfection by Michael Imperioli. He starts the series with the previously alluded-to Lexus LS400, before acquiring a 1999 Mercedes-Benz CLK430 Lorinser and a 2000 Range Rover 4.6 HSE in rapid succession.

In Season 5, Chris drives a Hummer H2, the quintessential status vehicle of the early 2000s. Between having his Range Rover stolen and showing up in the H2, Chris is briefly seen in a tenth-generation Pontiac Bonneville GXP; that’s the one with the Northstar V-8, not the tried-and-true supercharged 3.8-liter V-6. At different points in the series, “Chrissie” also takes sports cars off of people either as partial payment for debt or to help them out when they are experiencing the cash flow issues commonly associated with getting incarcerated. The former situation scored him a BMW Z3, which was presumably sold or chopped, as it isn’t seen again, and the latter got him the keys to Johnny Sack’s prize Maserati, which is the only Italian vehicle prominently featured in the series, interestingly.

Chris finishes out the series by joining the Cadillac club with a 2007 Escalade EXT, and adjacent to Moltisanti, we also had the resurrected Ford Thunderbird that he bought his fiancée, Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo), before eventually abandoning it in long-term parking at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Other Star Cars

For the majority of the series, our female lead and Tony’s long-suffering wife, Carmela Soprano, can be seen in an S210 Mercedes-Benz E320 wagon. Just in time for the final season, Tony buys her a Porsche Cayenne—like the pepper. Uncle Junior drives a ’64 Lincoln Continental in flashbacks. When it comes to his kids, Meadow and Anthony Jr., Tony proves to be a bit of a Nissan fan. In season two, he takes an R50 Pathfinder off of Liquid Metal, of Terminator 2 fame. After taking delivery, Tony tries to gift it to Mead, only for the whole thing to blow up in his face—you try to do something nice for people! A couple of seasons later, when A.J. is of driving age and going through the process of becoming one of the series’ most maddening characters, Tony brings home a 2002+ first-generation Xterra to use as a carrot to get A.J. to try harder in school. As the show progresses, A.J.’s ride suddenly morphs into a second-gen—the producers probably thought we wouldn’t notice!

As early as the show’s second episode, we see cars as plot devices. When A.J.’s science teacher, Mr. Miller, has his Saturn SL1 stolen and, unbeknownst to him, torn to pieces at a chop shop, Tony’s guys boost him a new one to earn his underachieving kid some brownie points. When the car is mysteriously “returned” to the school parking lot, Miller’s keys don’t work, and the paint seems a little wet; it’s the weirdest thing! In season three, an early storyline features a character so tied to his ride that he’s literally known as “Mustang Sally.” His Green ’91 Fox-body makes a big impression, but it is unfortunate that it has to associate with Sally, who is a deeply and immediately unlikable sort. 

It’s a testament to the versatility of the automobile that cars also make for memorable set pieces. A few notable examples of this include the Silver Cloud from Allegra Sack’s wedding, the Willys Jeep in the boosted load of WWII collectibles, the Grand Wagoneer that the newly sympathetic Vito rear-ends to remind us that he isn’t a great guy before his brutal—but mostly offscreen—demise, and the 5/8ths-scale Legends Fords buzzing around in the track scene.

We’ll close with America’s Sports Car, of which three generations appear on screen. After a black facelifted C4 convertible briefly appears on a college visit, its C5 twin is seen out front in a frequently used exterior shot of the show’s premier exotic dancing establishment—a subtle but hilarious jab that hits home with anyone who’s ever been to a Corvette club meeting and can picture the exact member of their club who personifies “that guy.”

If you thought The Sopranos did the Corvette dirty with that C5 joke, the show more than makes up for it by attaching a C6 to the best success/redemption story of its entire run: Angie Bompensiero. After Angie’s husband “disappears,” she’s initially portrayed as a helpless grieving widow who even comes to Tony for help paying her bills. In time, though, she picks herself up and goes into business for herself. Angie’s body shop is a significant player in the show when overly difficult New York higher-up Phil Leotardo’s Continental-kitted Lincoln Town Car needs repair. The business is portrayed as barely scraping by until Carmela shows Angie the Cayenne that Tony bought her, and she responds that she thought about a Boxster, but the Le Mans Blue LS2-powered ‘Vette just felt more “her,” with a light air of self-satisfaction that makes Carm think twice about her own situation. 

The world of The Sopranos revolves around the automobile, and nearly every episode features a car that matches its driver or scene perfectly. The best part is that, outside of a few classics, all four-wheeled former status symbols featured in the show two decades ago can be had on the cheap these days, and almost anyone can roll like Tony, Chris, Paulie, and Sil for a song.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Cars of <em>The Sopranos</em> appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Muscle car values went through the roof in the early 2000s, riding high on the hog of a U.S. housing bubble that saw non-stop construction put a lot of money in the pockets of ordinary Joes who happened to be successful in their trade. A lot of those folks bought dream cars. A lot of those dream cars had stonking Detroit V-8s underhood. And a lot of those V-8 dream cars changed hands at Barrett-Jackson auctions. Suddenly, people were paying six figures for Chevelles and GTOs. The bottom fell out from 2007 to ’09, and some sanity returned to the market, but not before the absolute darlings of the day, 1970–71 Hemi Cuda convertibles (just 21 were built over the two years), had cruised past $2 million for the very best. Today, they still occupy rarefied air in the muscle market.

This week, one such rare Cuda falls into the capable hands of Jay Leno, when he is joined by a 1970 in Plum Crazy and its owner, Craig Jackson, who is the chairman and CEO of Barrett-Jackson Auction Company.

The two discuss Barrett-Jackson’s premier auction each January in Arizona, which Leno calls the “Super Bowl of car events,” before getting into the specifics of Jackson’s Cuda, which he has owned since 1999. Jackson says he hunted for the right one for a long time. “When I saw this one, it checked every box,” he says. He reckons he paid “a little over a hundred grand” for it, which was not cheap in 1999, but far from where these cars were headed.

The car has a unique history as the only 1970 Hemi Cuda convertible export. After a period spent in England, the original 426 V-8 was replaced with a 318 as a way to make it more of a fuel-sipper during the dark days of the mid-’70s fuel crisis. Go figure.

After some back and forth about the way the Cuda stacks up to modern Mopar muscle, Leno and Jackson hit the road to let that Hemi breathe and continue a great conversation about a variety of cars that keep this hobby humming.

The post Jay Leno Goes Plum Crazy for Craig Jackson’s Hemi Cuda Convertible appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The new Maserati MC20 GT2 is very cool, very new, and Henry Catchpole has driven it.

What’s more, it just might spawn a road car to rival a Porsche 911 GT3 RS. For the moment it is the freshest entrant to the Fanatic GT2 race series, competing against cars such as the Lamborghini Huracan, Audi R8, Mercedes-AMG GT and KTM X-Bow as well as a Porsche 911, obviously. It is also the successor to the legendary MC12 Corse.

With the same 621bhp, turbocharged Nettuno V-6 as the Maserati MC20 street car, the GT2 version is definitely not lacking in performance, but it is also intended to be more approachable than a GT3 car. Catchpole reports that it is designed to be approachable for an amateur as well as incredibly quick in the hands of a professional. To put this to the test, Catchpole was given eight laps to get as close as possible to the time of Maserati’s multiple championship-winning test and development driver, Andrea Bertolini.

Just to add to the pressure, the track is the Autodromo di Modena, a circuit that Catchpole has never driven before. And he had to talk to camera while driving. And, if you just turn to page 439 of the BIG Book of Racing Driver Excuses, you’ll know that a brioche for breakfast makes you slower. Thankfully, the MC20 GT2 has both adjustable ABS and traction control to lend a hand, and the secondary controls were all laid out according to the teachings of a certain Michael Schumacher.

The bodywork is carbon fiber but the brakes are steel. The GT2 category doesn’t prioritise aero like a GT3 car, but nonetheless it will generate over 1,000kg of downforce with its splitter, wing, diffuser and flat floor. The gearbox is still paddle-operated, but the ratios are in a six-speed sequential rather than a dual clutch ‘box. The dihedral doors remain from the road car and the GT2 can also be fitted with a second seat, to allow for training (or just very fun passenger rides). Catchpole shares that all in all, the MC20 GT2 is quite the balanced package.

So, how did Catchpole’s times fare against Bertolini’s? Not too bad, and the two shared a debrief to understand where our man could make up some time. See how he did in the video above.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post <em>The Driver’s Seat:</em> Henry Catchpole drives the Maserati MC20 GT2 appeared first on Hagerty Media.

On a Friday night in December of 1988, families all across Canada and the U.S. gathered in front of the television to see what scrapes everyone’s favorite gadget-building action star was going to get into this week. MacGyver! He of the feathered mullet, selection of vests, and ever-present Swiss Army Knife, always able to jury-rig a clever solution to any problem, and despite the danger, never using a gun.

This particular week, in an episode called “Collision Course,” MacGyver would find himself taking over driving duties in a race-prepped Pontiac Firebird after shadowy saboteurs hamstring an old friend who was supposed to drive it. But behind the TV make-believe, the backdrop was a real race track with real race cars—and one of them was raced by the real MacGyver.

The track was British Columbia’s Westwood Motorsport Park, the actor who played MacGyver was, of course, Richard Dean Anderson, and the racing machine he competed in was a third-generation Chevrolet Camaro. Specifically, it was a special road-legal, road-registered, factory-supported machine with a bunch of improvements to make it better suited for track use. He raced in the Player’s LTD/GM Motorsport Series, which featured Camaros and Firebirds battling it out in fields that averaged fifty cars, with occasionally as many as seventy.

“The sound alone was worth the price of admission,” says Michael Zbarsky, who owns a special one of these factory-prepped Camaros and remembers watching the series at Westwood as a kid. “Those guys didn’t hold back at all.”

Before diving into the racing, a little thumbnail sketch of 1980s television history is in order. A cultural icon right out of the gate, the MacGyver series regularly drew close to ten million viewers at the height of its popularity—for modern context, that’s about what HBO’s Game of Thrones did in its original run. In contrast with the more shoot-’em-up feel of 1980s action movies and television, MacGyver bordered on the cerebral, with the big hook being what kind of contraption made of household items the star was going to slap together this week. In terms of lasting effects, the show spawned reboots and parodies, and even entered the lexicon: found in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1992, MacGyver is a verb meaning, “to construct, fix, or modify (something) in an improvised or inventive way, typically by making use of whatever items are at hand.” Sounds like the kind of thing the owner of a British car would naturally be good at.

Coincidentally, Zbarsky comes from MG-owning stock, with his father Ralph owning and racing several interesting MGs, including an MGB GT campaigned by Paddy Hopkirk at Sebring and the Targa Florio. Initially, the apple did not fall far from the tree, with the younger Zbarsky campaigning a 1953 MGA racing machine on the west coast. But he never forgot the thunder of small-block Chevy V-8s hurtling in a pack around Westwood.

Long supplanted by housing developments on Eagle Mountain in Coquitlam, Westwood Motorsport Park is a much-missed piece of grassroots motorsport history. It was built in the late 1950s by the Sports Car Club of British Columbia, created through the sale of debentures to members and through the work of volunteers who cleared brush and carved a challenging 1.8 mile course into the landscape. At its inaugural race, it bore the distinction of being Canada’s first purpose-built tarmac racetrack.

Over the years, Westwood saw plenty of stars compete there—names like Rosberg, Villeneuve, Andretti, and McLaren. But it was at heart a place where an ordinary enthusiast could square off against others driving modestly-powered British sportscars, taking part for the sheer delight of speed. Then, a ground-pounding V-8 series showed up. Always looking for a way to promote its brand, GM Canada soon hit on the idea of a one-make series (fine, two-make if you’re a Pontiac purist) that would provide plenty of excitement with cars within financial reach of the fans.

Third-generation Camaros first competed in several places in the US and Canada in showroom stock form in the mid-1980s, but repeated hot laps soon showed some deficiencies in the platform. GM developed the now well-known 1LE package, which solved most of the problems by adding baffles in the fuel tanks, tweaks to the suspension, an engine oil cooler, Corvette-style brakes, and a higher-flow exhaust.

GM Canada went even further, building on the 1LE platform with the A4Q, A4U, and R7U order codes. There are some variations, but the additional options included features like power windows (actually a mild weight savings), racing-specific power-steering, and retuned rear dampers. Perhaps most impressively, each car received a hand-built, blueprinted V-8, complete with tamper markings. Power for this generation of Camaro wasn’t huge—it was factory-rated around 220 hp, probably more in the racing-prepped machines—but the V-8s sounded great and the level playing field made for intense racing. If you’re thinking this sounds like Spec Miata with a mullet, you’re not far off. GM built roughly 100 Player’s LTD-spec cars per year over the seasons, for a total of just under 500.

Terry Craig, who operated Airborne Racing, ordered two racing Camaros and one Firebird through local BC dealer Dueck GM for the 1988 season. Craig’s brother Murray drove the Firebird, and Richard Dean Anderson drove one of the two Camaros that season.

Anderson appears to have fit right in as a racer. In a tv interview, he humbly walks through one of his laps at the race circuit in Calgary (his name appears on the car’s dash as “Rick Anderson” in the in-car footage), joking when he had trouble with the monitor, “Sure, MacGyver can’t get this thing to work.”

The Firebird of the trio ended up playing the hero car in the Collision Course episode, with one of the Camaros (driven by Terry) standing in for long shots of the villain car. GM fans will have a field day noting when the interior shots between the two cars are conflated.

Back in the real world, a fresh R7U car was ordered for the 1989 season, but Anderson ended up sitting out that year. Meanwhile, the two Camaros and the Firebird from the ’88 season found their way into the used car market. The rules of the series dictated that these machines be insurable, street-legal cars, and as a result many of the Player’s race cars were consigned to road use once their competitive days were done.

Zbarsky found himself half-seriously looking for a replacement for his MGA about ten years ago, and stumbled across this example listed locally. Tipped off by some clues, he identified it as one of the fairly rare Player’s cars, and with a little more research—thanks to some help from Craig himself, he was able to determine that it was one of the two cars run during the season when MacGyver was racing. Even with logbooks, it’s hard to determine which of the twin cars it is, so Zbarsky is careful to make an absolute claim. But, with the way racing works, it’s likely that Anderson at least ran this car around a circuit or two for warmup or qualifying laps.

Today, Zbarsky races his Camaro at Mission Raceway Park in British Columbia, and down in Washington State. And as it’s a street-legal car, he’ll often take it out for a spin on the roads around his home on Vancouver Island. He’ll freely admit that at the vintage races, the built 500-600 hp V-8s will run away from him. But it’s still a joy to pilot, and the power level is just right for street cruising.

And, of course, should he ever find himself stranded on the side of the road on one of these drives, then there’s only one hero to turn to for inspiration. It’s the lesson many a gearhead learned long ago: all you need to keep going is a Swiss Army Knife, maybe some duct tape, and a bit of ingenuity.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post When MacGyver Raced a Camaro appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s always fun to look back a decade or two and survey the automotive industry landscape with the added perspective afforded by the passing of time. Often, these exercises remind us that despite whatever today’s CEOs are spouting off at their keynote speeches in Davos, the challenges facing the auto industry don’t look all that different through the years.

Case in point: this Retro Review from Motorweek, discussing the then-brand-new Lexus GX 470. At the film’s opening, charismatic host John Davis drops the famous Field of Dreams line, “If you build it, they will come” as he talks about the situation facing the GX upon its debut. Faced with an unprecedented array of choices in the luxury SUV market, would Lexus’ decision to toss another hat in the ring prove intelligent or cannibalistic?

That question sounds familiar—the 2024 GX 550 faces similar inquiries today. With the addition of the TX unibody crossover and the company’s decision to mount the GX and the LX on the same body-on-frame TNGA-F platform, it initially seemed to us that three three-row luxury offerings from one automaker might be too much. Having now driven the GX 550, the LX 600, and the TX350, we can say that there are enough differences between the three to allow each one to carve out its own market niche.

Back to the Retro Review in question. Aside from the market conditions, it’s also enjoyable to simply look at how far a single model such as the GX has come in its lifetime. In 2003, the GX’s 4.7-liter V-8 made 235 hp and 320 lb-t of torque. Today’s model manages 114 more ponies and 159 more lb-ft from a twin-turbo V-6 with just 3.4 liters of displacement.

Even more interesting to me is the discussion around the older model’s off-road abilities. Davis talks about the full-time four-wheel-drive system and how it’s plenty capable off-road as you see the rear end of the GX 470 bounce over some rocky terrain. But note those fixed running boards—in the first and second generations of the GX, Lexus still made concessions to on-road comfort. The new generation, particularly with the Overtrail and Overtrail+ models, can finally place off-road capability at the forefront of its selling proposition. (Even if, like the older ones, most of them will probably see road-going duties for most of their lifespan.)

At the end of the short review, Davis notes that Lexus was hoping to crest the 20,000 unit annual sales mark. A quick Google search shows that the 2003 model year covered that objective handily, moving over 30,000 examples of the luxo-ute. Beating estimates by 50 percent was a serious win, and it proved that Lexus had a compelling formula in its hands.

The new model, by retaining its body-on-frame construction, would appear even more outdated in today’s market than its predecessor did over 20 years ago. Car-like SUVs were already gaining traction back in the early 2000s, but today, they’re a dime a dozen. But with the uptick in interest around off-roading and the clear advantages that this chassis design offers, the new GX might be positioned even better today. Lexus hopes to clear 33,000 units in the first full year of sales, and despite tougher economic headwinds, we think that number is plenty doable.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How the First-Generation Lexus GX Blazed a Trail for the Current Model appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It is 1986. Somewhere, on an unrestricted section of German autobahn, the speedometer of a BMW 5-Series clicks upward, hurtling toward maximum. Inside, two young computer programmers chatter excitedly as the revs rise, the top speed modest by European standards, but double the highest limits in their native Japan. There’s no ticking clock, no announcer shouting “Checkpoint!” But at the wheel is a renegade gearhead and Sega employee, and he’s in the process of creating one of the greatest driving games of all time: OutRun.

Note carefully: that’s driving game, not racing game. Released in 1986 to become almost instantly the most popular arcade game in the world, Sega’s OutRun was all about the feel of driving at high speed, rather than competing against rivals. At the wheel of their own convertible Testarossas, thousands of kids poured in quarter after quarter chasing that thrill.

Ferrari’s Testarossa is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and it has long been a staple 1980s poster car, rivaled only by the Countach. The most famous example has to be the white 1986 Testarossa that first showed up in the third season of Miami Vice. But the runner up, and arguably more important to a generation, was OutRun’s digitized Testarossa, and its Ferrari roots run deeper than you expect.

First, an introduction is needed to the Sega employee at the wheel of that BMW 520i. His name is Yu Suzuki, and his influence on video game design over the decades is so vast as to have his Virtua Fighter—one of the first games to use 3D characters—enshrined in the Smithsonian as the only video game on permanent display. But from the very beginning, he never had an interest in playing video games.

“The reason I started making games is I joined a video game company,” Suzuki told Eurogamer in 2015. “That’s it! It’s not like I wanted to be a game designer. I just entered the game company.”

That company was Sega, and Suzuki was about to hand it the first of a series of hit games. After successfully launching a boxing game, he turned his focus on pushing the limits of technology to create a gaming experience faithful to his love of motorcycles. At the time, Suzuki was mostly interested in motocross and Dakar, but he had expanded into watching circuit racing thanks to the success of American racer Freddie Spencer.

Spencer, who was born in Louisiana, started racing for Honda in the late 1970s, and gave the company its first superbike win in 1980. In 1983, he rode a viciously quick two-stroke Honda NS500 to the 500cc Grand Prix world championship, becoming the youngest-ever rider to do so (Marc Márquez would break this record, but not for three decades). The success of a Japanese motorcycle maker on the world stage came with an explosion of growth in new fans of the sport at home in Japan. Suzuki was among them.

His breakthrough arcade cabinet game was called Hang-On, and it was the first of Sega’s “taikan” games. These were a series of games with hydraulically activated controls, where the cabinet would actually move—action not just on-screen, but in real life. In the case of Hang-On, riders sat on a scale-sized motorcycle and leaned into the turns displayed on a screen in front of the handlebars.

Launched in three styles (a rideable bike plus two simplified versions with just handlebars), Hang-On was projected to sell a few thousand units. Instead, it exceeded expectations by four times, and became Sega’s bestseller. Obviously Sega executives wanted Suzuki to make lightning strike twice. He did, and then some.

Originally, the concept behind OutRun was 1976’s Cannonball Run. Suzuki’s plan was to head to the U.S. and drive from California to Florida, noting the terrain he passed through on the way. Instead, Sega sent him to Europe, along with a superior to keep an eye on things, and a video camera to capture the trip.

In that rented BMW, Suzuki and his project manager, Youji Ishi, started out from Frankfurt with no firm directive other than a need to depart from Rome for Japan in three weeks. They drove Germany’s Romantic Road through Bavaria, crossed into France, traveled through Chamonix to Nice and then Monaco.

And it was there, in Monte Carlo, that Suzuki found his hero car. After driving the F1 course, he stumbled across a street-parked Testarossa and instantly knew that this was the perfect fit for his game. On return to Japan, he and a small team of artists tracked down one there and photographed it exhaustively for reference.

All this effort to create a series of pixelated sprites may seem overkill, but game designers were pitting their imagination against the limits of technology at the time. Suzuki wanted the feel of high-speed driving to be as accurate as possible, and the exotic shape of the Testarossa would set things off.

OutRun was released in September 1986. By 1987, it was the highest-grossing arcade game in the world, and Sega’s best-ever performer for the entire decade.

In the game, which features a style influenced by digital artist Hiroshi Nagai, players start off on a California-style stage, just as Suzuki had initially planned for his trip. The terrain then transitions to a more European look, heavily based upon the Romantic Road. Tires screech as the terrain rolls and the scenery blurs past. It’s hardly a simulator, but it’s still a thrill to play even now.

With two knockout hits under his belt, Suzuki was a rockstar at Sega. This was handy, as he was hardly a corporate drone, not the kind to keep to early morning starts and a regimented work week. He formed his own sub-studio, called AM2, away from Sega’s main offices, and he was known for keeping night-owl hours.

Suzuki’s success through the 1980s and 1990s and beyond extended to the point that he was able to buy his own Ferrari, to add to the Ducati and Hayabusa motorcycles he kept in his garage. It wasn’t a Testarossa, but a F355, one of the best-looking cars Maranello ever made.

He would go on to use it to develop another standout automotive arcade game, 1999’s F355 Challenge. This racer was a lot more hardcore simulator than lighthearted OutRun, and it was developed with on-track data collected in Suzuki’s own F355. There are rumors that then-Ferrari F1 racer Rubens Barrichello was so impressed by the game’s accuracy that he even used it to practice a little.

In addition to titles like Daytona and Virtua Racer, F355 Challenge and OutRun cement Yu Suzuki as one of the greatest automotive video game designers of all time, which is to say nothing of the best-selling games in other genres he created. He still says he doesn’t have much time for actually playing games, despite enjoying the work of designing them. He’d rather be riding or driving for real.

But because he tried to make OutRun feel authentic to his genuine passions, Suzuki gave many a kid their first taste of driving freedom. Maybe that kid never grew up to be able to afford a Testarossa, but perhaps an old Alfa Romeo wasn’t entirely out of reach.

So, grab your keys, because that clock never stops ticking. Get out there and hit those checkpoints.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post A Gearhead Programmer, an Epic European Road Trip, and the Creation of <em>OutRun</em> appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Unless you’re rolling it out of a trailer for two car shows a year, the life of your hobby car is probably going to involve some tough run-ins with dirt, grime, and other detritus that are all but inescapable in everyday life. Add in nearly four decades of slumber in a dusty barn, and things go to a whole other level.

The barn-find DeTomaso Pantera that Tom Cotter discovered in North Carolina a while back has been getting quite the second shot at life. Davin and his merry band of wizards breathed new life into the Ford 351 Cleveland V-8 in the latest edition of our famous Redline Rebuild series, but the goal was never just to freshen up the motor. We wanted to put this Pantera back on the road, looking as good as it did the day it rolled off the assembly line.

That’s where cryoblasting (the cool-kid term for dry-ice blasting) comes in. The relatively new method of car detailing involves using little pellets of dry ice to blast away debris and dirt that have been caked on over years of use. Think of the materials that even the best power washers can’t touch without risking the finish of what’s underneath.

Tom takes the engineless Pantera to Jared Friends of Merritt Motors, a specialty dealer out of Kannapolis, North Carolina, that offers dry-ice blasting as well. As Jared explains it, despite being relatively new to the automotive world, cryoblasting has been around for a few decades in the manufacturing and food service industries. “[It’s used] to clean any surface where you don’t want to damage the substrate underneath,” explains Friends.

Dry-ice blasting has a far more exacting level of cleaning capability than blasting with another media like sand or walnut shells would, he says. In the case of the Pantera, Tom is hoping to see the original undercoating remain intact, but also to see all of the dirt and grime that’s worked its way into said undercoating removed. As Jared shows Tom, the pressure and particle size are both highly customizable, depending on the application and the desired outcome.

Watching Jared and his colleagues work is downright mesmerizing. You can see the gun turn the surface white temporarily, as the dry ice freezes everything it touches. Then, as it evaporates, what’s left is a dirt-free surface that still has the factory undercoating intact—just like Tom had hoped.

Perhaps most impressively, the process seems relatively surface-agnostic. Whether Jared and his crew were spraying steel on the frame, body panels, exposed mechanical components, or wires and rubber grommets, the cryoblasting has no trouble removing half a century of build-up.

Just before the halfway point in the video, the team pauses to do a side-by-side comparison between the treated areas and the untreated areas. The difference is astonishing; Tom is completely blown away. By the time the crew is finished, the Pantera looks nearly as good as new. In fact, the finish is so solid that Tom and Kyle, Jared’s associate, are analyzing the quality of the application of the original factory undercoating in areas, noticing inconsistencies with the way the Italian assembly workers treated areas on the Pantera.

On the second day, Tom and the car’s owner, Brian Cotter, get a chance to try their hand at the cryoblasting process. Both are amazed at how straightforward the application is. Before long, they’re both having a great time blasting away at the built-up grime. Eventually the transmission gets the same treatment, taking the gearbox back to near-as-new. Even the interior panels get touched up.

“It’s going to be so nice to work on,” says Tom. “It’s oddly satisfying to use the machine,” agrees Brian. “It’s remarkable the amount of different materials you can clean up with this process.”

We couldn’t agree more. Check out the full transformation by watching the video below.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Cryoblasting Our Barn-Find Pantera Made It Look Like New appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not invent the modern mystery—that’d be Edgar Allen Poe—but he did create the genre’s most beloved character. Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, first appeared before the turn of the twentieth century, and he has since become so interwoven with popular culture as to have his name crop up in a rather rude phrase when someone says something obvious (you know what it is, Sherlock, I just can’t print it here). He has appeared in tens of thousands of adaptations, from the theater to television, to say nothing of the other characters he inspired, ranging from a cartoon mouse to a very grumpy physician. But there is a case yet to be solved: What kind of motorcycle did Sherlock Holmes ride?

And yes, he would surely have had a motorcycle. His arrival in 1887’s A Study In Scarlet neatly lines up with the debut of the Daimler-Maybach Reitwagen, an early prototype motorcycle, just two years before. And, although Doyle killed off his popular detective one year before the first series production motorcycle emerged – the 1894 Hildebrant & Wolfmüller – he was brought back by popular demand and the last story was published in 1927. Watson, the game is afoot!

Our first clue, and indeed the entire reason for this thought experiment, concerns the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Because the only thing the most famous detective novelist of all time liked more than getting hoodwinked by spiritualists was riding motorcycles. He was an early adopter, and was filled with such enthusiasm for two-wheeled transportation that he financed his own motorcycle company and took place in hillclimbs.

Racing around on juddering early motorcycles seems a little at odds with Sir Arthur’s later public persona, which has a whiff of tweedy walrus about it. But in the early 1900s, he was just into his 40s and joined one of England’s earliest auto-cycle clubs. The company he financed was Roc of Birmingham, which built bikes right up until the Great War.

Using some inductive reasoning, we can thus uncover our first fact: As a booster of the domestic industry, the creator of Sherlock Holmes would have chosen a British steed for his hero to ride. It might even have been tempting for Sir Arthur to place Holmes on a Roc. However, our modern understanding of Sherlock was not shaped by Conan Doyle alone.

Enter the actor and playwright who portrayed Sherlock Holmes almost more times than any other—and it is not, as you perhaps assume, Basil Rathbone. Rathbone did quite well, playing Sherlock Holmes first in 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, and going on to appear in some 14 movies. With respect, those are rookie numbers, because Connecticut-born William Gillette portrayed Holmes some 1300 times over 33 years.

If you’ve ever watched a Sherlock Holmes movie or TV series, then you have Gillette to thank for it, because he was instrumental in both resurrecting Holmes and bringing him to the stage. Born in 1853, he was nearly the same age as Conan Doyle, and was an established and respected playwright when he was approached in 1899 to help adapt a draft play written by Sir Arthur. Incredibly, both the original and Gillette’s adaptation were destroyed in a hotel fire, and he re-wrote the entire thing in just a month.

When he met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the first time, Gillette was dressed as Sherlock, cape to deerstalker hat. Doyle was stunned until Gillette approached, whipped out a magnifying glass, and declared, “Unquestionably an author!” The pair became longtime friends.

Gillette is credited with adding or popularizing some of the classic Holmes characteristics, including the deerstalker hat, the curved pipe, the magnifying glass, and even the phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Two other actors would beat his number of stage appearances eventually, but they were acting in the play he wrote.

And, like Conan Doyle, William Gillette was also a committed and enthusiastic motorcyclist. Widowed in 1888 (he never remarried) he lived in a sprawling Connecticut mansion called Gillette Castle with up to 17 cats and several bikes. Thanks to official traffic records, we know that he crashed twice, once on a rare American Ner-a-car feet-forward bike, at the age of 72. He survived this crash and even talked his way out of a ticket with a quip: “To be reckless is to be thoughtless and I never thought so quick in my life.”

But, fellow sleuths, it was Gillette’s other motorcycle that is the key to our mystery. Because it was a Triumph, and that’s the little clue that’ll crack this case wide open.

Triumph is currently the UK’s largest motorcycle manufacturer, and its roots stretch back to 1902. In fact, the company’s first in-house–designed bike, the 1905 Triumph Gentleman’s Roadster, exactly coincides with the launch of Doyle’s short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Some of you will now point out that, by canon, the Holmes adventures are still set in late 1800s, even after his death, disappearance, and resurrection. However, we have the examples of Gillette and Doyle, both born in the 1850s, and riding right into the early part of the 20th century—in Gillette’s case, even into the 1930s.

Further, if we fast-forward to more modern representations of Holmes and switch to deductive reasoning, the Triumph theory holds up. In the popular and well-rated BBC reboot Sherlock, the titular character rides a Triumph Thruxton 1200R, albeit briefly. Further, the actor who plays Sherlock, Benesnickt Cambersnoot, er, Bendercatch Bumperclutch—oh, you know who I mean—is also known to ride a motorcycle around London.

And in one of America’s best-loved twists on the Sherlock Holmes story, House M.D., Gregory House famously rides a Honda CBR1000R Fireblade in Repsol livery. Aha! You say, but that’s a Honda, not a Triumph. But Oxford-born Hugh Laurie’s American accent isn’t real, either. And what did Laurie buy with his first paycheque from House, M.D.? A new Triumph Bonneville.

Elementary, my dear Watsons. Of course, what kind of Triumph motorcycle Holmes bought for puttering around the Sussex Downs in his retirement is up to you. Perhaps a slightly later model with a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gearbox. But almost certainly there would be days when Sherlock Holmes would head on out to the shed early to bolt on a wicker sidecar, give the kickstarter a firm stomp, and then ride over to the local train station, there to pickup his longtime friend Watson for one more ride together.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post The Case of Sherlock Holmes’ Motorcycle appeared first on Hagerty Media.

When the Plymouth Prowler debuted in 1997, it was, as we said in this year’s Bull Market List, “one of the strangest fun cars ever to make it to the showroom floor.” As a modern throwback to hot-rodding’s postwar heyday, however, it was just about perfect. Just about.

“It could have been great if it had just had a better powertrain, but they were so out of money by the time they reached production they had to go with off-the-shelf parts.” So says Jay Leno on this week’s episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, where the subject is, you guessed it, the Prowler.

Jay is joined by automotive stylist, hot-rodder, Hagerty YouTube host, and former Overhaulin’ star Chip Foose, who, almost as an afterthought, played a key role in the Prowler’s genesis. One day while he was a student at Art Center, a team of Chrysler designers came to the school and asked students to develop a niche-market vehicle as an exercise. Foose not only gave them what they asked for, he gave them what he believed they should have been asking for.

“When I was a student at Art Center,” Foose says, “if you were drawing hot rods or muscle cars, it was very frowned upon. They wanted you to only focus on the future of automobile design. But I was a hot rodder…”

Foose gave them a handful of proposals “based on what they wanted.” Then he did a second batch of proposals, “at home so nobody would get upset,” based on hot rods and muscle cars. Tom Gale, who was then head of design at Chrysler, was intrigued and wanted to know more. “I’m catering to customers that already exist,” Foose told him, the people out there with hot rods and muscle cars who want to be able to use them on a daily basis. “We can go back and grab from forms that were fantastic in the past and evolve them into something new.” Foose says.

And that’s essentially what happened. Gale instructed Foose to refine his sketches and develop a model, and though that model theoretically had a Hemi mounted amidships, the roadster that saw production was no less striking. It did, unfortunately, lack the Hemi. In the middle or up front. Instead, power comes from a fairly humdrum 3.5-liter V-6 making 253 hp, which is mated to an automatic transmission. Manuals were never part of the plan, sadly.

No one, it seems, was excited by that aspect of the Prowler. “You’ve designed this outside to look like a hot rod,” Foose tells Leno, “but it’s Grandma’s car. It just didn’t go together.”

Still, despite its all brakes no gas underpinnings, the Prowler was ahead of its time in other ways; namely, in the use of structural bonding, the use of previously unheard-of 20-inch wheels, and the widespread use of aluminum throughout the car, including the body panels. Body panels, we’ll say, that have aged gracefully. Even today, the Prowler still turns heads, looking no less wild in 2024 than it did in 1997. That it got built at all is a testament to the bravery of Chrysler at that time, led by the venerable Bob Lutz. “It was so unbelievable that Chrysler Corporation would build this car,” Leno says.

He’s not wrong.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Chip Foose Joins Leno to Prowl around in the Most Un-Plymouth Car of All Time appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The ties between rock ‘n roll and automotive culture date back to their respective origins. In the years after World War II, returning servicemen began repurposing surplus materiel into high-speed racers, while also hopping up tamer fare for hot rod street performance. At the same time, a new and vibrant youth culture coalesced around a musical fusion of pop and R&B. The movement quickly replaced the lighter instrumental fare that had, until that point, dominated music charts.

The marriage of rock and chrome through the 1950s and 1960s has been chronicled by all manner of popular media (including Hagerty) not to mention in the lyrics of the era’s own songs. Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, and Jan & Dan led the way with name-checks on their favorite models, their drag racing exploits, and their back-seat maneuvers. While much has been made of the artistic impact that gasoline and gears have had on the music industry, there was also meaningful creative cross-pollination creatively in the other direction. I’m speaking specifically about guitars shaped by cars and car culture in the ’50s and ’60s.

Instrument manufacturers Fender, Gibson, and Gretsch—makers of some of the most iconic guitar and bass designs of that era—borrowed their product nomenclature from what young people were racing (or admiring) on the street. Music shops and bandstands filled up with axes with names like Mustang, Jaguar, Thunderbird, and Toronado.

It wasn’t just names, either. In fact, if you look closely enough at what rock and roll heroes were playing on stage, you might notice that nearly the entire color palette of early rock and roll instrumentation draws from the paint booths of the Motor City’s car factories.

When you think of 1950s and 1960s rock and roll performers—assuming your memories aren’t fixated on the early black-and-white broadcasts of the day—the paint schemes slathered over guitars, drum kits, keyboards, and really popped in vibrant colors. Robin’s Egg blues mixed with fuchsia, searing lime greens, and deep metal-flaked reds in a celebration of the contemporary fascination with advances in industrial chemistry and the dyes and pigments that it delivered.

These bright hues were a match for the equally splendiferous cars busy peacocking up and down the boulevards of America’s cities and towns. It was an era of optimism, represented in expressive colors that today seem stunning compared with the dour, monotone palettes in dealer showrooms. Automakers of the ’50s and ’60s made it a point to provide as many custom and curious colors as possible for their wares to stand out in a cutthroat business.

Chemical Clues, Custom Colors

Paint formulas produced by DuPont in the late-1950s through the 1960s made this connection possible. These colors, which served popular brands like Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Oldsmobile, switched from nitrocellulose lacquer to acrylic lacquer in 1956 in a move that improved the durability of shine and color. Originally done at General Motors’ behest, it wasn’t long before others in the paint and automotive industries caught wind of the improved product, incorporating DuPont’s latest evolution of automotive-grade finish. By the early 1960s, acrylic lacquer was the new standard for cars.

Fender guitar finishes experienced similar changes. As with automobiles, lacquer was favored among luthiers for its quick-drying properties and its ease of use with industrial spraying equipment. The earliest Stratocasters and Telecasters were painted with nitrocellulose lacquer, and originals can be identified today by their light cracking, yellowing, and loss of pigment that—in many ways—matches the characteristics of car paint from the 1950s. Although nitrocellulose remained popular at Fender, the company shifted toward acrylic lacquer for its metallic finishes (underneath a nitrocellulose clear coat) as the 1960s wore on.

Record-keeping of Fender’s custom guitar and bass colors was spotty until about 1960, but from that moment forward the evidence that it lifted its hues straight from Detroit’s showrooms is clear. Both the DuPont and Ditzler paint codes for the vast majority of Fender paint colors could be tied directly to an automotive equivalent, with a heavy preference for General Motors (specifically, Cadillac) paints. Whether it was sprayed Sonic Blue, Surf Green, or Burgundy Mist Metallic, you could waltz into the dealer and pose beside the road-going match for your musical instrument.

This dynamic continued throughout the decade, albeit with a bit of an asterisk. Automakers were keener to rename their paint colors (and change up their ordering codes) much more regularly than smaller operations like Fender. So, although a guitar’s particular shade might still persist in the dealer showroom, by the mid-’60s it may have adopted a different moniker. Then there was the issue of planned obsolescence, which made it more difficult for Fender to source acrylic lacquer versions of some of the early nitrocellulose colors it had used in the 1950s. The car industry’s obsession with novelty forced such hues out of production.

By the 1970s, Fender had dramatically winnowed down its custom color options, emphasizing natural finishes. It also switched to polyurethane paint, away from lacquer, for most of its instruments. The pendulum swing back toward bright colors on guitars didn’t manifest until the early 1980s, but by then the automotive industry’s palette was nowhere near interesting enough to tempt rock and roll into its earlier copycat act.

Thank The Restorers

How do we have access to so many details about the link between classic guitar paint colors and their stop-light-racing, big-finned, V-8-powered, boulevard-cruising, inspirations? It’s largely through the efforts of guitar restoration buffs, both professionals and hobbyists, who have made it their mission to dig through the paperwork surrounding instrument production in their bid to bring them back to their original glory. These enthusiasts worked tirelessly to unearth color charts and establish links to automotive paint mixes of the day; their research has unlocked a part of rock and roll history that further illustrates the unbreakable bond between teenage rebellion on the radio and smoky burnouts on the streets.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Color of Rock: How Hot Rods and Muscle Machines Tinted Classic Guitars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

For those of us who call Michigan home, there was something sorely missing from this year’s Super Bowl: our Detroit Lions. Again. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. 

Sadly, the Lions—whose principal owner is Sheila Ford Hamp, a descendant of both the Ford and Firestone families—weren’t the only Detroiters who didn’t show up for the big game. For the third straight season, Ford Motor Company sat out too, choosing not to spend $7 million for a 30-second commercial on CBS. General Motors? Nope. Stellantis, the conglomerate that owns Ram, Jeep, and Chrysler? Nada.

Fortunately, several automakers played like champions. So did the Kansas City Chiefs, who after a slow start defeated the San Francisco 49ers 25–22 in overtime to claim their second consecutive Super Bowl title. Cheers to all who entertained us on and off the field, and even those who tried and failed. We appreciate the effort.

Touchdown

Volkswagen USA: “Arrival”

Most great Super Bowl commercials are great because they make us laugh, but some hit us right in the heart. Count Volkswagen’s “Arrival” among the latter. Celebrating VW’s 75 years in the USA, starting when the Beetle turned heads and changed minds upon its arrival in 1949, this commercial is actually an “American Love Story.” Using Neil Diamond’s impassioned 1971 hit “I Am … I Said” as the soundtrack and utilizing both actual and recreated film footage and photos, VW did the opposite of its award-winning “Think Small” ad campaign. It dreamed big and absolutely nailed it, right down to its ending tagline: “We shape its metal. You shape its soul.” (We’ve included the two-minute version above because it’s twice as nice as the one-minute version that ran during the third quarter.)

BMW i5 M60: “Talkin’ Like Walken”

Admit it: You’ve done your own Christopher Walken impression before. Lots of times, in fact. You probably started way back in 2000 when Walken appeared on Saturday Night Live and scored laughs (even from the cast) in his role as record producer Bruce Dickinson. “I have a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COWBELL!”

BMW knows us all too well. From the valet to the coffee barista to the tailor to the makeup artist to the waiter, everyone in this ad for the new i5 M60 electric sedan is “Talkin’ Like Walken.” The commercial ends with a proclamation from the announcer: “There’s only one Christopher Walken, and only one ultimate driving machine,” before he goes into his own Walken impersonation: “The rest are just imitations.” Walken, driving his BMW, laughs: “Come on.”

Nailed it.

Toyota Tacoma: “Dareful Handle”

Toyota had a banner day Sunday, especially considering that (according to Ad Age) it was going to skip the Super Bowl entirely until CBS came calling. Thankfully, Toyota’s marketing team already had a great commercial in the can: “Dareful Handle,” which refers to that handy dandy interior safety feature that we often call the “Jesus Bar”—as in, “Oh, Jesus, please save me while I hang on for dear life.”

As the camera jumps from one frightened passenger to the next, we’re shown an orange Tacoma kickin’ up dust while doing donuts and other herky-jerky maneuvers at high speed. “Introducing the most powerful Tacoma ever,” the announcer says, “With [echoing the truck’s flustered passengers] the ‘Shut the Front Door!’ handle … also known as the ‘Seriously Rob!’ handle … or the ‘Woah, woah, woah … woah, woah!’ handle … or the ‘No Me Gusta! (I don’t like!)’ handle … standard.”

Kia EV9: “Perfect 10”

Kia went the VW route, tugged at our heartstrings, and delivered another winner. Showcasing its new EV9, “the first mass-market three-row EV SUV in the U.S.,” the car isn’t just for transportation, it’s designed to be a mobile power source. When a young skater’s grandfather misses her performance, she brings the show to him and dazzles on a lighted rink just outside his window—and the Kia EV9 provides the juice. Well done.

BONUS: Toyota Tacoma: “Celebration”

This ad was among those offered up during the week leading up to the game, so even though it didn’t have an official time slot, we thought we’d include it. In “Celebration,” a herd of Tacomas—and motorcycles, and even a souped-up riding lawn mower—roar through a canyon before stopping, en masse, at a desolate cabin. When a bearded man comes to the door, one of the Tacoma drivers asks, “Can Billy come out to play?” The man, who we quickly deduce is Billy, shouts “YES! Woohoo!” and jumps into his own Tacoma to join the fun.

Field Goal

Kawasaki Ridge: “Mullets”

In this mildly amusing spot, everyone who comes in contact with Kawasaki’s up-market, four-cylinder side-by-side—even a (formerly) bald eagle and wrestler Steve “Stone Cold” Austin—suddenly wears a mullet. “Business in the front, party in the back. The all-new Kawasaki Ridge.”

Pluto TV: “Couch Potatoes”

Cute. And yes, we know, it isn’t an automotive commercial. But it has a fictional Pluto tractor in it, so it gets in on a technicality. “This here, this is Pluto TV country. Here on this farm, we grow couch potatoes.” The best line in this ad, showing potatoes glued to their couch, thanks to Pluto’s streaming television service? “I like anything where a hot person throws a glass of wine at another hot person.”

Turbo Tax: “Streamer”

Kris came to Turbo Tax because she “switched gears from delivering part-time to streaming full time.” The ad has almost nothing to do with cars, except that when she makes the switch she suddenly becomes part of a fast-driving video game. “That’s how you corner chat!” Don’t we all wish filing our taxes was this fun?

OFF-SETTING PENALTIES

The Dawn Project: “Boycott Tesla Now”

Like a football referee who calls out both teams for messing up, we’re introducing this new category for an ad that ultimately left nobody in a better position.

Dan O’Dowd is a tech entrepreneur who heads The Dawn Project, a group that wants to ban Tesla’s “defective self-driving software,” which “drives like a drunk teenager.” The fact that Tesla tends to pirouette away from liability claims when its cars get into accidents while using the autosteer system is not lost on The Dawn Project. It’s the second year in a row the group has purchased ad space during the big game to criticize Tesla, according to The Washington Post. We agree, of course, that software shouldn’t put the lives of people at risk, but a night of festivities and sports didn’t feel like the right venue for this ad.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post 2024 Super Bowl Car Ads: Touchdowns, Field Goals, and Penalties appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The world lost a musical great last year when Jimmy Buffett passed away at the age of 76. While he was known for songs about a laid-back life on the water, he was also a big fan of cars and pickups. One piece of his fun car collection is currently up for bid on GAA Classic Cars. Buffett’s 1963 Ford Falcon Sprint convertible looks ready for top-down summer cruising and features some interesting modifications.

When it was purchased in 2002, the Falcon reportedly had just 8578 miles on the odometer. In the 20 years since, it has racked up only 3300 more. The listing doesn’t specify, but we assume that with that mileage the engine is the original 260 that came with the car when new. The Falcon was not offered with any rowdy powerplants in 1963; those would come later as the 289 debuted for 1964.

The small-block convertible was hot-rodded by Buffett, who added a four-barrel intake and a matching Holley carb for a bit more power. The most noticeable addition to the car is a roll bar that serves as a surfboard rack, proving that you don’t need a surf wagon, or even a hardtop, to bring your board to the beach. On that subject, a board is included in the sale, as pictured on the car. We sort of expected Buffet to be a long-board guy, so maybe we shouldn’t have judged a surfer by his chill beach music. Buffett also added a sound system, with a trunk-mounted amplifier and subwoofer. A Fender Squier Stratocaster with Buffet’s autograph is also a part of the auction.

A look at the Hagerty Price Guide shows 1963 Ford Falcon Sprint Convertible prices down just a bit over the year, with a #2 (Excellent) condition worth $27,800 currently. That said, this car’s provenance should come into play. We asked valuation specialist and Hagerty Price Guide Publisher Dave Kinney to weigh in. “Jimmy Buffett might not be remembered as a car guy in the same vein as Paul Newman or other celebrities, but he was, through and through,” Kinney said. “That, and since Parrotheads are an enthusiastic bunch, I expect bidding for Buffett’s Falcon is likely to go well above its condition value.”

This well-kept convertible seems to be ready for another surf-loving owner, and we hope it goes to one of Buffett’s many fans who will appreciate it, as we’re sure he would have wanted. We fully expect the custom stereo system to be put to proper use playing Buffett’s expansive catalog of albums.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Jimmy Buffett’s Personal Falcon Convertible Is Ready for Beach Duty appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Remember the good old days, when we just couldn’t wait for the future to get here? And what a future it was! At least, according to the short musical film Key to the Future, which was produced by General Motors for the 1956 Motorama and imagines the magical world of, uhh, 1976.

Let’s set the scene …

There they are, a darling family of four, Dad and Junior up front, Mom and Sis sweating in the back, their convertible stuck in traffic on a summer day. In unison, they all shrug their shoulders, look at each other, and then break into song:

We gotta slow down. Slooow down.
So much traffic cuts the flow down.

Take it away, Dad: Til they bring the highways up to date,
you can bet your high compression we’re gonna be late.

While we’re waiting around singing the blues
Turn on the radio for highway news.

Junior, riding shotgun, obliges, only to learn that it’s traffic, non-stop, everywhere!

“I wonder what we’d hear if I turned on the switch,” says Junior, “and we’re driving along in nineteen hundred and seventy-six.”

Dutifully, he turns the dial. Boy howdy! Just like that, it’s 1976. But not the 1976 you might recall, all groovy and shaggily carpeted and sick to death of Vietnam. In this imagined future, our family is suddenly whisking right along through the desert in the cartoonish Firebird II, arguably the most ridiculous of all the Motorama show cars.

The boy radios “the tower” for a traffic update, then asks for a route to Chicago, a mere couple thousand miles away. The friendly officer on the other end gives him two choices—the scenic route or the direct route. These folks are on vacation! Scenic route it is.

Tower man instructs them to check their fuel and engine. A central display shows that they’ve got a range of 662 miles and that the Whirlfire GT-304 gas turbine is spinning right along a cool 31,000 rpm. It’s all systems go in 1976.

“We’re all set for auto control!” says Dad. Tower man instructs them to move to the “electronic control strip in the center lane,” then to synchronize the engine. Dad tunes the speed. Dad tunes the direction.

“We’re coming in on the beam, Dad,” says the boy, as a nebulous glowing dot on the center screen gets closer to a wavering glowing line. Great futuristic high-pitch radio-tuning sounds ensue: Wee-yuuu-aaaahhh-ooo-uuu-wee. After just 30 seconds of twisting some knobs and not looking at the road, Dad has that autopilot set.

“Well done, Firebird II,” says our man in the tower. “You’re now under automatic control. Hands off steering.” Now he’s only got to give that sort of individualized attention to the other million motorists passing his way that day. Who needs automation in 1976 when there’s so much time for individual productivity!

Past the control tower they go, not another car in sight, for some reason. “Here we go in the high-speed safety lane,” Dad says, except they’re only going about 30 mph and have been this whole time. But once into that fast lane, bubble-top windows sealed tight, it’s time for a stogie. Puff away, Dad! Not for Junior; he’ll have some ice cream. Mom and Sis’ll have some delicious orange juice, thanks—all of it neatly dispensed into futuristic metal cups from the glovebox Orange Juice & Ice Cream Machine, patent pending. Curiously, no one has coughed or grimaced or vomited or said “Really, Dad?” at the prospect of being trapped in the Firebird’s fishbowl cabin with that damn cigar.

Soon they pass a single-seater Firebird I, “the original gas-turbine car,” says Junior. The whole family gawks at this relic of the past. “Runs pretty smooth for an old-timer,” Junior says.

Time marches on as they cross what is turning out to be an endless desert, only now they’re on an elevated roadway. Fancy!

Eventually the highway before them curves to the left, as highways sometimes do. They’ve hit the “east-north interchange,” according to Junior. Dad scans the road ahead. “The safe, easy way to make a turn,” he says, knowing his car will do it for him, because by 1976, as you’ll recall, turning the steering wheel 30 degrees in order to follow the road had become quite treacherous. Still, Mom and Sis give each other that knowing nod, because Dad’s right. It is both safe and easy.

They won’t make Chicago today, obviously, and from the way they all yawn simultaneously, it’s clear our family of the future is beat. Cue the refrain …

We’ve got to slow down. Slooow down.
Mr. Sun is just about to gooo down.

Once again they call on “Mr. Tower Man” to find them a place to lay their weary heads. This time, he sings too. The Sunset Inn’s a honey, he suggests, and the hostess is a dream.

And do you know why the Sunset Inn’s a honey, reader? Because their predigested food is cooked by infrared, that’s why.

Hindsight being what it is, it’s hard not to want to just pet this short promotional film on its adorable little head. In 1956, what we wanted—nay, expected—from 1976 were self-driving cars, elevated roads, glovebox ice cream, and to not have to chew our food at the end of a long day. What we got instead was the Dodge Aspen, the ink-jet printer, the Big Gulp, VHS, Ebola, a bicentennial, and no more American convertibles—ever!

What a rip-off.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post GM’s 1956 Vision of the Future Was, Um, Off appeared first on Hagerty Media.

At the 66th Grammy Awards on Sunday night, country music star Luke Combs surprised in-person and television audiences alike when the curtain dropped ahead of his cover of the song “Fast Car”. As the familiar guitar riff began, the lights lifted to reveal not Combs, but rather, the song’s original creator: singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.

The two artists alternated verses before joining for the chorus bringing the house down with a duet for the ages. But it was the brief film shown before the performance, an interview and montage with Combs, that gave us the automotive connection beyond just the notion of a car that could “get us outta here.”

“My dad had a 1988 Ford F-150 pickup truck,” said Combs to the producers. “It had a cassette player in it, and my dad would play me that Tracy Chapman self-titled album. That song, ‘Fast Car’, it was my favorite song before I even knew what a favorite song was.” Over a collage of photos from Combs’ younger days, from school pictures to early gigs at local bars, Combs shared how the song became a foundational part of his musical blossoming. “I’ve been playing that song since I could play guitar, honestly. I just love that song.”

Combs recorded a cover of the song as a part of his most recent album, titled Getting Old. When the cover first appeared on his record, Chapman, who has since retreated to a more reclusive life, was courteous and earnest in her support of Combs. “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honored to be there,” Chapman told Billboard in an exclusive statement. “I’m happy for Luke and his success and grateful that new fans have found and embraced ‘Fast Car.’”

The song has been a staple at all of Combs’ live shows for a while now, often sung alongside an audience that routinely joins him in belting out. It’s also proving to be quite successful from a charts and awards standpoint. Combs’ cover has reached as high as number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and has topped country music charts everywhere. Along the way, Combs earned two Country Music Association awards in 2023 for single of the year and song of the year.

Of course, “Fast Car” was already an established hit before Combs’ soulful vocals lifted its lyrics. When Chapman first released the song in 1988, it earned her three Grammy nominations of her own: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, the latter of which she won in 1989.

The duet, then, was a fitting high point for the two artists. Fans of Combs and Chapman alike flooded social media with personal connections to the song, often involving an automobile of their own.

The Grammy duet caught the eye of Ford CEO Jim Farley as well. “It was such a moving performance and one of those shared cultural moments that everyone was talking about at work the next morning,” Farley said in a statement to the Detroit Free Press last night. “It’s special that a Ford truck was a little part of the backstory.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post For Luke Combs, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” Evokes a Ford Truck appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Tuesday was a big day for stock car racing as NASCAR: Full Speed debuted on Netflix. The five-episode docuseries follows last year’s 16 playoff drivers as they race toward the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series Championship.

If you’re apprehensive about yet another motorsports documentary, I get it. I certainly was.

Since its debut in 2019, F1’s Drive to Survive has become a global phenomenon, perhaps making the biggest waves right here in the States. According to a Nielsen study, the sport’s U.S. fan base grew about 10 percent in light of the show’s success. Fun stat: More than 360,000 viewers who didn’t view F1 in the latter part of the 2021 season watched F1 racing in 2022 after first watching Drive to Survive.

These stats were likely regurgitated in the board room of every motorsports sanctioning body here to Timbuktu, as aspiring documentarians pitched other series on similar ideas. In the past few years, plenty of disciplines have rushed to make a bare-all docuseries. In 2022, the USA Network premiered a 10-episode NASCAR series, Race for the Championship. Last year, IndyCar launched 100 Days to Indy on the CW. Both were legitimate attempts but lacked the trademark rawness and drama that Drive to Survive served in its five seasons.

The rumblings surrounding NASCAR: Full Speed signaled that the show might be different. For one, the project had some serious power players in the mix. The production studio Words + Pictures was behind the lens. If that sounds familiar, this is the same group who created The Last Dance, a ten-part documentary that focuses on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, and the 2017 Academy Award-winning O.J.: Made in America.

Oh, and retired NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. is the executive producer.

Still, I’ve been bit before. When you know a subject matter so intimately, a production’s flaws can stick out like a sore thumb. I recently watched a tennis expert break down the inconsistencies in Break Point, another hot Netflix doc produced by the Drive to Survive crew.

Girding myself for disappointment, I tuned into the big red ‘N.’

The first episode opens in Martinsville, Virginia, at the penultimate race of the season. It’s a time of high stress for the remaining playoff drivers who are attempting to make the final four cutoff for the season-ending showdown in Phoenix. This is a great snapshot of the sport at its most tense. The intimate pre-race convos between lovers and teammates, which are rarely shared during the event’s traditional coverage, excellently build the suspense. Long gone are the early-season races, where a mulligan or two can be tolerated; it’s go-time in Martinsville.

Then, the show quickly pivots, jumping back a couple of months to the days leading up to the playoffs and the respective cutoff race in Daytona. This Tarantino-style timeline could be confusing to the entry-level viewer, however, the doc employs a fuzzied shock jock radio voice to slowly explain the context. We join Denny Hamlin as he prepares his two daughters for school.

Throughout the episode, we’re given incredible access to the personal lives of each driver in the spotlight. This is where the show shines. It’s intriguing to watch these superstars who wrestle race cars around the track at 200 miles per hour performing mundane tasks. Hamlin burns a pancake during his family’s morning routine.

Unsurprisingly, it is the veteran driver Hamlin who provides the best sound bites: “I don’t want my competition thinking ‘Oh gee shucks, what a nice guy.’ F*ck that.”

In addition to interviews with a roster of drivers, you also hear from plenty of pundits and even executive producer Dale Jr., who eloquently explains the sport’s subtle complexities and provides clear context. In fact, as you roll through the midpoint of the episode, the experienced NASCAR fan will start to understand the intended purpose of this docuseries: make new fans.

First, the decision to set the first episode at Daytona is intentional. It’s the same track that will open the 2024 season in a couple of weeks. What a way to prime an audience. Second, the explanation of NASCAR’s playoff system, one of the most nuanced components of the sport, is laid out and explained multiple times so that even a person who has never witnessed a stock car race can comprehend. Drafting, inspection, personas, reputations—everything is laid out like a grade school curriculum.

At one point, bored of explanation, I started to reach for my phone. Then, the cameras travel inside a hauler to listen to a prerace speech from a crew chief. Wait, I’ve never seen that. We even see team owner Coach Joe Gibbs pull Hamlin aside to talk about a soundbite that aired on the driver’s podcast earlier in the week. Juicy!

And it’s all shot and composed really well. There’s plenty of neat framing, unique perspectives, and a great soundtrack.

Despite setting most of the first episode at Daytona, a place where Dale Earnhardt dominated but ultimately passed away, there is no mention of the Intimidator. There isn’t mention of any Hall of Fame driver, for that matter. Make no mistake, the series is here to explain today’s NASCAR. That might rub some fanatics the wrong way, but for the sake of the sport’s future, I’m fine with highlighting modern-day heroes. The lack of personality is one of NASCAR’s current issues and NASCAR: Full Speed is trying to provide a remedy.

Bubba Wallace, the second-ever Black driver to win in NASCAR’s premier level, is chronicled heavily in the first episode. Rightfully so. Wallace has worked his tail off to be in the Cup Series, and found himself right on the playoff cut line during the show’s filming. He also drives for Hamlin and co-owner Michael Jordan. Yeah, that Jordan.

The episode ends with the closing laps at Daytona. A huge flip is followed by late-race dueling, and a triumphant—and exhausted—Bubba Wallace on pit lane receiving congratulations from teammates and Jordan alike. Orville Peck’s “Daytona Sand” accompanies the scene. This doc consistently has the kind of stuff that will likely put your arm hair on end, even if you aren’t a NASCAR fan.

NASCAR: Full Speed is an excellent primer for new fans and provides plenty of intimate never-before-seen moments for the most devout followers, and it wraps it all in a shiny cinematic bow. I’m excited to watch the next episode.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Review: Netflix’s <em>NASCAR: Full Speed</em> Targets Newcomers, Satisfies Oval Obsessives appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Few people are as knowledgeable about automobiles and their unique driving characteristics than Jay Leno, so it’s a rare occurrence when he needs help to “fill in a gap.” In the latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, Jay decides it’s high time to learn about the Volkswagen Scirocco. And who better to school Jay than award-winning automotive journalist, YouTube host, and Scirocco aficionado Jason Cammisa?

The question is, what took him so long to take one for a spin? As Jay explains, he was pretty busy building his comedy career in the 1980s and had little interest in most Volkswagens at the time. In fact, he’d just purchased a year-old 1986 Lamborghini Countach for $70,000, which “seemed like crazy money at the time … I was so captivated by that whole Italian thing and Ford Cobras, so Scirocco just seemed like a regular car.”

Cammisa admits that it is—and isn’t. The knowledgeable and hilarious host of three Hagerty YouTube series—Icons, Know It All, and Revelations, where he has racked up more than 450 million views—has owned his 1987 Scirocco 16-valve since 1997. He went to high school in Germany and was a fan of German cars, but he knew nothing about Sciroccos. He wanted a Golf. But when his father “kind of reneged” on a promise to buy him a car in college, he used his dad’s credit card—designated for emergencies—to buy this second-gen Scirocco for $1500 (in the U.S.).

Somehow, he survived his father’s wrath and never let go of the car.

“I’ve driven literally thousands of cars for work, basically everything in production for the last 30 years, and this is still the one that makes me laugh the most,” he says, “which is weird because it shouldn’t. It’s a common car for common people.”

“And you were pretty common, as I remember,” Jay says.

“I still am,” Jason admits. “Trash, complete trash.”

“To me, Volkswagen was always nice, and there was a cute aspect to the Bug and the hippie van and all that kind of stuff,” Jay says. “And then the next gen, the Rabbit, didn’t do much for me. And I didn’t pay much attention to the Golf. The Scirocco just seemed like another version, but it’s not. This is much more sophisticated.”

Styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro and bodied by Karmann, this Scirocco began its life with a 1.8-liter, 123-horsepower four-cylinder engine mated to a manual five-speed transmission. It still has that gearbox, but it is now powered by a 2.0-liter with European cams and intake, which boosted horsepower to 170.

“This is a Mark II Scirocco, but it’s the same exact platform underneath,” Jason says. “And the Scirocco was a first-gen GTI—the original Golf GTI with a lower roof.”

Jason dives even deeper into the car’s styling and lineage. “Look at the rear window … this looks to me like a BMW Hofmeister kink,” he says, then continues to explain some of the car’s finer points. When Jason is finished, Jay says, “More information than I wanted to know, but that’s OK.”

Cammisa is undeterred. “This was the last of the A-1 chassis, so it got all the things the original GTI never got, like power steering, four-wheel discs, 16 valves …”

Jay is clearly trying to figure out exactly why this car is priceless to Cammisa.

“You bought it when you didn’t know what it was, and then you fell in love with it. So it’s like imprinting on a goose. The first thing you see when you open your eyes, that’s your parents. If you were driven home in a ’71 Pinto, would that have … ?”

“Nooooo,” Jason says, emphatically. There’s more to it than that. The thing “weighs 2356 (pounds) and has enough power to have fun. It loves to be sideways.”

Cammisa even shipped it to Germany and cut it loose on the Autobahn. Top speed: 135 mph, “which is horrifying. Don’t do it.”

The car is also a rare sight on the West Coast, Jason says.

“In 15 years of living in California, I’ve seen two Scirocco 16-valves on the road. You just don’t see them. They were fast and cheap, and they snap oversteer. Fast, cheap, and sideways means tree. So they’re all gone. It’s been a challenge to keep this one [on the road].”

Jay asks, “Is this a car you’re keeping your whole life?”

“This is it,” Jason says. “No. 1. Bury me in it.”

Offered the chance to find out if the Sirocco is everything that Cammissa says it is, Jay slides behind the wheel and turns the key. Did he enjoy driving it? Check out the last half of the show to see the verdict, but you can be sure that Jay’s knowledge gap has been properly filled.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Cammisa Schools Leno on the Finer Points of the VW Scirocco appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If your answer to the question “What’s a bear’s natural habitat?” is anything but “a Studebaker,” it’s time to grab some popcorn and watch (or re-watch) Jim Henson’s The Muppet Movie. Thirty-five years after Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog road-tripped to Hollywood in a 1951 Studebaker Commander, the colorful movie car has embarked on an even longer journey, an 18-month road to restoration.

One of two ’51 Studebakers used in the 1979 comedy musical and now owned by the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Indiana, the one-time movie prop is headed to Razorfly Studios in Sylva, North Carolina, for a full makeover. The transformation of the now-dilapidated car is expected to be finished by summer 2025.

The news has drawn plenty of media attention and rekindled happy memories for fans of all ages. That comes as no surprise to Studebaker National Museum Archivist Andrew Beckman, who says the car and Henson’s characters make great co-stars.

“The style and whimsy of the Muppets dovetails nicely with the Studebaker’s far-out styling,” Beckman says. “The film’s producers were intent on finding a Studebaker to serve as Kermit and Fozzie’s ride, as they felt it was a good fit.”

Beckman was a child when the movie came out, and he didn’t have to twist his dad’s arm to take him to see it. In fact, his father owned a handful of Studebakers at the time, and he was the one who suggested going to watch The Muppet Movie. It’s no wonder why Fozzie’s ’51 Commander has been special to Beckman ever since.

“The car is more of a character in the film, similar to the Love Bug or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” he says. “The film came out when the Muppets were at the height of their popularity, on TV every week, and Kermit was on Sesame Street. The movie was designed for all ages and was a huge success.”

The story follows Fozzie and his sidekick Kermit as they drive cross country to make it big in show business. Along the way they meet dozens of other Muppet characters and an endless stream of real-life stars, including Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Telly Savalas, Orson Welles, James Coburn, Dom DeLuise, Elliott Gould, Madeline Kahn, and Carol Kane.

Chased by villainous Doc Hopper, played by Charles Durning, Fozzie and Kermit run into the fictional rock band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Offering to help the weary travelers, the band members decide to disguise the car, but the psychedelic paint job they choose is hardly subtle.

When the group is finished, Fozzie is impressed. Kermit? Not so much.

“I don’t know how to thank you guys,” Fozzie says.

Kermit quickly adds, “I don’t know why to thank you guys.”

Since computer-generated imagery was not yet available to Henson and other filmmakers in the late 1970s, two Muppet cars were used during production, one for long shots and the other—the museum’s Studebaker—for closer shots showing Fozzie and Kermit driving. To pull that off, puppeteers were required. They hid below the dashboard, so they couldn’t be seen, but that also meant they couldn’t operate the car. Henson installed a camera in the nose of the Commander, allowing the actual driver to drive from inside the trunk using a television monitor.

According to The Muppet Show Fan Club newsletter, “The first time they tried ‘driving,’ the television monitor went on the blink, and the driver had to be talked through the scene by an assistant director on a walkie-talkie. ‘A little to the right, now, to the left … hold it …’”

After filming was complete, the close-up car was parked on a studio backlot. Left to the elements, its paint—actually poster paint, which the crew preferred for its resistance to glare—quickly faded. In 2004, after the car was acquired by the Studebaker Drivers Club’s Orange Empire Chapter in California, it was gifted to the Studebaker Museum. Beckman says the Commander was in “pretty rough shape” when it arrived; its engine had seized up, and it was in desperate need of major rehab. But that would cost money—a lot of it—an estimated $175,000 for a full restoration. That would include returning the actual steering wheel and controls to their original position so that the car can be driven as intended.

The Studebaker National Museum cleaned up Fozzie’s car and put it on display, as is, along with a donation box to get the rehab work done. Only about $9000 was raised over the years, so two years ago the museum decided to start a crowd-sourcing campaign. Including the money raised from a GoFundMe page, the museum has secured approximately $60,000 in funding, enough to get things started.

RazorFly Studios, an Academy Award-winning prop house and custom-car builder, has agreed to partner on the project. Again, there wasn’t any arm-twisting involved. As Eric Hokanson, a restorer with Razorfly, told the South Bend Tribune, “I grew up with the Muppets. I said, ‘Really, we get to work on a Muppet car? Cool!’”

That famous ’51 Commander is about to get cooler.

“This project is so special to museum staff, the community, and Muppet fans around the world,” says Studebaker National Museum Curator Kyle Sater. “We are one step closer to returning a bear to his natural habitat—a Studebaker.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post At Last, the Car from <em>The Muppet Movie</em> Will Get a Restoration appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you loved Netflix’s Drive to Survive, buckle up for another high-speed Netflix docuseries, called NASCAR: Full Speed.

The five-episode docuseries, which premieres on Netflix on January 30th, will follow last year’s 16 playoff drivers as they race toward the 2023 NASCAR Cup Series Championship. Each episode will be 45 minutes in length. A trailer for the new film debuted earlier this week, providing a sneak peek into the drama captured during the last season’s on- and off-track action.

According to NASCAR, the documentary “will bring fans behind the scenes, exploring the physical and emotional challenges of competing for a championship at the top level of stock car racing.”

Before you pass NASCAR: Full Speed off as a cheap copy of Drive to Survive, know that this effort has some serious horsepower—and cred—under the hood. The production studio Words + Pictures created this series. If that sounds familiar, these are the same people who created The Last Dance, a ten-part documentary that focuses on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, and the 2017 Academy Award-winning O.J.: Made in America. Retired NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. also joins as executive producer.

The documentary comes at a time of great sea change. “NASCAR has kicked down the door to an entirely new era recently—with new tracks, cars, team owners, and stars combining to deliver some of the best competition the sport has ever seen,” says NASCAR Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Tim Clark. “Now is the perfect time to introduce people to the characters, competition, and chaos that make NASCAR so compelling while still giving our most passionate fans plenty of new insights into their favorite teams and drivers.”

The last big NASCAR film series to hit screens came in the fall of 2022, when the USA Network premiered a 10-episode series, Race for the Championship. Last year, IndyCar launched also its docuseries titled 100 Days to Indy on the CW. Both seemed like rather ambitious efforts with plenty of compelling behind-the-scenes drama, but neither took America by storm in the same way that Drive to Survive did back in 2019.

A Netflix property, given the app’s 247 million-plus users and cultural influence, has plenty of promise to make any series a touchstone overnight, from Tiger King to Squid Games. Will NASCAR be the next trendy docu-series to dominate water cooler chat and incite massive FOMO? Only time will tell.

Will you tune in?

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post NASCAR Races to Netflix for Its Own Version of F1’s <em>Drive to Survive</em> appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A red Miata dangles from the arm of a construction crane, suspended several stories in the air. Hooked behind the rear bumper, its round nose points to the pavement below. In an instant, the tiny sports car plummets to the tarmac. It smashes and falls, shiny side down. If that wasn’t cruel enough, a gray 1985 Dodge van with “Blink 182” painted on the side enters stage right and backs into the dead, red convertible.

End scene. Fin.

Said Miata drop is the climax to a Blink 182 music video for the band’s 2001 hit song “The Rock Show.” The whole premise is that the record label gave Blink a check for its latest video. The pop-punk trio rolls up to a bank in the gray Dodge van and then chases the check in order to commit a day of stunts with the windfall: throwing dollar bills off a roof, freeing pet shop doves, and the like. Rapid cuts of this buffoonery are mixed with footage of the band playing at various locations. It’s all the kind of stuff that captivated the minds of young teens and shot Blink 182 to the top of the charts in the early 2000s.

While it’s safe to say the folded Miata was probably written off as a total loss, the van’s whereabouts were always a mystery. “The band rented the Dodge for the shoot,” says 32-year-old superfan Andrew Baldwin. “After the video, it ended up in the hands of a radio station and sat in their lot for a while. Then a station employee purchased the van and owned it for better part of a decade.”

In the 23 years since the video, Blink 182 became one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century. It’s three central members came and went before finally reuniting last year for a reunion tour. By all accounts the band still rocks and brings the same juvenile humor prevalent in their songwriting, live performances, and music videos. (Look no further than the tour name, The Rock Hard Tour.)

Only one question was left unanswered until recently—no, not “What’s my Age Again?” but rather: Where on Earth is the Blink 182 Dodge van?

“We first found it a few years back, posted online,” says Baldwin. “There were rumors someone was going to buy it. Somebody passed on it. Other people chose not to buy it.” He and his girlfriend Taylor didn’t lose interest. “We thought about it a whole lot. Nobody really said where it was and nobody would give the exact location.” Online chatter was only mildly helpful.

The couple eventually found the van using Google Street View. “We had enough clues to get close.” The faded “Blink 1-8-2” on the side rendered it immediately recognizable to a guy like Baldwin, who remembers watching the music video when it was on the air in ’01. He was able to get in contact with the owner. Still, Baldwin found himself hesitating at the prospect of taking the van home. He contemplated what he might do with an old music video prop that, in his words, “ran, but not well.”

“It was actually my girlfriend that said, ‘Go for it and think about it later.’”

A thousand bucks later, the van was theirs. After shipping it to their house in Texas, they commenced to flushing the gas lines and dropping the tank. According to Baldwin, the Dodge needs a new carburetor, new brakes, and a bit of TLC throughout. “The goal is to get it road-worthy by the time the band tours this summer. We’re going to take it shows and tailgate.” While it might not command the dough that a Bullitt Mustang or a Bandit Firebird will fetch at auction, the van has plenty of historical provenance among the right crowd.

“For me, I love the band and the music and part of it how ridiculous it feels to own a 38-year-old van in the garage that you’re going to restore,” he says. “It means a lot. I get a funny feeling sitting in the driver seat.”

The van’s musty interior appears just as it was when the band piled in for filming of “The Rock Show” video. Even the rear doors, which impacted the Miata during the shoot, remain permanently wedged shut. More two decades later, the giant gray van is a rolling time pop-punk capsule.

“It’s awesome. I smile every time I step in the garage and see it.”

The couple is documenting the entire Blink 182 van saga on their Instagram. Follow along at @therockshowvan.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Blink 182’s Dodge “Rock Show” Van Just Got New Owners appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I’ve seen Ferrari and heartily recommend you do the same. If nothing else, a strong box-office showing for Michael Mann’s long-awaited flick will induce more talented filmmakers to do like we do here at Hagerty Media: mine the rich characters who populate more than a century of automotive history.

I left the theater on Christmas Day grateful to have seen a reasonably accurate portrayal of Enzo Ferrari, 1950s Italy, and terrific acting performances, but wishing Mann had spent more time on the cars and the company. Instead, the movie is a story about how Enzo Ferrari juggles his self-induced maelstrom of a personal life. The film is based in 1957 when the 59-year-old Enzo is still mourning the recent death of the son he bore with his wife Laura, even as he tends to a second family that includes a mistress and a son. Plus, his domineering mother still lives with him and Laura, and he’s running a teetering company that requires dozens of hot-headed and egotistical drivers and engineers. Mamma mia!

Enzo’s 90-year life was so rich that biographies, like the most recent one by former Ferrari PR man Luca Dal Monte, are nearly 1000 pages long. I know Mann had to focus somewhere but I yearned for more of the intrigue and creativity that filled the workshops and racing paddocks, not just the apartments and bedrooms. Hollywood’s handling of Ferrari is bound to be a suicide mission for the likes of me. I was also disappointed with the generally excellent Ford v Ferrari movie from 2019 because it relegated Phil Remington to a hapless administrator rather than acknowledging his central role as the engineer/fabricator who Carroll Shelby admitted was a key to his success. For the non-Hollywood version, check out our piece on Shelby and Ford.

Two days after I watched the movie, I embarked on a 600-mile road trip to visit family on the East Coast and listened to an audio version of the book the movie was based on: Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine. Longtime Car and Driver columnist Brock Yates published the book in 1991, the year I first met him. I loved the guy who created the Cannonball Run for his bombastic and simple writing style but also because he was an exceedingly decent human. I first read the book some 25 years ago and, last week, Yates’ breezy style made for a gripping audio version. The 10-hour Interstate slog whizzed right by as I listened to all the intricate Ferrari history for which I yearned.

We’ve also produced plenty of Ferrari material. I’d start with a summary biography of Enzo penned by the gifted Aaron Robinson, then dig into Don Sherman’s history of the V-12 that made the company. Robinson and I discuss the movie and Ferrari history in this week’s Never Stop Driving podcast, which is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. We’ve made videos, too, including one where Jason Cammisa explains that the Dino sub-brand was not Enzo’s afterthought but rather his highest honor. We also published a more detailed review of the movie. I’ve just pointed out some highlights; for the full list of Ferrari material, go here.

If you’ve seen the movie, please post your thoughts in the comments! Catch you next week.

Larry

P.S.: Your feedback is very welcome. Comment below!

Please share this newsletter with your car-obsessed friends and encourage them to sign up for the free weekly email. The easy-to-complete form is here. And if you’d like to support the efforts of Hagerty Media, please considering joining the Hagerty Drivers Club.

The post Never Stop Driving #80: <em>Ferrari</em>, the movie appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Film critics will judge the new Ferrari biopic on the basis of the acting, the directing, the writing, the editing. But hardcore car lovers—whose approval will help establish the movie’s credibility—are more interested in the authenticity of the cars and the verisimilitude of the racing scenes. Which is why one of director Michael Mann’s first hires was Robert Nagle.

A former race car driver turned stunt driver and then stunt director, Nagle has worked on nearly 90 movies and television productions, ranging from John Wick: Chapter 2 to Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation. Recent car-centric credits include Ford v Ferrari, Baby Driver, and Gran Turismo. In 2015, he shared an Academy Award for technical achievement for developing a self-propelled camera/vehicle platform that revolutionized the way in-car footage is shot.

Nagle’s expertise was indispensable to Mann, even though the director insists that Ferrari isn’t a racing movie. The film is primarily about Enzo—the man, not the cars he built—and it focuses more on his romantic and financial entanglements than his motorsports legacy. Still, there is a ton of racing action in the movie, and bringing the Mille Miglia—an epic race staged on open roads and through congested towns—back to life was a supremely difficult task.

“The streets were so narrow and tight,” Nagle says. “It was challenging to photograph the cars on the move, especially at speed, and when we got a couple of cars together, there was very little room for the camera car. Adding to that, I typically have to run the camera car off-line to get a good shot. It was hard to balance all that and keep the drivers safe.”

Despite these obstacles, Nagle generated plenty of killer footage. Race fans will geek out on three set pieces drawn from dramatic events during the 1957 season. The first is a test session in Formula 1 cars at the Aerautodromo di Modena (actually a defunct Formula 3 track elsewhere in Italy dressed up for the occasion). Next comes the Italian Grand Prix at Monza (really Imola in disguise). Most elaborate of all are a series of breathtaking scenes depicting the Mille Miglia, shot largely in Brescia and on the roads in and around Modena.

The movie showcases two authentic Maserati 250F Grand Prix monopostos, which Nagle tested himself before agreeing to use them. “The clutch is either in or out; you slip it, and it’s done,” he says. “So once the car’s warmed up, you’ve just got to send it. But the car immediately let me know that it didn’t want to be cruised. The harder I drove it, the better it worked. It was amazing. When I got back to the pits, I told the owner, ‘I don’t want to get out.’”

The Ferraris were more problematic. None of the three 801 F1 cars raced in 1957 have survived, and the V-12-powered 315 S and 335 S sports racers showcased in the Mille Miglia are virtually priceless. (The last 335 S to change hands publicly sold for nearly $36 million in 2016.) The rival Maserati 450Ss aren’t nearly as expensive, but they’re still rare enough that they might as well be made of unobtainium. So Nagle commissioned the construction of replicas.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Robert Nagle (@rpnagle)

Unlike, say, a Kirkham Cobra, which is built to the exact specifications of the real thing, Nagle’s faux Ferraris didn’t have to fool an expert. Job one was looking the part. That meant not only being dead ringers, cosmetically, but also boasting legitimate performance chops.

The chassis were built by Auto Action Developments in the U.K., while the bodies—four aluminum and five fiberglass—were fashioned by Campana, a carrozzeria in Modena. The drivetrains, cannibalized from Caterham 620s, featured supercharged 2.0-liter Duratecs rated at 310 horsepower, mated to five-speed manuals or six-speed sequentials. Despite the aerodynamically challenged bodywork, the replicas could exceed 140 miles per hour.

Cars this capable demanded equally capable drivers. Marino Franchitti, who won the Sebring 12 Hours in 2014, was supposed to drive the Maserati 250F that he vintage races for its owner, ex-Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. But then he was unexpectedly cast—wearing a wig—as Ferrari factory driver Eugenio Castellotti and subsequently shifted over to the Italian’s ill-fated F1 car.

“The only thing I was able to help with was on the pressures for the Dunlop racing tires on the 801 replicas,” Franchitti says. “Obviously, a Caterham doesn’t have huge power, so I was able to help them get the pressures up to a point where it would move, slide and feel the way it should, which made it look and feel more authentic.”

The Maserati that Franchitti had been slated to drive was given to Derek Hill, who played the French firebrand Jean Behra. A Ferrari Challenge champion during his years as a pro racer, Hill is the son of America’s first Formula 1 World Champion, Phil Hill. As it happened, Phil did his first F1 race in a 250F before joining the Ferrari factory team. So the movie gave Derek some first-hand insight into his father’s racing legacy.

“We filmed on the roads in the hills outside of Modena and Maranello, where my father always told me that they used to test cars,” Hill says. “We also wore cotton pants and polo shirts in the cockpit, which helped us get into the character of the era.” The racing mindset was so deeply ingrained that Hill even touched wheels with a Ferrari 801 during the Italian GP scenes.

Other stunt drivers with pro racing experience included Hollywood heartthrob Patrick Dempsey (read our interview with him here), costumed with a shock of white hair to resemble Mille Miglia winner Piero Taruffi, and Ben Collins, better known as the Stig on Top Gear, who appears briefly as Stirling Moss. The crew also included veteran stunt man Tony Hunt, former drift king Samuel Hübinette (cameo as Olivier Gendebien), past go-kart champion Brett Smrz (playing Mike Hawthorn) and newcomer Spencer Bucknum, the son of Indy 500 driver Jeff Bucknum and grandson of F1/Le Mans stud Ronnie Bucknum.

Although Spencer Bucknum recently won the TC America Series TCA title in a Honda Civic Si, he was hired mostly because he was an uncannily well-matched double for Gabriel Leone, the actor who portrayed Alfonso de Portago. When Bucknum started, he didn’t understand the subtle difference between race driving, which is all about going as fast as possible, and stunt driving, which is about looking as fast as possible.

“I watched him at the test track, and he was so smooth, hitting every mark,” Nagle recalls. “I told one of my other drivers, ‘He’s too perfect. I need you to ruin him.’ After that, Spencer was fine.”

Although the stunt drivers handled the high-speed and close-quarters work, Nagle spent hours training the actors on various tracks and an airport runway so they’d be comfortable roaring into and out of the pits. “I wanted them to look like they had no problem handling their cars,” he says. “I told them, ‘Drive that thing to the mark with authority. You own it, right?’ I think that just plays so much nicer on camera than somebody who’s not quite sure how to get to that spot.”

Inevitably, of course, Mann and Nagle had to resort to some trickery, especially in the spectacular crash schemes. The question, Nagle says, “was how far my guys could take it before handing off to the special effects people to do their magic.”

The biggest challenge was imagining and then staging De Portago’s fatal crash on the ultra-high-speed blast to the village of Guidizzolo, which also claimed the lives of his co-driver and nine spectators. Although reams of pages have been written about it, there’s no documentary film or footage of the wreck, so it’s impossible to say definitively what happened.

Nagle theorizes that a worn front tire blew out after hitting a sharp-edged road marker. As the car spun sideways, the swoopy bodywork of the 335 S acted like an airplane wing. The Ferrari soared into the air, struck a telephone pole, then scythed through the onlookers lining the two-lane road.

Even now, when we’re accustomed to Hollywood movies depicting countless extras being mowed down by automatic gunfire, the footage is genuinely shocking—a grim and gruesome reminder of an era when racing was literally a blood sport. The scene is graphic, yes, but it feels less like a gratuitous stunt than an honest attempt to re-create one of the most horrific moments in motorsports history.

Critics are sure to complain about some of the plot points in the movie, which is based very, very loosely on Brock Yates’s unflattering biography, Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine. Mann and Nagle, too, took some liberties to make the action more compelling to non-racing fans. But the racing scenes—especially the clips featuring the 250F at Modena—are among the most realistic committed to film since Steve McQueen immortalized Porsche 917s and Ferrari 512s in the movie Le Mans way back in 1971.

Robert Nagle, take a bow.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Stunt director Robert Nagle made <em>Ferrari</em> feel real, alive appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“Jaguar races only to sell cars. I sell cars only to be racing.” — Enzo Ferrari, in Ferrari (2023)

In the life of Enzo Ferrari, 1957 was a fraught year—not to mention a tragic one—amid an especially dangerous era of racing. It’s the moment in history, covering a few brief but critical months, when director Michael Mann chose to set his biopic Ferrari. At this time, Enzo finds both his company and his personal relationships in peril.

When the film begins, we find Enzo (Adam Driver) struggling with his volatile marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz, the film’s MVP), a not-so-secret second family with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their young son, Piero, who seeks recognition from his father. Meanwhile, his namesake business is on the brink of failure. The year prior, Enzo’s son Alfredo “Dino” Ferrari passed away at just 24 years old, and the loss casts a shadow over both him and Laura.

To save Ferrari, Enzo’s business manager, Cuoghi (Giuseppe Bonifati), tells him he must win Italy’s Mille Miglia, a sports car endurance race covering about 1000 miles. If successful, he can attract partners like Henry Ford II or Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli, and he can sell more cars, and the business will survive. (As the famous NASCAR adage goes, automakers had a “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” mentality) The difficult circumstances of these months—like motorsport itself—serve as a crucible for the man and the company.

Making Ferrari was, for Michael Mann, a dream that has survived development hell since the ‘90s. (Screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin, who adapted the script from Brock Yates’ Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, sadly passed in 2009.) Anyone familiar with his filmography will recognize that the subject matter is tailor-made to the filmmaker’s interests, from its fast cars to Mann’s particular brand of romanticized (and often destructive) masculinity embodied by taciturn, driven, professional men. Enzo Ferrari was a self-made man, perhaps the ultimate example of the type, who forged and shaped himself like the metal of his cars.

Though Enzo was in control when it came to his business, his personal life was in chaos. Ferrari thus delivers on the domestic drama front—or rather the flavor of domestic melodrama that serves as a recurring theme in Mann’s movies. In the past, some critics have written off this aspect of Mann’s work as extraneous, but Ferrari underscores that it’s a feature, not a bug; Mann adores a love story, however imperfect or troubled, as much as he adores the obsessive man archetype. In this context Lina Lardi is never portrayed as a mistress but rather as Enzo’s true love, and scenes with the two characters together feel lighter, warmer, homier. As for Laura, she is essential to Enzo’s greatness—an equal partner from the start who co-founded Ferrari with her husband and continues to contribute to its success. It’s a refreshing departure from the familiar wife trope in many biopics about famous men, which frequently depicts some kind of harpy working in direct opposition to her husband’s potential, his ambition, his brilliance.

But Laura struggles with her own emotional turmoil, also locked into her grief over Dino’s passing. Cruz as Laura is both controlled and (delightfully) unhinged; she is smart and savvy, but not above firing a gun in her husband’s general direction to make a point. She is every bit as complicated, contradictory, and powerful as Enzo, and it comes across as a shame that she never gets her proper recognition or respect. (Nor did the real Laura Ferrari.) Cruz expresses all of this in her performance and, together, she and Adam Driver capture the wildness of Laura’s and Enzo’s relationship, the way they were simultaneously attracted to and repelled by each other. Driver’s Enzo mostly keeps us at a distance throughout the film, but Cruz’s Laura feels vital, fully dimensional, viscerally real.

And the cars! They are shot lovingly, beautifully, more like works of art than mere machines. The film showcases Ferrari 335 S, Ferrari 315 S, Ferrari 250 GT, Lancia-Ferrari D50. (Enzo, well-known for his love of Peugeots, drives a decidedly less sexy Peugeot 403.) Gearheads and racing enthusiasts will be relieved to hear that no real vintage Ferraris or Maseratis were harmed in the making of this film; action shots were performed using production-built replicas rendered from LiDAR (i.e. 3D) scans of the real thing. (Even if production had wanted to use them, it would have been prohibitively expensive to do so.)

Mann explained that his crew “designed the tubular chassis to receive the body of the car… and they had contemporary drivetrains and they could do 140, 150 [mph], were reliable, and safe.” The powerplants they used for the replicas were four-cylinders cribbed from Caterhams. (The exception here is the 1957 Maserati 250F grand prix race car that makes a cameo during the time test—a very real car that belongs to Pink Floyd drummer and car collector Nick Mason.) At one point in the film, Enzo comments on his newest Ferrari, perfectly articulating both the awe and dread it inspires: “The driver in front will piss his pants when he sees it in his mirror. And when it passes, it has an ass on it like a Canova sculpture.”

The film presents racing as religion. This is not a poetic invention by the filmmakers, as Ferrari is indeed a kind of religion in Italy. In one scene, a priest delivers a sermon about “the nature of metal,” and “how it can be honed and shaped with your skills into an engine with power to speed us through the world.” He posits that if Jesus Christ had been born then, the son of God might have been a “craftsman in metal” instead of a carpenter. This is a Workers Mass, and so the men in the pews are all car-factory workers themselves; though this sermon is clearly written for them, their attention is divided between God and Ferrari: they pull out stopwatches when they hear the sound of the starter pistol in the distance, as Maserati is just beyond the door, seeking to break Ferrari’s speed record.

And the racing scenes do not disappoint. (My only gripe: there could have been more of them.) They place the viewer in the driver’s seat, capturing both the thrill and the horror of racing in this era. A scene late in the story plays like something out of a war film, somehow both graphically realistic and hallucinatory, as if it’s a nightmare dredged from Enzo Ferrari’s own subconscious. Adam Driver himself described a single-seater as a “moving coffin,” echoing a line delivered by Antonio Sabàto’s Nino Barlini in 1966’s Grand Prix: “Then I go into one of these cars: you sit in a box, a coffin, gasoline all around you. It is like being inside a bomb!”

Mann is known for his painstaking attention to detail, and it brings remarkable, noticeable authenticity to the film that the most knowledgeable, finicky racing fan should appreciate. The actors, for example, were all given race car driving lessons. (There were some notable exceptions, like Patrick Dempsey, who plays “silver fox” Piero Taruffi, who is a real race-car driver and did not require lessons, and Ben Collins, who plays Stirling Moss.)

Shooting locations were frequently the actual locations, like Enzo’s barbershop (the man who shaves him in the film is the son of Enzo’s barber), the exterior of the Ferrari house, and the family mausoleum. Even the wallpaper from Laura Ferrari’s bedroom was replicated for the film. And because the cars they fabricated didn’t sound quite right (four-cylinder engines sound nothing like V-12s), production relied on ADR (automated or additional dialogue replacement): When the cars are racing down narrow streets of Ravenna, for example, they duplicated that in a railroad tunnel in the U.K. with a real Ferrari 250.

Yet some of the movie’s best moments are its quietest, like when Enzo and Laura separately visit Dino’s mausoleum. Enzo speaks openly with him, while Laura only weeps and smiles, as if she can hear her son’s voice. (This is among the very few moments where Driver’s Enzo allows himself to be vulnerable, to show a crack in his well-constructed façade.)

And then there is a scene that crystallizes the film, meaningfully set during an opera, not a race. It is specifically a performance of “Parigi, o cara” from La Traviata, which is intercut with the film’s characters reflecting on memories made bittersweet by the passage of time, by reality and tragedy intervening, while cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt renders the actors’ faces in shadowy darkness like Caravaggio portraits. The film really does feel more like an opera than a traditional biopic; Mann even reuses a bit of the gorgeous operatic score by Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke from his 1999 film The Insider.

Ferrari gives us an intimate look at a man who was consciously unknowable, who maintained an airtight mystique. In the press, Enzo Ferrari is dubbed a widow-maker, “an industrial Saturn devouring his own children.” He often feels more like a man sending his soldiers into battle than a businessman, writing off the deaths of his racers as if it’s simply the cost of war. But Mann attempts to show us that while we saw coldness and dispassion, it was grief that ossified the man’s heart. In addition to the death of Dino he also lost two of his friends at Monza back in 1933—Campari and Borzacchini—who both died on the same day “in the metal I made,” Enzo confesses. In response, he told himself, “Enzo, build a wall. Or else go do something else.” He built the wall, but their ghosts haunt him nonetheless.

Mann’s and Driver’s take on Enzo Ferrari feels like a reflection of the ethos that people associate with the brand: often at the top of its game yet constantly improving, forever chasing something better, more efficient, more perfect. His race cars are like him, powerful yet fragile, undone by a sticky gearbox, a faulty steering column, an unexpected cloudburst, or just a bit of debris in the road. Il Commendatore was many things: “the Sage of Maranello,” a celebrity, a mythic figure, a martyr, a national treasure, his company regarded as a jewel in the crown of Italy. But the “great engineer,” capable of bringing his foundering business back from the brink, was still a man, powerless to save the life of his own son. With surgical precision, Ferrari identifies and explores the godlike legend figure who is unable to play god when it matters most.

There is no easy, tidy resolution in this film, no hard-won underdog victory as in Ford v Ferrari, no triumphant success story that one might expect from something lighter like Gran Turismo. Instead, Mann gives us a melancholy, incisive look into a man of contradictions, and into the race-car driver’s paradoxical love of racing: you never feel more alive than when you are speeding along the precipice of death. Ferrari captures the addiction, the exhilaration of being one with a race car, the heady thrill of winning—and the unimaginable cost that it levies. As Enzo Ferrari tells his drivers: “We all know it’s our deadly passion, our terrible joy.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post <em>Ferrari</em> captures the exhilaration of victory—and its dreadful cost appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Ewan McGregor isn’t just a Hollywood heavyweight—he packs quite a punch when it comes to cars. The Scottish-born actor has eclectic taste, as well as the money to buy pretty much whatever he wants, but he doesn’t always hang onto his automotive treasure.

Two years ago, McGregor sold a 1927 Buick Master Six sedan for $28,000 on BringATrailer.com because, he says, he moved to a house on a hill and the car struggled to make it up the incline. Now he’s back on BaT with a 1972 Porsche 911T Targa that he acquired in 2020.

McGregor has also owned a number of other classics, including a 1969 Aston Martin DBS, which he sold in order to buy a 1967 split-windshield VW Westfalia Camper.

So where did McGregor’s love of classic vehicles come from? He told Top Gear that he likely caught the bug from his grandfather, since his dad wasn’t much of a car guy. Volkswagen Beetles were the family’s car of choice when McGregor was growing up, but he was first attracted to motorcycles. He started with a 1978 Moto Guzzi T3, and later moved on to a Ducati and some Spanish Ossa dirt bikes. Cars came later.

“I bought my first ‘proper’ car when I was in Australia doing Moulin Rouge,” he told Top Gear. “A member of the crew had a 1972 Ford Mustang fastback, and he always parked it outside my dressing room because he wanted me to buy it. Anyway, for some reason I found out about another Mustang that was being sold in Sydney at the time—a 1965 convertible. It was the color of vanilla ice cream with a light blue roof. I fell in love, bought it and shipped it back to Britain because it had been converted to right-hand drive. That was my only car for a long time because I was always on my bikes.”

McGregor began collecting cars when he moved to the United States in 2008. Among his many purchases: a 1960 Silver Cloud II, Porsche 718 Cayman, two rat rods (one based on a 1920 Dodge and and the second “a ridiculously slammed 1927 Ford Tudor”), a 1937 Wolseley that served as the family car in the 2018 film Christopher Robin, and several VW Beetles, one of which is an electric-converted 1954 model that he commissioned from SoCal specialist EV West. McGregor also plans to buy a Volkswagen ID Buzz when it hits dealerships in 2024.

As for McGregor’s 1972 Porsche 911T Targa, bidding has reached $93,000 with three days remaining in the BaT auction.

According to the vehicle description, the Targa had been stored from the late 1970s until 2019, and it was acquired by McGregor the following year. Finished in black paint over black leatherette and Pepita fabric, the German sports car is powered by a 2.4-liter flat-six that’s mated to a five-speed 915 manual transaxle.

Features include a removable roof panel, stainless-steel Targa bar, 911S-style front spoiler, four-spoke leather-wrapped steering wheel, driver’s sport seat, right bucket seat, fold-down rear seats, staggered-width 15-inch Fuchs alloy wheels, and factory air conditioning. A timing chain update kit, Porsche Classic radio (with Bluetooth, Apple CarPlay, satellite radio, and USB charging ports), and replacement speakers have recently been installed. Performed maintenance includes a valve adjustment, resealing the transmission, and replacing the clutch, flywheel, shifter bushings, various engine oil seals, and ignition components.

This 911T Targa comes with a Porsche Production Specifications certificate, as well as the owner’s manual, recent service records, spare parts, and a clean California title in the owner’s name.

The Porsche’s left front fender was repainted prior to McGregor’s ownership, and the antenna has been relocated to the right front fender. The front has rock chips, and the paint has other imperfections as well.

The car wears 185/70 Vredestein Sprint Classic tires and retains its factory-equipped ventilated disc brakes. The rear shocks were replaced in 2020.

The five-digit odometer shows 38,000 miles, but the car’s true mileage is unknown. Also unknown is why McGregor has decided to part with the car. Perhaps he has his eye on another Westfalia.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Ewan McGregor loves classics, but he’s letting go of his 1972 Porsche appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week I asked the Hagerty Community to name Christmas movies in which Santa drives a sleigh that might be interesting to a car enthusiast. My reasons are selfish: I want to be something other than wholly bored during a holiday movie, and nothing perks me up like a cool, unique, or appropriately chosen car.

My recommendation of Bad Santa from last week’s According to You is clearly not a good idea for general audiences seeking Christmas cheer. Turns out the Hagerty Community went even deeper, because the best bits of automotive holiday media may not even be in movies. Have a look—it’s clear that the holidays are what you make of them!

Elf (2003)

@hyperv6: Elf! I am more traditional [than my Bad Santa recommendation —SM] but with a twist.

Keep it classic

Perhaps our very own DUB6 puts this question into proper perspective. Santa doesn’t need a car as his sleigh; there were very few cars in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and perhaps that’s the way it should be. Cars aren’t everything in this world, right?

@DUB6: I’m not really a big movie-watcher to begin with, and even less so during the holiday period, when I’m typically busy minding livestock and spending my spare time with family. Not even sure I’ve ever watched a “Santa-themed-movie” except for Miracle on 34th Street as a kid. Did that even have a sleigh in it? I think so. If it did, I’m sure it was very “traditional,” so that’d be my pick.

Those Mercedes commercials

While I technically wanted movie recommendations, I can’t deny how festive (and vehicularly satisfying!) manufacturer commercials are during the holidays. If you’re watching a movie with commercials, well, I can’t argue with dropping everything to watch them:

@Chris: Not a movie—but the Mercedes-Benz ad, run seasonally, where Santa has the hot red convertible and the reindeer have the utes and sedans in silver, is well-done.

@DUB6: I always liked those commercials. A few years ago, a group of us were invited to bring our cars to a local holiday parade. There were 10 cars. It was a total coincidence, but the “freakiest” hot rod took the lead and ran the center line, then eight cars lined up two-by-two-by-two-by-two behind him, and I pulled into the center behind them with my bright red coupe. Only later did we realize that we had done a mashup of Rudolph out front and the M-B ads!

Christmas car-commercial parodies?

@Sajeev Mehta: Since we opened the door with Christmas-themed car commercials, the Lexus spoof commercial on Saturday Night Live was a pretty hilarious take on going into debt for the holidays. Truly that was a December to remember!

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

I completely forgot about the Ford Taurus wagon–based Family Truckster from this movie, and it is clearly playing a bigger role than the Taurus SHO that Tim Allen drove in The Santa Clause.

@Roger: Santa didn’t drive it, but I love the Family Truckster in the Christmas Vacation movie.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post According to You: What is your favorite sleigh from a Santa-themed movie? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Drew Scott, known as one-half of the Property Brothers on HGTV, admits that if there’s one thing he enjoys as much as a property makeover, it’s a car makeover—and this week he brought proof to Jay Leno’s Garage. Scott, who along with twin brother Jonathan spends much of his time renovating houses, loves European sports cars and the concept of renewable energy, and he merged the two by designing a very attractive electric car, the Lanark DS.

“It’s a tribute to my dad, who’s from Scotland,” Scott says, sharing that the Lanark is named for his father’s hometown. Born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, the Scott twins and their father “would admire the cars” they saw on the street, which jump-started Drew’s interest in European sports cars.

The bespoke Lanark is inspired by those cars but is also completely different. It has Mini Cooper headlights, Miata taillights, an electric charging port hidden inside a gas tank lid, scallops in the fenders (which Drew admits are influenced by the Corvette), bespoke wheels, and a touchscreen on the dash. The car also has a hood emblem, designed by Drew’s wife, which shows a Scottish Thistle and the Cascade Mountains, since his parents lived most of their lives in Colorado.

The Lanark also has British flag emblems on the sides, not Scottish. Scott tried to explain his reasoning for that, saying he chose what he thought was “a nice midpoint” between Scotland and the European cars that he loved as a kid.

“I kinda haven’t mentioned that to my dad yet,” Scott admitted about the British flag. “He’ll probably be like, ‘Get that off of there and put on the Lion Rampant!’”

Scott worked on the one-off automobile with master mechanic Ant Anstead, and their collaboration turned into a Discovery+ television series, Drew’s Dream Car. It wasn’t an easy ride, especially for Anstead, who learned that his “client” was very insistent about what he wanted. Scott also admits that despite his deep affection for automobiles, he was also a little surprised by the complexity of actually building one.

“I’ve designed so many houses over the years—we’ve done everything from new developments to renovations and rehabs, and also taking historic homes and trying to revitalize (them) while keeping the original charm …,” Drew tells Jay. “I do houses that are a lot bigger and have a lot more rooms and (I thought), ‘This is just a car. How hard can it be?’ Then I got into it and I realized it was hard. I got in a little over my head.”

“And you’re tall,” Jay jokes, “so to be in over your head, that’s a lot.”

“It’s 10,000 components coming all together,” says Scott, who is 6-foot-4, “… but it was fun and we got it done in the end.”

Actually, Scott’s height came into play from the start, as the car’s batteries had to be stacked to allow for plenty of legroom. And although the windscreen isn’t very large—because Scott didn’t want it to “look like a clown car”—it still does the job because the ample leg room allows the driver and passenger to sit lower in the car.

Built with “a Tesla motor, two-tube frame, a lot of Miata pieces,” the Lanark DS weighs only 2200 pounds, less than half that of a Tesla. It gets 300 miles on a full charge.

“Everything about this car speaks to me or my family in some way,” says Scott, who owns a Tesla Model S and a Rivian. “(Even) the fabric in the ‘chairs’ and mid-console is Scottish tartan.”

Oddly enough, considering that the car is electric, Scott decided against power steering because classic European sports cars don’t have it. “I was asked if I wanted power steering, (and) I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then I was given a look like, ‘You’re making this very unauthentic’ … So I said no to power steering.”

After Jay makes a joke about his wedding night while trying to get the bonnet to latch properly, the two go for a drive. Jay applauds the Lanark’s “excellent throttle response. This really is linear … They did a really good job on that.”

He also mentions that the car may eventually be auctioned for charity.

“This whole experience was amazing,” Scott says. “To make something that’s a family tribute means a lot to me, but what also means a lot is giving back … To be able to have somebody else who’s a huge car lover have something custom like this while still raising money for charity, that would be amazing.”

The discussion turns to EVs, renewable energy, and the high cost of gasoline.

“It is what it is,” Scott says. “It’s not like we can flip the switch and make everything electric tomorrow … (but) we’re getting there.”

Nearing the end of their time together, Jay—who insists he appreciates both combustion-engine and electric vehicles—praises the Lanark. “Well, Drew, it turned out very nice … You have a few scratches to fix on the front, but whoever gets this will be pretty lucky.”

“Wait a minute,” Scott interjects. “Did you scratch my car?”

“Um, no, that was there when it got here.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Tell me about it.”

Jay quickly signs off, telling his viewers, “We’ll see you next week with more gas cars, I promise!”

“Woah, woah, woah,” Scott says, pretending to be offended, “I’m still here.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Leno is impressed by Drew Scott’s bespoke electric sports car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Just under a year has passed since legendary Hoonigan founder, rally competitor, and world-class stunt driver Ken Block passed away in a snowmobile accident near his home in Park City, Utah. When news of his passing reached the automotive world, millions of fans lamented his loss and figured that it would mean the end of the Gymkhana stunt-driving videos that made him a household name.

But early last month, Audi, who had only recently become the OEM partner with Block’s company, Hoonigan, announced that there was one last video on the way, filmed shortly before Ken’s accident. That video dropped today, and ay Dios Mio, is it epic.

Electrickhana Two: One More Playground, Mexico City takes place in the same locale as another one of Block’s previous films. Unlike the latter, in which Block used a specially prepped Focus (Ford was Hoonigan’s OEM partner at the time), this one features the absolutely mental Audi S1 Hoonitron, an 800-volt drift missile whose performance beggars belief.

As expected, Block makes the S1 Hoonitron do things that seem to bend the laws of physics. Undoubtedly, the instantaneous nature with which the all-electric S1 Hoonitron can deliver 4400 lb-ft of torque helps with some of these moves, as do the conventional differentials, which allow Block to adjust the slide characteristics to exactly how he wants. (Check out that opening shot—the unique engineering of the S1 means Block can spin each set of wheels in opposing directions, which helps him produce that backwards, moving burnout.)

Watching Block link lurid slides together, one after the other, while smoking his way through Mexico City’s streets, will never stop being enjoyable. The film has every type of stunt imaginable; Jumps, long slides with tiny slip angles, short slides with ridiculous slip angles, reverse entries, jumps where the whole car is sideways in the air—you name it, Block pulls it off.

At one point, Block even stops off at Felipe Ángeles International Airport, the main hub for Mexico City’s international travelers, for a few slides, donuts, and general hooning. (As impressive as the stunts are, we’re equally as impressed that the Hoonigan team managed to get the airport managers on board.)

There’s no replacing a guy like Ken Block, and the automotive community undoubtedly still feels his absence. It’s thrilling to watch his daughter, Lia, carry on her father’s legacy behind the wheel and forge her own path through rallying, open-wheel racing, and more. Perhaps one day, we’ll get an Electrikhana film with Lia behind the wheel. One can only hope.

Ken Block and the Hoonigan crew absolutely knocked this film out of the park. Though he’s no longer with us, his passion for creative and exciting automobiles and driving will linger for decades to come.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Watch Ken Block’s last (and maybe his coolest) stunt video appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Lionsgate Entertainment, purveyors of such films as The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D (2005), Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006), Bratz (2007), Leprechaun 3: Origins (2014), and all 10 movies in the Saw franchise (2004–23), may just have a new hit on its hands.

Race for Glory, which opens in theaters, on demand, and digitally on January 5, 2024, tells the story of Lancia’s 1983 Group B campaign in the World Rally Championship and the Italian firm’s fierce battle with Audi. With the German carmaker’s introduction of four-wheel drive ushering in a technological turning of the tide within the sport, 1983 represented a last-gasp effort for Lancia and its gorgeous Montecarlo-based, mid-engine, rear-drive 037. Spoiler alert: Lancia claimed the title.

The film stars Riccardo Scamarcio as Lancia team principal Cesare Fiorio, who recruits German ace Walter Röhrl (Volker Bruch) away from the Opel team with which he had won the drivers title only a year before. A skeptical Röhrl, who knows that Audi’s approach is the future, reluctantly agrees to join Lancia. As this is “a true David vs. Goliath story,” you can imagine where it goes from here.

“Against all odds,” reads the teaser accompanying the new trailer, “Lancia battles to regain its former glory with an unbeatable combination of bold innovation and extraordinary courage.” And Walter Röhrl, obviously … Daniel Brühl, who you’ll recognize from his portrayal of Niki Lauda in Rush, is cast as Audi team boss Roland Gumpert (latterly of Gumpert Apollo fame).

Riding the recent-ish wave of dramatic car stories as told on the big screen that began with 2013’s Rush then continued with Ford v Ferrari (2019), Lamborghini (2022, another Lionsgate joint), and most recently Ferrari (2023), Race for Glory (not to be confused with 1989’s Race for Glory, about an underdog motorcycle racer who takes on the world) aims to translate “the thrill of the road with this action-packed sports drama inspired by true events.” Heady stuff.

The trailer features all the tropes we’ve come to expect from these sorts of films, and car aficionados will likely want to take the racing scenes with a grain of salt, lest we be offended by incorrect engine sounds and the odd untruth. But it’s nice to see rallying get some feature-length love, particularly the controversial Group B era. Ahead of the movie’s release, those interested in seeing the drama of Group B without the gaudy filter of Hollywood should prime themselves with the fantastic documentaries Too Fast To Race and Still Too Fast to Race.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post New <em>Race for Glory</em> movie jumps into Lancia-Audi battle for Group B appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Ferrari, the much-anticipated biopic by director Michael Mann, which opens in theaters on Christmas Day, is a holiday present for movie buffs, automotive junkies, and motorsports fans. And it comes at a great time, right amid the barren off-season of auto racing. “I think it is the best motorsports movie ever made,” actor Patrick Dempsey, a star of the movie and a successful race driver in his own right, said in an interview with Hagerty.

The film takes place during the summer of 1957 and follows the trials of Enzo Ferrari, played by Adam Driver. Enzo is still grieving from the death of his son Dino a year earlier, as well as dealing with the repercussions of the infidelity which bore his illegitimate son, 12-year-old Piero (née Piero Lardi). While struggling with the current financial crisis threatening to send his company into bankruptcy, he prepares his cars to win the Mille Miglia endurance race.

Dempsey portrays Piero Taruffi, the Italian racer, sportsman, and engineer who won the 1957 Mille Miglia for Scuderia Ferrari. The 50-year-old Taruffi retired after that victory. Dempsey, 57, is close enough in age to fill the role, even more convincingly so with the shock of dyed white hair required for him to look the part.

Still best known for his role in the TV series Grey’s Anatomy, Dempsey considers the movie to be a long-awaited gift. It offered the opportunity to combine his skill as an actor with his passion for racing cars. “Ferrari was the perfect experience for me because I love the era and have so much respect for the drivers of that time,” he said.

For decades Dempsey held the movie rights to The Limit, author Michael Cannell’s story of American Phil Hill winning the 1961 Formula 1 World Championship. Mann’s biopic, Ferrari, which is based in part on the Brock Yates masterpiece Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine, had been on his radar. Dempsey says its movie rights have changed hands several times over the past 30 years. Mann acquired the original script from fellow director Sydney Pollack.

“I’ve been tracking the project for 15 years and knew about the script three years ago,” Dempsey said.

Production on Ferrari began in July of 2022 and concluded in October. Much of that time was spent in Modena, Italy. “We had great support from the factory with plenty of their cars from that era, plus from collectors who wanted their car in the movie. You will find plenty of Easter eggs in the background of the scenes.”

“I spent as much as 10 hours a day in the car,” he continued. “The most seat time since my last full-time season racing in 2015.”

Some scenes feature authentic 1950s Ferrari F1 cars in the background, but cars in the movie’s action sequences were actually Caterham chassis with vintage bodywork built on top, Dempsey explained. He described the feel of driving these cars as “a bit like being in a Ferrari 550 Spyder,” complete with concerns about the lack of any sort of protective cage. His co-drivers in the movie cars included racers Derek Hill, Ben Collins, and Marino Franchitti.

Dempsey researched his character in multiple ways. He visited the Piero Taruffi Museum in Bagnoregio, Italy, and combed through the Ferrari archives in Modena and Maranello, where he found hand-written notes from the race. Additional background material he gleaned from reading articles from MotorSport Magazine and books like The Technique of Motor Racing, penned by Taruffi, and Piero Taruffi: The Silver Fox, written by his daughter, Prisca Taruffi. The actor met and talked with Prisca when she visited the set.

As for director Michael Mann, his background spans decades in the entertainment industry. He has produced, written, and directed iconic works in television and movies such as Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, The Aviator, Manhunter, Collateral, and The Last of the Mohicans.

Mann’s perspective, as Dempsey described the new biopic, is “a great look behind the door” of Enzo, whose name is most legendary in auto racing history, and whose Prancing Horse logo represents one of the most recognized brands in the world. The legacy was crafted generations before “brand” was a household term.

Working with Mann was an education, Dempsey said. “It is staggering how much info he has, so he is demanding. He nit-picks and gives you an incredible sense of fine-tuning each scene. His attention to detail is amazing. Some scenes took two days to set up.

“Michael is focused completely on every detail. Many of the crew in those scenes are retired Ferrari racing mechanics. We never changed the dialogue. He is tough that way.”

Being on set was, the actor said,  “the closest feeling to being in the real pits.”

Dempsey speaks from experience. His racing career began in 2004 in the Panoz spec series and he worked his way up to the professional ranks of the American Le Mans Series and the Weathertech SportsCar Championship. He made his debut at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2009 in a Ferrari F430, a race in which he and co-drivers Joe Foster and Don Kitch piloted the GT2 car to ninth in class. It took three more trips to France and a switch to the Porsche 911 RSR before Dempsey found himself on the podium, finishing second in 2015 in the GTE Am class with Patrick Long and Marco Seefried.

The actor’s promotional schedule has been an endurance race of its own over the last several months: promoting the movie at the Venice Film Festival, preview screenings at the Formula 1 races in Austin and Las Vegas, and the official premiere in London in early December, followed up a couple of weeks later by the United States premiere in Los Angeles.

Dempsey doesn’t seem to mind. Nearly twenty years after his first racing exploits, his racing and acting careers are merging. He considers it a privilege to win on the big screen in a film that represents Enzo, among the most revered figures in racing. Another high point: the chance to highlight perhaps the greatest (and last) true automobile race through the Italian countryside.

Every scene in the film contains conflict. Dempsey described Ferrari as “very much a soap opera … It captures the essence and toils of auto racing.” On Christmas Day, audiences can experience all these storylines meeting at the finish line.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Interview: Patrick Dempsey heralds <em>Ferrari</em> as “the best motorsports movie ever made” appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Innovations came fast and furious during the early years of the automobile, and racing played a vital role in many such advancements. Today, many of the cars that made names for themselves on the race tracks of yore are lost to the sands of time. Of the ones that remain, we have a soft spot for the ones that still get exercise. The latest episode of Jay Leno’s Garage looks at one such car, a 1911 EMF Model 30.

In 1908, EMF was founded by three Detroiters: coachbuilder Barney Everitt, ex-Ford product manager Walter Flander, and William Metzger, a former Cadillac employee and someone who some folks say was the first car dealer in America. The talented trio grabbed a letter from each last name, and voila, EMF was born. The company produced a handful of models during it’s short life, some under the EMF name and some which were eventually badged as Studebaker models.

Like many automakers of the era, EMF tried its hand at racing. This particular car was sent to the 1911 American Grand Prize race, the final running of an event that brought grand prix racing to Savannah, Georgia. As owner Dale Critz Jr. tells it, this car was the first of three consecutive Model 30s to be plucked straight from the assembly line and configured with speedster-type bodywork, seen here. The latter two cars (numbered 34 and 35, to follow this one’s numeration) received special Firestone tires before the race that enabled them to finish first and second; this car finishing in third place.

This EMF Model 30 features a stock flathead engine that, although Jay and Dale don’t specifically mention it, is likely 228 cubic-inches in displacement. The light car class that this car competed in was limited to 230 cubic-inch engines, thus tipping us off to which of EMF’s engines would be under the hood. Leno and Critz Jr. take some time to go over the rest of the systems in the car, which really paint a picture of just how brave the folks that raced these cars in period really were. There are no brakes on the front wheels, and only a hand-operated brake lever to slow the rear wheels.

Race cars of this era often have two seats because you had to have a ride-along mechanic alongside to help manage the multitude of tricky function and things to keep track of while driving. From that second seat, a mechanic would operate the hand-pump fastened to the side of the bench to regulate fuel pressure. The pump has since been modified to run both the fuel and the oil pressure systems, which feed from the two tanks out back. The larger tank is for oil, because these were total-loss oiling systems.

Despite the primitive braking systems, these cars weren’t slow by any means. This one boasts a speedometer that can read up to 60 mph, something Jay and Dale reminisce on while crawling over the car before the drive. “In the early days of the twentieth century, speed was the new sensation,” explains Leno. “There was no inherent fear of speed yet.” That probably explains the primitive brakes.

And this car proved that absence of fear, recording an average speed of 58 mph around the 17-mile course back in 1911, according to Critz Jr. seeing “something going a mile a minute was pretty impressive,” admits Leno.

Though the car originally had two spark plugs per cylinder, Critz Jr. and his crew have modified it to run with one plug now, opting to use the second hole for a set of primer cups that help the car less cantankerous to start in foul weather conditions. With a little ether and a few cranks to prime it, the EMF Model 30 barks to life easily.

Out on the roads, the EMF’s engine produces plenty of low-end grunt for each of the three forward gears. The tachometer on the car reads up to just 1500 rpm, which seems low in modern context but was quite high for the time, according to Jay. The ride looks pretty decent too, thanks to leaf springs wrapped with twine that had been lubricated with oil. This one also has a Moto-Meter installed up front to measure the temperature of the coolant circulating the engine though Critz Jr. points out that the Moto-Meter wouldn’t have been run during the race, because that invention came out after 1911.

To see a car that’s more than a century old running and driving is always a treat, and Leno is clearly appreciative of the chance to experience such a thing. While we can’t promise you’ll get the chance to pilot a similarly-aged car, you can at least enjoy the full video of Jay’s time with the 1911 EMF Model 30.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Jay Leno takes a 112-year-old EMF Model 30 for a spin appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias waited 29 years to get the car he lusted after in high school. So you’ll have to forgive him if he gets a little excited about his 1994 Ford Mustang SVT Cobra.

It was clearly worth the wait.

Iglesias brought his newly acquired—and practically brand-new—Mustang SVT Cobra to Jay Leno’s Garage, and it was difficult to tell whether Jay was more blown away by the car and its ultra-low mileage or the fact that Iglesias actually graduated high school.

“Original and unrestored … only 12 miles from new,” Jay says, introducing the car before he then introduces his fellow comedian. “Also original and unrestored …”

“Much like the car, I have only 12 miles on me,” Iglesias jokes.

“It’s a hard 12 though,” Jay quips, “A lot of potholes.”

Jay explains that Ford built five 1994 Mustang SVT (Special Vehicle Team) Indianapolis 500 pace cars and 1000 additional replicas, one of which now belongs to Iglesias, who bought this one from a collector who started it regularly but rarely drove it. The Cobra features a 302-cubic-inch V-8 that produces 240 horsepower and is mated to a five-speed manual transmission.

“Let me tell you what’s so special about this car for me: 1994 is my (graduation) year,” Iglesias says. “This one is the car I wanted, but I couldn’t get my hands on it. This is the car that everybody wanted.”

When Fluffy mentions Vanilla Ice, Leno appears speechless, but not for the reason Iglesias thinks.

“I’m just stunned that you graduated,” Leno says. “I can’t believe it.”

After more banter, Iglesias says that he’s considering taking the car to the Woodward Dream Cruise next summer for its 30th birthday. He also explains how the Cobra is essentially a new car.

“I basically took all of the plastic off it,” he says. The only work he had done was to replace the tires and the gas tank, just to be safe. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it … the car is perfect.”

The biggest difference between Iglesias and the car’s previous owner is that Fluffy says he’s going to drive it. A lot. In that vein, the two comedians decide to “go out and double the mileage.” Jay happily agrees to take the wheel.

Iglesias says he feels a little sad for the previous owner, who obviously didn’t fully engage with the Cobra.

“I’m going to enjoy this car,” Iglesias vows. “My version of ‘enjoy it’ is driving it.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Leno “doubles the mileage” on fellow comic Iglesias’ 1994 Mustang SVT Cobra appeared first on Hagerty Media.

With the Camaro nameplate retiring soon, we’re honoring the beloved two-door with a series of love letters, fun lists, and memories. Many performance cars, especially nowadays, aim for an anodyne version of perfection that only a few can afford. The Camaro is for the rest of us—and it’s always ready to party. Still, we can’t pretend the car we’re about to celebrate over the next week or so is perfect. That in mind, let down your hair and come with us for a deep dive into what, exactly, makes the Camaro so bitchin’.

The Camaro lived a fruitful life on our city streets and open highways, but its role on the silver screen was just as noteworthy. Whether or not they entered the theater as car buffs, moviegoers from around the world were introduced to Chevrolet’s take on the classic pony car, and its muscular roles in many movies often stole the show. So let’s dig into five such movies where the Camaro took center stage.

Better Off Dead (1985)

Is there a better car for the dark humor present in this unconventional “coming of age” story of a teenage boy in the American suburbs? Very few cars embody the youthful energy and aspirational performance of a Camaro, especially in the 1980s when the first-generation models were both plentiful and affordable for a middle-class teenager.

Picking a black 1967 Camaro RS/SS for Better Off Dead was casting perfection: Motoring out of the garage for the first time to a classic Muddy Waters song was the perfect analogy for a teenage boy coming out of his shell. It was a moment of swagger and success for Lane Myer (played by John Cusack) and the moment altered his trajectory in the movie. Though I wish the Camaro’s headlight doors opened as it left the house, this remains a scene that few of us will forget.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

Here, we have the polar opposite of a darkly subtle comedy. The high-velocity action of 2 Fast 2 Furious wouldn’t be the same without a ’69 Camaro wearing racing stripes. Because the cars are truly the stars in this franchise, the film’s creators wisely crafted a first-gen Camaro with Yenko graphics inside and out for Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker). While the Yenko was demolished in an elaborate stunt, plenty of ’69 Camaros have met a similarly disastrous fate without exciting a single moviegoer. That’s gonna count for something, because there’s even a book chronicling how much effort went into preparing the cars in The Fast and The Furious movies.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Do Camaros and coming-of-age movies go hand in hand? Unfortunately, the 1981 Camaro Z-28 in Fast Times at Ridgemont High didn’t save the day like the Camaro in Better Off Dead. Instead, the ’81 was destroyed by careless Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) who clearly was a better surfer than he was a motorist. (Or not.) But the Camaro as a quintessential character-actor for movies about high school cannot be understated. It’s a pairing that endures, much like the popularity of the second-generation F-body in the darkest times of automotive performance.

Runaway Bride (1999)

I have a feeling that a romantic comedy like Runaway Bride is low on many of our movie lists, especially one with a 46 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the fiercely independent personality of Maggie Carpenter (Julia Roberts) only has one peer in the automotive world: a 1999 Camaro Z28 convertible in Light Pewter Metallic with an LS1 soundtrack. Perhaps a Firebird would suffice for the altar-jumping bride, but this Camaro is more of a sweet charmer, with that toothy smile above a set of chrome wheels. While it’s true that General Motors sold this car back in 2009 for an impressive $28,850, some problems—like GM’s bankruptcy ordeal—are too big for one Camaro to solve. It only makes sense this Camaro would flee before it got ensnared in a messy divorce.

Transformers (2007)

The post 5 movie-famous Camaros from the ’80s to the aughts appeared first on Hagerty Media.

You’ll be surprised how much acoustic guitars and bespoke Porsches have in common. Fourteen years ago, no one thought the world needed custom Porsche 964 restorations worth well into six figures. Forty-nine years ago, nobody thought the acoustic guitar was in need of reinvention.

In each case, a wildly successful Californian company has since proved the naysayers wrong while teaching us something about the reinvention of old ideas.

Taylor Guitars was founded in 1974 by Kurt Listug and Bob Taylor. In the decades since, they have brought modern engineering and fresh thinking to an industry dominated by tradition and fuzzy intuition. Through CNC machining and constant innovation, the company has grown into one of the world’s largest builders of acoustic instruments, but also a compass for the guitar industry, influencing even legacy giants like Martin and Gibson.

Singer Vehicle Design is younger. English expat Rob Dickinson found public exposure in the 1990s as the vocalist for shoegaze band Catherine Wheel. In 2009, he started a company to “reimagine” the Porsche 911 through heavily customized, ground-up restorations. Singer’s jewel-like work costs as much as a West Coast house and looks it, but it also launched an industry, birthing countless copycats. Singer reps won’t admit this publicly, but the company’s work is so good, it’s admired even within the executive suites of Porsche itself.

Happily, Dickinson and Listug know and respect each other. The former owns and plays a Taylor, while the latter, a longtime 911 fan, just took delivery of a Singer restoration after a four-year wait.

Mindful of all this, we toured Singer’s new restoration facility in Los Angeles. After that, we visited Taylor’s modern San Diego factory. Finally, we sat down with Dickinson, then Listug, and then Taylor’s new CEO/chief luthier—the architect of its recent renaissance—Andy Powers.

We met these men separately but asked each the same questions—on creativity and inspiration, but also on how you make something new in a hidebound environment. Their answers comprise the virtual roundtable on the following pages.

All three men love machines and music and view both in unique ways. (Powers even drives a vintage pickup to work and wrenches on it himself.) But enough introduction—we’ll let the creators speak for themselves.

Taylor now owns 40 percent of the American acoustic market. Singer has delivered more than 200 customer cars. Growth like that doesn’t happen by accident. And yet you can’t totally plan it, either.

Rob Dickinson: It takes a nutjob, an individual. Just setting out on these goals… cannot be done by a committee. It can only be done by someone who’s got something in their brain that they just can’t shake off. That they’re convinced will be good.

Did you ask Kurt if he imagined Taylor would grow to this? I can probably guess his answer. There was never a destination to my idea. I just knew I was absolutely f***ing convinced it was a good idea. In as much as it would not kill me, or bankrupt me, or bankrupt all the people—my wife’s family—providing the money to get it off the ground. I was just convinced it would be OK.

Kurt, did you and Bob ever think deeply about growth? Or was it just… finding the next cool step?

Kurt Listug: The things that you do are the things that make sense to do. We’re dreaming all the time about things we want that could be great for the business, but it’s a matter of timing and resources. What do you get really amped up about, that you want to work on and pursue?

We grew the business to $150 million a year and basically self-funded. We started with $10,000, we reinvested, grew and grew. Looking back, it seems impossible, but that’s what we did.

You waited four years for one of Rob’s restorations. Why?

Kurt: I’m a 911 guy. I’ve had 11 Porsche 911s. I saw [Singer’s work] in the magazines and thought: Wow, that’s really incredible. The workmanship, the quality of the craftsmanship, the design.

Rob is… being an artist. I hoped [the car] would be as good as I wanted it to be. It really exceeded my expectations.

You told me that ordering one felt like a leap. That a project this complex could be worth the money and time.

Kurt: The car is reimagined, turned into something completely different. I like it when people do that, and really, any industry would just get stale and die without it.

With Andy being so creative, someone who can invent new guitar designs, that’s important to us—that’s who we want to be as a company. We want to make instruments that inspire people to create new music.

The music business and car business each run on an odd balance of tradition and new.

Kurt: With guitar companies, typically, when the founder gets old, they sell. The company is usually bought by financial people. They’re backing sales and marketing, and nobody’s in charge of design anymore.

The same old design becomes a legacy product. It doesn’t really advance, but it has to. You have to keep creating the new world, so to speak.

When I started the business, we couldn’t pay ourselves regularly for the first 12 years. I know with Rob, the company was basically financed early on by customers paying their deposits. He surrounded himself with people who were equally passionate. That’s how new things come into being.

Everyone knows these industries die if they don’t occasionally break out of the box. And yet they both push back on reinvention and call you nuts when you try.

Rob: It was just like, “We’ve got to build this and show our idea.” If you talk about it, people will just roll their eyes and say you’re f***ing bonkers.

That’s why we didn’t have any luck raising any money before we started Singer. We had to do it ourselves. “I don’t really understand. What do you mean, great quality? How are you going to make it look any different, any better?”

You start to get bored with those conversations quite quickly. I think the only way to do it is to build it. It comes through sheer passion or sheer insanity: I can’t stop thinking about this when I go to sleep, and I can’t stop thinking about it when I get up.

I love how artists and engineers, when they start a project, don’t always know where it will end up. They just know where to start.

Kurt: It’s getting an idea, an intuition, of the direction to head in.

Rob: Lots of people have good ideas. But lots of people can [move on, go] do something else. I just was unable to do that. To the extent that I pushed aside a reasonably rubbish rock-and-roll career for the sake of a car I had become obsessed with.

If everyone thinks something is fine as-is, how do you begin thinking about changing it? Is that process rooted in need? Problem-solving?

Andy Powers: All of the above. I have all these things, and none of them satisfy me—why not?

If you’re making something new through deeply considered choices, how do you prioritize that work process, not get overwhelmed by possibility?

Andy: What do I want it to be that it isn’t? That’s incentive No. 1. I don’t have what I want. I have no means to get it unless I build it.

Another part would be, maybe I have the ability to build something that nobody else has. Knowledge or tools or personal initiative. There’s also that simple question: Why not do this? With Southern California… in other places, the expectation is: Don’t do that, that’s not the way it’s done. Here, it’s: Oh, yes, do your thing, man. Hope you don’t get hurt.

Rob: The process isn’t work. I grew up in the Porsche community in England and was deeply within it for 5 to 10 years before I moved to America. Gaining opinions and attitudes, desires for what was best, what was average. The natural library builds up in the head as to what great can be.

So many great bits of new have compassed off California culture. Like how early hot-rodding evolved, couldn’t have grown the same anywhere else.

Andy: It’s the opportunity of a place and ability and desire all stacking together to go: Hey, this should be, and there’s nobody to tell me no. They’re not even paying attention.

Rob: And it is unavoidably entangled in ego. Wanting to express yourself. To be seen as the person who did something that needs to be done.

Ego can be productive.

Rob: If I’m brutally honest, I thought someone would do [what Singer does] before I did, and I wanted to get in there first.

I was thinking last night about where the great music has come from. The best rock-and-roll is audacious. Audacity is a product of ambition and ego, I think. Wanting to make your mark, to go: F*** it, I’ve done it, go tell me I’m wrong. The audacity to do that in a song! The Beatles had it flowing out of every pore.

Does that process look different when you’re rethinking someone else’s creation?

Andy: It does. You feel a great dose of respect, and you don’t want to upset that legacy. You already love what it is. In the case of a Porsche, there is a very emotional connection Porsche drivers have—with the legacy, the fenders, the sound, the feel.

Musicians have an attachment to their instrument that makes it behave almost like a living thing. It’s intimate—used as an expression of emotion, philosophy, aesthetic. You don’t want to do something that is totally irrelevant to that legacy, and yet, within context of it, you can make your changes.

One of the things that was a real departure in the history of acoustic guitars—we started bolting the neck on instead of doing woodworking joinery to glue those parts together. Mostly because [that change] makes it more serviceable. It just does a better job serving the musician over the life of the instrument.

Because guitars change shape over time. Wood moisture shifts, the neck has to be adjusted to play right.

Andy: Instead of a super-invasive and expensive repair job, this takes like 10 minutes. You take it apart, you put a different set of spacers in—it’s no different from, say, changing a car’s alignment.

Kurt: It’s all done with CNC [milling] equipment. Bob designed shims of different thicknesses… you can change, in thousandths of an inch, the angle of the body.

Before, you had to break the guitar apart to do that. It was decades to get to the point where he could do that. I knew he would eventually figure out how.

Andy: We went to great pains to make it look familiar. You want it to look and feel comfortable and respect the tradition of how the thing performs. More recently, we totally changed the internal architecture of an acoustic guitar.

Taylor calls it V-class bracing—this massive shift in how guitars are built.

Kurt: Un-freaking-believable. That’s a problem guitars have had forever: They’ll go out of tune once you go up the neck. Andy figured it out from surfing, looking at wave-forms. Sound is waveforms. He figured out it was really the guitar top fighting itself. He redesigned it. His V-class bracing, they play in tune all the way up the neck. That’s never been done. Ever.

Andy: It was a series of circumstances: Oh, I should take this influence from archtop guitars and mandolins, all these different instrument-building legacies, and I’ll combine those in this funny surfing context—that would give me a better architecture for how an acoustic guitar could work.

I could voice that and steer it in a lot of different directions. But the first course of business was, take this radically new idea that performs better and deliberately voice it so it is familiar to what a Taylor player already loves.

It’s not going to come out of left field—I’m going to hide it. When you play it, you’re going to instantly go: That is the sonic signature of a Taylor guitar. It’s all that I like, there’s just more there.

Why are we so compelled to make new from the old without losing the old?

Rob: [Our cars], in my humble opinion, they’re me thinking to myself: This idea can be even more fantastic than it already is.

I live in the past. I don’t like sci fi. I don’t like computers, really—I’m not very good with them. I live in a rose-tinted world of trips to France with my parents in the 1970s. From 1970 to 1985, we spent six weeks each year driving down to and around the south of France, sometimes into Spain.

You can imagine what I saw on the roads. The glamour and beauty, the birth of the appeal of the automobile to me, as an object of deep, dry-mouth desire. Those cars became my life.

I think it’s the same with music. My songs are very much a product of loving other people’s songs. I think our work on the 911 is very much a product of us loving the 911 and wanting to do our own thing.

That “dry-mouth desire” can be hard to share. Is it ever frustrating, trying to get a customer on board? “I can’t explain it, just trust me?”

Kurt: It’s not frustrating. It’s a challenge. You think about Rob, how he went about making a [964 have the nose of a] long-hood 911? What it takes to rebuild the whole thing to be able to do that? I texted the guys up there about the steering. I wondered what they’d done differently because it felt so good. I got back this answer: We’re using this and that and there was a 993 something-or-other and we designed our own bushing for this and that.

It’s just… they knew no bounds, to make it as good as they could.

A Porsche designer once told me that redesigning the 911 was half privilege, half curse. Everyone wants the car to get better, but no one wants it to change. It ties into this old saw in the car business, how what the customer wants and what they say they want don’t always jibe.

Andy: Ask your favorite band: We need a new single—can you make it different from the last one and make it sound just like the last one?

To me, it feels like a left-brain/right-brain exercise. You’re going to look at this thing as the sum of its parts, and at the same time, you’re going to see it as a cohesive whole: What do I like about it? What feels expressive?

Musicians are not doing their business with dollars and cents. They work with the currency of emotion. They’re trying to make sense of a wider world. That’s the language we need to think about if you’re going to disassemble this thing. Let’s say we want the guitar to have more empathy. What the heck does that turn into? What does it mean when a car has great road feel? What translates through a steering wheel? Technically, that’s a flaw, but why is it so dynamic? It feels like you’re engaging with a living thing. That’s something that needs to be preserved.

Those are all measurable, quantifiable things, but what they really turn into for a musician is: What can I do with this? How expressive can it be? I start disassembling them mentally. I want them to turn into the more subjective experience. Then, when I go back over to my holistic side, I want all of these components to still reflect and affirm each other. In other words, the guitar needs to sound the way it looks and look the way it feels.

That’s all fuzzy, personal stuff, but also real and universal.

Andy: It’s very real. If it looks a certain way, you want it to then feel that way when you pick it up. You want the sound that comes out of it to conjure up the same sensation.

So much of creativity orbits rules—new ones we make, old ones we break. Success can calcify that thinking. You don’t want to risk what you’ve built.

Kurt: I’ll give you an analogy of creativity versus not being creative, wanting to do the same thing over and over.

If you have financial people running, say, a record label, they’ll look at what’s been selling. They’ll say, I want you to sound like so-and-so. They’ll squash [an artist’s] creativity when that person really needs to develop their own voice, their own personality.

I think that’s just the nature of business types, because they’re used to looking at metrics like that. They’re not always able to discover something new, see something in it.

The car business is so similar.

Rob: I’m asked more and more what I think of the industry that perhaps we had a hand in inspiring. I’m going, “Why don’t you try and imagine what Singer might do next, rather than trying to copy what we’re doing now?”

I look at this new [Singer-like] Porsche 928 [restoration] that’s just come out. The entrepreneur behind this company found a car designer that he loved, a good car designer but with no passion for Porsche whatsoever. It’s like, let’s change it as much as possible for the sake of reimagining it. Rather than look at how the guys that were responsible for the 928 [thought], set about reimagining that.

Apparently, though, a lot of people love it. Which is fantastic. Who am I to say what the rules are?

Who are any of us?

Rob: It’s interesting how other people misinterpret why we’re around. Yes, I wanted to start a business. But what I really wanted was to make a name synonymous with doing something particularly, dare I say, unusual in the automotive sphere.

To get under the skin of a subject and understand it. Not just from a design aspect. From an industrial aspect, a social aspect.

The 911 is such a social thing. It’s bought for what it means, how it feels. And yet the business model is so metric-driven. Each new one must be faster, or they’ve failed.

Kurt: You stake 15 more horsepower every time you turn up with a new one. They have to give people a reason to buy it.

Right! As if a Porsche weren’t desirable already. The balance is so funny. If carmakers ask the customer what they want, they want a crash-proof ’69 Camaro with 3000 horsepower and a 5-pound curb weight. Does the music business have more latitude to listen there?

Kurt: The music business is really, really teeny compared to the car business. They don’t have the capability or the resources [to respond] to the public as quickly.

I admire what Porsche does. I think they’ve done a remarkable job with not wrecking the 911. They’re basically all the same animal, but the personalities are all a little bit different.

Does it ever feel limiting to work with only one instrument? One car? Evolving one object for most of your career?

Andy: I break them into categories. There’s always the projects that are going into production in six months. Some things, we can’t make in even 10 years. The players aren’t ready for it. We’re not ready to figure out how to make it.

To me, it’s exciting to work on all of them. Because you’re a product. Whatever a person makes is a snapshot of who they are right then—your experiences, influences, resources, inspiration at the moment. That might be the availability or lack of a certain material. It might be a musician asking for something. It might be a changing aesthetic that you can’t even put into words yet, but you know is there.

I’ll look at something and go, man, we just put everything into it. Now, two years later, how the heck are we going to do that again?

You can’t just double your efforts. You won’t get anything new or fresh out of that.

Rob: I think that Singer has an opportunity, maybe, to become a car manufacturer. Because of whatever we’ve done thus far. I’m slowly starting to put together the idea of what our first [ground-up] car will be.

In the past, I didn’t really scratch that itch, because I didn’t know what it was. I’m starting to get a better idea. I think it’s a journey through the past to get to something brand-new. That no one has ever seen before.

The question is, do we reimagine 911s for the rest of our lives? Or do we do other things with that notoriety that perhaps we’ve gotten? I don’t know.

With creating, what does it feel like when you realize you’ve gone…

Andy: Too far in the wrong direction?

It’s typically coming out of the struggle to bow to some market metric. Let’s say as a company, we want to make a new thing, and we understand that there’s a market and a price point we should look for. And that if we arguably delivered a set of features at that price, mathematically, you would have a certain number of customers.

The reality is, it rarely works that way. As I said, musicians aren’t doing their business with the currency of dollars and cents. Fortunately, we’ve never really gone that far. You tiptoe up to the line and go: Oh, that was the line, back away.

There was a psychologist, I think his name was Mendo. He did a lot of work back in the ’50s and ’60s trying to define creativity. The closest he ever got was saying that his essence of creativity was the formation of a connection between disassociated ideas.

You take two things that aren’t related, and you make some sort of connection between them, you’ve created something new.

What’s scarier—creating on a blank sheet with endless freedom, or inside fences?

Andy: Both are exciting and terrifying. Within an existing box, you don’t want to ruin it. You have a lineage, an expectation. A community of enthusiasts. You can all stand around this thing and agree on what it is.

Don’t disrupt that. That’d be like some kid stomping on your sandcastle. At the same time, [freedom] has its own pitfalls. Something entirely new—I might make one and go, “Well, this was exactly what I wanted,” and nobody else will agree. “You have what you wanted, now get back to making some we all like.”

Rob: A blank sheet is always scarier, but only if you don’t have an idea.

If you got an idea, it’s great. Approaching that blank canvas each morning. Even if you are embracing the traditional mores of popular music, which is built on repetition. If you’re challenging and you’re audacious, maybe your second chorus isn’t the same as the first chorus. Maybe there’s only one chorus. Imagine three verses and one chorus—f*** me!

When any band is trying to find new ways of doing things, these things are always experimented with. And you do find yourself coming back to this very satisfying sense, if something is really lovely, you want to hear it again.

It sounds so easy once you see someone do it. Making something new. Convincing people it’s worth it. And yet.

Kurt: I was the person who did all the sales, called on stores, and drove around the country. People working in guitar stores, or guitar players, they always want to see a new guitar. For ours, it was the [ease of] playability. Bob liked the thinner neck—he didn’t see any reason why we needed to have a [more traditional] bigger neck.

Everything in the business is problem-solving like that, even the creativity with marketing. When I had the money to start doing advertising, I didn’t want ads that looked like everybody else’s. It helped put the company on the map.

Really, anything you approach, you have to look at the problem and come up with a creative solution. Not just do what everyone else has done. Because who wants what everyone else has done? That already exists.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Work, Wheels, and Wood: A conversation with Taylor Guitars and Singer Vehicle Design appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Where did the universe come from? What is our role in it? What do you buy if your penny stocks have paid off, if not a white-on-white Lamborghini Countach? These are important questions. One of them has an easy answer.

In the late 1960s, Marcello Gandini hammered a wedge into the supercar styling paradigm with the original Countach design. Horacio Pagani gave it a radical sendoff two decades later with his work on the 25th Anniversary model. But only one Countach was modified under the direction of cinema’s Martin Scorsese. Unlike the sketchbooks and clay of bygone, brilliant automotive designers, the Oscar-winner opted to use a few golf carts and a flatbed truck to achieve his vision.

On November 25th, the Bonhams auction house will auction off the (anti)hero car driven by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jordan Belfort, in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The sale is part of Bonhams’ inaugural “On the Grid: The Abu Dhabi Auction” at the Yas Marina Circuit.

The Bianco-Polo-over-Bianco-leather 1989 Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary car featured in Wolf has been preserved in as-destroyed condition since the 2013 premiere of the film. Bonhams estimates it will sell for $1.5–$2 million. That’s a lot of “fun coupons” for an already ridiculous car, in this case rendered immobile in pursuit of movie magic.

Just under 660 examples of the Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary model were built, with the going rate for a #2 (Excellent) condition example in excess of $600,000, and a merely #4 (Fair) condition example commanding $345,000 on average. But if true excess is what you seek, why not spend multiple times that amount to own an inoperable one used in one of the most debaucherous driving sequences ever put to film? You may not be the fraudulent Wall Streeter-type, popping ‘ludes and opening scissor doors with your feet after rolling down the stairs of the Brookville Country Club, but you can still own the ultimate signifier of unchecked hedonism.

The auction lot also includes a costume from the scene; a director’s chair and clapboard signed by Scorsese, DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie; two crew hoodies; and not one, but two—yes, two—copies of the film on DVD. (A pair of VHS tapes would be more period-correct, but at least the car is the real deal.)

In fact, two Countach 25th Anniversaries were used for the scene, the other being an unscathed backup car seen only for a few seconds. That makes the star car shown here a true cinematic one-of-one. In that context, we can better wrap our heads around its potential value exceeding even the most perfect, most original Countach 25th Anniversary.

As-is the car is more or less sculpture. Tampering with that, even to restore it to perfection if that’s possible, likely would reduce its value even though certificates of authenticity proving the Lamborghini’s on-screen provenance might still make it worth more compared with a “normal” one.

Another option is to get the thing mechanically sorted and drivable while leaving as much of the aesthetic damage intact as possible—call it movie prop patina. Then again, anyone with more than a million to spend on a non-running wrecked Lamborghini might have an suitable spot to simply display it in a Scarface-esque compound somewhere.

The Wolf of Wall Street is one of the rare movies that rivals Goodfellas in terms of fans taking the wrong message from the  corrupt characters’ exploits on screen. But if someone unironically thinks greed is good, this Countach would look quite cool displayed next to a pillar holding up a diamond-encrusted skull by Damien Hirst or something.

Car enthusiasts would likely prefer to own a different Wolf’s Countach—Walter Wolf’s to be specific—but nobody can promise such a purchase would come with a pair of sweatpants and $35 worth of DVDs. Tough call how to spend those fun coupons.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How many fun coupons will buy the wrecked Countach from <em>The Wolf of Wall Street</em> ? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The most recent episode of Jay Leno’s Garage could be boiled down to one phrase: ”It’s not that bad”—which, when describing the much-maligned, low-priced 1980s Yugo, might actually be a compliment.

“Production problems, quality problems, safety issues—and they all break down,” comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham says, listing the economy car’s drawbacks. “But when it’s running the way it’s supposed to, I will defend this thing and say it’s not that bad.

“This would have been a car that my dad probably would have purchased, because his idea of a vehicle was to just get from Point A to Point B, and that’s all that mattered. I think 4000 bucks (the price of the earliest base-model Yugos available in the U.S.), he would have walked in, handed them cash for one of these things, and driven away happy.”

Marketed in the United States by Malcolm Bricklin from 1985–92, the Yugoslavian-built Yugo was essentially a disposable car, which is why they’re no longer prevalent in the U.S.

“Its reputation precedes it,” Leno says when introducing Dunham and his almost-all-original 1988 Yugo GVS to the show. “(But) I have to admit, it’s one of the nicest ones I’ve ever seen. It’s probably one of the few left.”

“Because who would keep a $4000 car?” Dunham says, as Leno points in his direction.

“It wasn’t a terrible car,” Leno admits, despite the Yugo’s reputation as the worst car sold in America.

“Have you ever driven one?” Dunham asks.

“I might have,” Leno replies. “It’s not like ‘Oh, boy, remember that day when we took the Yugo out? We went up to Laguna Seca.’ It’s the kind of car … when somebody offers you a ride, you say, ‘Well, alright.’”

Which begs the question, why would Dunham own one? “I love cars that start conversations,” he says. “You put this in a car show next to a car that’s two million bucks, and people are going to gather around this one.”

Dunham’s front-wheel drive Yugo is powered by a 1.1-liter four-cylinder engine that generates 55 horsepower and is mated to a four-speed transmission. The spare tire is nestled up front between the engine and the driver, which Dunham says Yugo actually promoted as a safety feature.

Leno guesses that the car weighs 2300 pounds, but in fact it is almost 450 pounds lighter than that. “It’s like a motorcycle,” Dunham says. “You know if you get in an accident you’re probably dead.”

Dunham explains that 142,000 Yugos were sold in the U.S. and 800,000 worldwide, yet you rarely see one anymore because “nobody’s going to do preventive maintenance on a $4000 car … Does a real car person buy this car?” The answer is no.

In that vein, Dunham points out, “The ad campaign for this was pretty funny. The ads said, ‘Everybody needs a Yugo sometime.’ What does that mean? It means that at some point in your life you’re poor, and you need to settle for crap.”

Opening the trunk, Dunham “surprisingly” discovers a ventriloquist dummy and brings it to life so that he can tell a few jokes. The best one: “Hey, Jay, you know what’s included with every Yugo owners’ manual? A bus schedule!”

Before taking the car out for a drive in the Los Angeles area, Leno asks Dunham what GVS stands for. “Great Vehicle … Sorta,” he answers. 

The Yugo jokes continue on the road, even when Dunham tries to be serious. After a couple of women recognize the car (we’re not sure if they recognize Leno and Dunham), Dunham once again praises the Yugo’s unusual celebrity status.

“You show up someplace driving something like this,” he says, “and you’re approachable.”

To which Leno replies, “Actually, people try to avoid you.”

Joking aside, the two agree that Dunham’s Yugo is adequate transportation, with decent pep and a smoother-than-expected gearbox—especially for its original $4000 price tag, which would be less than $11,000 today. But humor is how these two make a living, so …

“Did you buy this because of the Yugo jokes?” Leno asks.

“No, the Yugo jokes came with the car.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Leno, Jeff Dunham agree Yugo is “not that bad,” but is it any good? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Jack Swansey holds a degree in anthropology with a focus on car culture, and he is the world’s leading ethnographic authority (by default, if you must know) on NASCAR fandom. His love of the automobile fuels him to discover what cars mean to the people who own, drive, and love them. Read more Auto Anthro here. —EW

Racing movies are a Hollywood fixture, an action and drama genre to which cinematic storytellers regularly return. You might have noticed, however, that these films tend to be polarizing; mainstream audiences and real-life racing fans rarely agree on what makes a good racing movie or a bad one. I’ve met true gearheads who will defend Days of Thunder, Cannonball Run, or Sylvester Stallone’s Driven to their dying breaths, despite filmmaking gaffes or cheesy dialogue. And for every Ford v Ferrari that earns broad critical acclaim and undeniable box-office success, there’s a chorus of car enthusiasts eager to pick apart its every technical and historical inaccuracy.

The recent Gran Turismo summer blockbuster produced such a familiar dynamic. Despite $117M in box-office sales (against a $60M budget), car-savvy critics contend that it plays fast and loose (“on the edge of out of control,” some might say) with the order of events in the real-life racing career of Jann Mardenborough.

To understand from what or where these different perspectives stem, it helps to break down the medium of film into the most common narrative building blocks. There is a series of story beats that tend to occur in good movies—I often see screenwriter Christopher Vogler’s 12-step “Hero’s Journey”—but the most basic version is the famous “three-act structure.”

In the three-act form, the first act establishes the world in which the hero’s journey takes place. This act also defines what the journey is going to be about. In the beginning of Gran Turismo, Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) has a loving father who nevertheless disapproves of his son’s only ambition: to race cars. Success in this field seems impossible, since Jann’s only competitive experience behind the wheel is in the virtual world of PlayStation’s Gran Turismo. His eventual invitation to Nissan’s GT Academy, which gives gamers the chance to train as real-life racing drivers, serves as what Vogler would label the “call to adventure.” That opportunity is what sets the story in motion. Through it Jann meets a mentor figure, Jack Salter, (David Harbor) to help him improve his skills. Jann ultimately signs a contract with Nissan—“crossing the threshold” as Vogler would put it—into the world of professional racing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbqBqBwdRi0

Act two, usually the longest act in a good film, shows Mardenborough exploring and adjusting to his new environment in motorsports. He experiences success in some races and failure in others, eventually arriving at his lowest emotional point. In the case of the Gran Turismo movie, this nadir is his real-life accident in the Flugplatz section of the Nürburgring, in a VLN endurance race that claimed the life of a spectator. In reality, this crash happened in 2015, two years after the events that inspired the third act of Gran Turismo, in which the hero finds the power deep inside himself (“resurrection,” to Vogler) and emerges changed, if not triumphant.

According to Ben Queen, the screenwriter of Pixar’s Cars 2 and Cars 3, basic facts about racing make it tailor-made for a great film narrative: “built-in protagonists and antagonists—the other characters racing against our guy —the team element, the authenticity of the world.” You can check off all Vogler’s boxes here: the mentor, the threshold, et cetera—but it goes deeper than that. Because of humanity’s instinctive love of a good story, racing is a narrative medium in real life.

Vogler’s “Hero’s Journey” is directly based on the work of Joseph Campbell, the scholar widely credited with identifying the “monomyth” that bridges Hollywood scripts and Homeric poetry. (There are narrative structures other than Hollywood’s three acts: Shakespeare plays are told in five, for instance, and Game of Thrones’ many twists and turns resist easy categorization.) Campbell argues that humanity, throughout history, has always mythologized stories about heroes, be they real or fictional.

NASCAR, for instance, has stood the test of time because of the story arcs of its driver-heroes. The 1992 Hooters 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway witnessed six drivers enter with a shot at the Winston Cup championship, but it soon came down to two: Bill Elliott, NASCAR’s most popular driver who drove for Junior Johnson’s Budweiser-funded powerhouse operation, and Alan Kulwicki, a Wisconsinite outsider who built his own engines. While battling Elliott for the win, Kulwicki’s Ford Underbird (he had special permission from Ford to run without the Th-) broke the first three gears in its transmission, seemingly dooming Kulwicki’s championship charge. A brilliant strategy call to delay pitting and lead the pack for one lap more than Elliott earned Kulwicki just enough bonus points to win the title, though he lost the race.

It’s the monomyth, a perfect hero’s journey (unless you’re an Elliott fan). But this wasn’t a movie, which means the real-world race lasted three hours, 44 minutes, and 20 seconds. Fans had been watching Kulwicki’s entire career point to that moment; at the same time, Richard Petty was making his final Cup start in that race and Jeff Gordon was making his first. That race, considered by many NASCAR’s greatest, takes on its emotional meaning only in the context of the rest of the sport’s history. A feature film doesn’t have the time to establish that depth of context. As Queen warned me: “Even if the cars are moving forward, the story might not be.”

Racing’s narrative structure, so familiar to fans of the sport, is near-impossible to drop directly to the silver screen. Just like a novel or a TV show, it has to be adapted. And adaptations always make changes to the source material. They have to, in order to make it work in a new medium, but those changes can be frustrating to those in the know. Anyone expecting the film adaptation to be just like the book is almost inevitably disappointed. It can’t be exactly like the book because it’s a movie, which means a movie about racing will never be just like watching a race.

If done well, adaptation adds something only the new medium can provide.

Let’s take a look at 2013’s Rush. The film tells the story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda’s rivalry leading up to the 1976 Formula 1 championship. It ends with a quiet scene in an airplane hangar, with Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Lauda (Daniel Brühl) reconnecting weeks after the season is complete. It’s only the two drivers on location—no media, no fans, no cars even—and they just talk. They argue about the rainy conditions at the Japanese Grand Prix, when Lauda decided the conditions were too dangerous to drive; Hunt continued on to win the title. They argue about their different approaches to racing, yes, but it’s from the audience’s perspective in that narrative moment that we understand something more: They’re really arguing about life.

Lauda then delivers a monologue in voice-over, during which the film intercuts archival footage of the real Hunt and Lauda, with Brühl watching Hemsworth walk away. “People always think of us as rivals,” Brühl’s Lauda says, “but he was among the very few I liked … and even fewer that I respected. He remains the only person I envied.”

You can read books and articles about the 1976 Formula 1 season and the lives of Hunt and Lauda. Maybe you were lucky enough to have watched them race in real time. Their rivalry and friendship is rich with subtext, two very different men with very different philosophies that came into peak conflict that day at Fuji Speedway. Rush, the film, is about delivering the essence of that tension, whether or not the audience has a particular affinity or background in racing. It’s that rare film that succeeds in pleasing both casual viewers and serious racing fans.

With Ferrari coming out on Christmas Day this year, Michael Mann has his work cut out to thread that same needle. We car people are a tough crowd, but the movies that get it right we remember forever.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Auto Anthro: Why racing fans can’t stand some racing movies appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In the pantheon of movie cars, sporty models usually make the biggest impression. The Bandit Trans Am, Doc’s time-traveling DeLorean, and James Bond’s DB5 are among the most famous. Yet there’s no doubt that there are far less glamorous vehicles that have managed to be memorable due to their oversized personalities. Case in point—the Mutt Cutts van from Dumb and Dumber.

The outlandish, carpet-clad creation was the perfect vehicle to be cast alongside the memorable performances of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. It’s kind of like the Family Truckster of the 1990s. If you’ve ever yearned to own a Mutt Cutts van, an impressive homage to the original is now up for sale at Cars and Bids. 

We’ve seen other takes on Dumb and Dumber’s mobile pet-grooming van, and we covered another replica that sold at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale sale in 2020. This one is built on a 1993 Ford E-150 Econoline chassis, which seems rather appropriate, considering the original film debuted in 1994. However, that vintage of Econoline van is one generation newer than the 1984 model used during filming. The replica’s custom touches include LED headlights, a custom center console, and a bird cage with a fake dead “Petey” included for extra authenticity points. The van is powered by a 300-cubic-inch inline-six and a four-speed automatic transmission. The powerplant is a favorite of Ford fans, as the smooth inline-six is known for its durability.

As for aesthetics, the modifications to the hood to mimic the original Mutt Cutts van are pretty close to the original, although this replica has larger, more functional side mirrors. Overall, this homage to the classic comedy film seems to check all of the boxes for a fun cruiser or show van and it even offers the added benefit of reliable utility. We are curious, as are many of the auction commenters, what might happen if the carpet cladding were to get wet. The smell might make the van’s dog costume even more authentic…

When we checked in at the auction with three days remaining, bidding had hit $23,000. If that price is out of your budget, perhaps you could offer the seller to trade, straight up, for your 70-mpg minibike hog. It had better be a nice one, as there’s one of those included in the auction as well.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Mutt Cutts replica is a <em>Dumb and Dumber</em> fan’s dream van appeared first on Hagerty Media.

While writing about the 75th anniversary of the Citroën 2CV, it dawned on me that my personal history with the Deux Chevaux goes back almost as far as I can remember. From pre-teens and into my twenties and thirties, I had a series of unforgettable experiences in this fabulous French machine, as my Tin Snail Diaries demonstrate.

1980-something: Early memories

My godmother was a force of nature. I still have flashbacks to being driven in her pale blue Dyane on the streets of London. We would sail through red lights as she delivered non-stop chatter, often turning fully round in her seat to make sure that I’d heard. My eyes fixed on the road ahead, I braced for an imminent impact that somehow never came.

Renée drove with a terrifying combination of great skill and a total disregard for everyone else on the road. She was a Deux Chevaux dominatrix who mastered the car’s unusual umbrella-like gear selector and hustled it through corners at exaggerated angles. She would shrug off the great fanfare of horns that accompanied every journey and then, instead of actually parking, she would abandon the Dyane near her destination. Never once did she lock it.

Perhaps that’s because her previous 2CV-derivative was a Mehari which didn’t even have doors to lock. It was maneuvering the Mehari on the mountainous roads of the Canary Islands, where she had a restaurant, an environ that surely honed her abilities behind the wheel.

It was a sad day when failing eyesight forced Renée to stop driving, although the other road users of London may have felt differently.

1995: Love and death

It was quite the romantic gesture, even if I do say so myself. For my girlfriend Rachel’s 25th birthday I bought her a 1987 2CV6.

OK, so perhaps it wasn’t completely selfless: At the time, my other car was a motorbike, and autumn was fast approaching.

Rachel christened E981 AGN as Agnès and was soon crisscrossing London for work and play in all weathers. In everything but the worst conditions she would drive with the roof open, perhaps imagining herself in Paris rather than Purley.

Almost nothing could stop Rachel and Agnès. A busted starter motor simply meant a push start or parking on a hill. In the depths of winter, with a special plastic shield fitted over the grille, the little motor would put enough heat to keep the cabin quite toasty.

Unfortunately, the pipes that feed said hot air into the cabin of a 2CV are made from cardboard and it was one of these that ended Rachel’s roadgoing romance. She was driving some girlfriends to a convention when sparks began to fly from the front wing. Wisely pulling over and getting everyone safely onto the hard shoulder, she noticed thick black smoke. Flames engulfed the car, and poor Agnès was cremated on the spot.

1996: A balancing act

David James was passenger alongside Steve Webster as they took three back-to-back World Sidecar Championships between 1997 and 1999. His job was to fling his body around and counterbalance the cornering forces of the three-wheeled machine at mind-boggling speeds.

As it happened he was friends with a pal of mine and one day they were all out in his dad’s 2CV. Rattling along at a fair old lick, my friend’s dad chucked the car into a corner without so much as a lift of the throttle. James instinctively opened the passenger door and leaned out, ensuring they sped through unscathed.

2001: A racy return

Unlikely as it seems, the 2CV makes a brilliant budget race car. In 2001, along with three colleagues from Top Gear Magazine, I headed to Ireland for the Vingt-Qautre Heures du Mondello, a 24-hour endurance race open only to the Deux Chevaux. With a roll cage, lowered, stiffened suspension, and little else in the way of modification allowed, a 2CV was probably the cheapest way to go racing in the U.K. at the time.

We qualified right in the middle of the 33-car grid and, fairly soon, found ourselves running just outside the top ten. The cars were obviously not fast, but the racing was tight. Bump drafting and turning lights off on the straights at night to reduce the drain on the alternator were just some of the tactics required to keep up with the experienced leaders.

Our car ran faultlessly, though many others required late-night engine swaps or major rebuilds. I drove for a total of around eight hours including the final stint, crossing the line in eighth place, and securing a “best novice” trophy. It was only over a pint of Guinness that the team told me that a front hub was essentially sheared off and probably wouldn’t have lasted even one more lap.

It’s been more than 20 years since I took the checkered flag and that was the last time I drove a 2CV. I’ve noticed a rather nice 1985 example street parked around the corner from where I live. I wonder how much they’d want for it?

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Tin Snail Diaries: Citroën’s 2CV has a special place in my heart appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The Handler Team Center, formerly the Mattel Design Center, is located in El Segundo, California. It was named for Mattel’s founders, Ruth and Elliot Handler, who are responsible for Barbie and Hot Wheels, respectively. Even from the curb, you can tell there’s something special happening inside, as the entry ramp includes a Hot Wheel track and you follow either Barbie’s footprints or Hot Wheels tire tracks up to the front door.

Hot Wheels invited us to take a look inside the Handler Team Center to learn how Hot Wheels and other Mattel toys move from concept to production. As we were set to be judges at the Hot Wheels Legends Tour the following day, we were primarily focused on the 1:64 scale cars that make up the world’s number one toy brand. That said, there’s a ton more going on inside this building than just cars.

Leading our tour was Bryan Benedict, the design director for Hot Wheels and Matchbox. Benedict is an Art Center grad and has been with Hot Wheels for 19 years. Here he is showing us the major steps in the design and production process for turning the Texas Toot, last year’s Hot Wheels Legends Tour winner, into a 1:64 die-cast. The entire design process can take up to 18 months. Meanwhile, HotWheels has to secure the licensing to make a toy using an automaker’s design. Hot Wheels casting library includes all of the models that Hot Wheels still has licensing to create. Contracts get renegotiated and new contracts get written all the time. Hot Wheels creates about 50 unique models every year and will repurpose previous designs with new colors, graphics, or other treatments to create 400 additional designs.

This color chart shows the various colors that are available at Hot Wheels’ major manufacturing plants. MBK is in Thailand MMSB is in Malaysia. Some multipacks are also produced in Indonesia

We got to see Texas Toot in person when it won last year’s Hot Wheels Legends Tour, earning the right to become a 1:64 toy. Designers first 3D-scanned the actual vehicle and then refined the design. Manson Cheung sculpts Hot Wheels and is often tasked with bringing two-dimensional sketches into three dimensions, something that takes true artistry. He has to keep the production tolerances and final vehicle durability in mind when designing, while still rendering all of the vehicle’s character. Cheung gave us a hands-on demo of their modeling software, called Freeform, which emulates how they used to design Hot Wheels using clay. The articulated stylus, shown on the bottom right of the photo above, gives feedback when interacting with the 3D model, allowing designers to “touch” the computer model and carve it just like clay.

The wheelbase of a Hot Wheel car is virtually unlimited, but there are only five options for track width, which they call chassis span. The parallel lines on this model represent the optional widths.

Hot Wheels has been using 3D printing in its development process since 1996 when it began operating a stereolithography machine, and the vast majority of its products start here. Depending on the type of toy, Mattel can print various plastics, resin, and nylon. These action figures can be tested for freedom of movement of the joints. Carbon-fiber filament can be used for testing parts that need to be strong and thin, like pieces for RC cars. They even have a 3D printer that laser-welds powdered 17-4 Stainless steel to create durable metal parts. Mattel runs two additional 3D printing facilities, one at its Fisher Price facility in Buffalo, and a third in Malaysia.

“Once it’s approved, we turn it over to our development engineers in Malaysia. They will then work with us to part it out and create the four-part car like you see here,” Benedict explained, holding up a red, blue, and black prototype. Before moving forward, designers make sure the gaps are correct and the design has carried over into the prototype. Then, it’s time to cut metal for the dies. Engineering pilot samples are in metal. They get scrutinized, but by now they’ve got the design and function dialed in. “Sometimes there are some minor tweaks needed,” said Benedict. This is the point where the car is tested for safety and durability.

When that’s approved, it moves to the final engineering pilot, a test run that shows the car for the first time it’s in full color. If everything checks out, it moves on to the final product and packaging phase.

You’ll find the same kind of passion and creativity throughout the toy development at Mattel, something that became clear when we stopped by to see how the legendary Barbie is styled through collaborations with designers and music legends alike. This makeup inspiration and its final product is the result of several steps of masking and painting. Mattel designers must make sure that the process is repeatable when the products go into production.

Shirley Fujisaki gave us a demonstration of how doll hair is sewn in using an intimidating sewing machine that spun loops of hair fibers into position and set them in place to survive the rigors of being a child’s play companion. Fujisaki is a licensed cosmetologist and another Mattel veteran with years of experience.

In a building full of visionary car designers and creative artists, Paul Schmidt might have the coolest job. He’s responsible for designing the tracks and playsets that Hot Wheels cars interact with. He told us that he prefers to start his designs with simple foam core and poster board to help bring his imagination into reality, but other designers go right to 3d modeling. Sets he works on range in size from a drive thru burger joint that retails for less than $20 to three-feet-tall garages that house 100 Hot wheels and a looping, jumping playset that launches Hot Wheels cars at a menacing dragon.

This set of four playsets shows the various steps in production. Moving clockwise from the white foam core and posterboard concept is the first 3D modeled part. The colors here match the final design, but the details aren’t set just yet. The initial test model, shown on the left, has almost all of the details, but the parts have been cast in leftover plastic from whatever happened to be in production at the time. The final design in the back has the proper colors and looks just like the production product, minus the stickers.

Matt Gabe, the lead designer for Hot Wheels packaging, gave us a quick look at the process of creating the iconic Hot Wheels blisterpack. Gabe knows some collectors like to keep the packaging intact, but it’s also a win when he sees his hard work end up in the trash, as it means someone is enjoying playing with the toys. Sometimes Gabe and his fellow designers get to flex their creative muscle and drum up packaging that’s a noteworthy display for the product and makes the vehicle inside even more special.

If you’ve got a favorite Hot Wheel as part of your collection, let us know its story. Are you a meticulous collector with scores of intact blisterpacks, or do your cars roam free on your bookshelf or desk, like many of us here at Hagerty?

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Mattel turns actual cars into Hot Wheels at the Handler Team Center appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Paul McCartney was already a rock ’n’ roll legend when, in the wake of the Beatles’ break-up, he started the band Wings. The group’s 1972 Wings Over Europe Tour bus soon became a legend in its own right—a legend of rock ’n’ road.

The Wings’ tour bus, a 1953 Bristol KSW 5G ECW double-decker bus will be one of the star attractions at Julien’s “Played, Worn, and Torn: Rock ’n’ Roll Iconic Guitars and Memorabilia” auction November 16–18 at Hard Rock Cafe Nashville.

The historic vehicle joins the previously announced lineup of 1000 marquee items, including two of the most important guitars ever to be offered at auction: Eric Clapton’s “The Fool” and Kurt Cobain’s “Skystang I,” as well as items from Nirvana, Elvis Presley, Prince, The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Eddie Van Halen, Frank Zappa, Dee Dee Ramone, Snoop Dogg, Albert King, Kirk Hammett, Pete Townshend, and more.

In the summer of ’72, Paul and Linda McCartney—along with Denny Laine, Henry McCullough, and Denny Seiwell—set flight as Wings embarked on its first tour, which was in Europe. The open-top ’53 Bristol KSW became the band’s home away from home, and it stood out, not only because of the legendary musicians inside it but for the artwork on the outside.

Renowned artist Geoffrey Cleghorn (also known for his work with The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and The Who) modeled the psychedelic design after the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine album cover to give it the appearance of “a magic bus of love and peace.” A children’s playpen was installed on the open top deck, along with mattresses, bean-bag chairs, and blankets so that the band members and their families could enjoy the sunshine on warm summer days.

The Wings’ tour bus transported the band 7500 miles through nine countries across Europe—France, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—often with fans in hot pursuit, since it didn’t exactly blend in.

“Much like John Lennon’s iconic psychedelic Rolls-Royce and George Harrison’s psychedelic Mini Cooper, McCartney’s tour bus represents a moment in the psychedelic era and its status as the world’s first Beatles-related double-decker bus,” Julien’s says. “The bus is a touchstone of Beatlemania and cultural importance as the year of 1972 spurred a wellspring of creativity that inspired McCartney to write Wings’ classic songs for Red Rose Speedway and record for the Grammy award–winning and Oscar-nominated classic James Bond theme song ‘Live and Let Die.’”

The 1972 Wings Over Europe tour sparked the band’s trajectory into superstardom as the bestselling pop act of the 1970s, with an extraordinary five No. 1 albums and 27 Top 40 hits in the U.S., including “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “My Love,” “Band On The Run,” “Jet,” “Junior’s Farm,” “Listen To What The Man Said,” and “Silly Love Songs.”

Sir Paul McCartney has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, first with the Beatles in 1988 and again as a solo artist in 1999. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

The bus was fully restored by a workshop in Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, after being discovered in Spain in a state of decay. Its three-year restoration was completed in November 2022, and it was unveiled in England for the tour’s 50th anniversary celebration before 90,000 visitors at the NEC Classic Motor Show in Birmingham.

The interior of the bus has been restored with great detail to bring it back to the condition as it would have been on the 1972 tour. The refinished interior is complemented by wooden bunk beds, which the band members’ children would have slept on, and an original Wings tour trunk that was donated to the project by Denny Seiwell. The lower cabin perimeter has bright yellow curtains that accent the psychedelic paint scheme of the exterior. Also included is a custom-built cover for the upper deck that displays “1972 Wings Tour Bus” graphics on the roof. It is powered by a Gardner 5LW 7-liter diesel engine mated to a manual transmission.

In celebration of the vehicle’s restoration and the upcoming auction, fans will have a chance to win a ticket to ride on the historic bus through London—along with the Beatles only secretary, Freda Kelly—in an exclusive Magical History Tour contest sponsored by Hard Rock Cafe and Julien’s Auctions. The tour will be held October 17. To enter, like this post on Instagram, tag a friend you’d take on the bus with you, and follow both @juliens_auctions and @hardrockcafelondon. The contest closes on Friday, October 13.

“Tour buses have been a part of rock ’n’ roll music lore for generations,” says Martin Nolan, executive director and co-founder of Julien’s Auctions, “and there is no other one quite as famous and remarkable as Paul McCartney’s 1972 Wings Tour Over Europe bus.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Paul McCartney and Wings’ 1972 European tour bus is a psychedelic wonder appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The Walt Disney franchise has had a long relationship with the automobile, from Mickey Mouse’s jalopy to The Love Bug to the animated Disney Pixar movie Cars. Not to be left out, Disneyland, when it opened in California on July 17, 1955, introduced Autopia, a popular hands-on car experience for kids of all ages. Today, Disney World’s Epcot turns it up a notch with the Chevrolet-themed Test Track. If you’re looking for something a little different, you can take a spin around the lake—well, actually, on it—in an Amphicar at Disney Springs.

For a more leisurely ride, however, Disney parks offer trolleys and shuttles. Some of the older models occasionally make it into the public’s hands after they’re decommissioned. Take, for example, this “1970 Walt Disney World Trolley,” located in Lutz, Florida.

Offered on barnfinds.com, the trolley car was supposedly used in the early years at Disney World, which opened to the public on October 1, 1971. The seller explains that Disney’s trolleys were built by the Noland Car Company before Cushman bought the business in 1987 and continued to produce them. “Almost every resort on Disney property had a car built to the theme of that resort,” the seller says, providing an image of a similar trolley parked outside the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, which opened in 1988.

If dates don’t seem to quite add up, there’s a good reason: the data tag (VIN 30148588) identifies the trolley as a 1990 Cushman, meaning it is actually two decades newer than the classified ad’s title. Regardless, the vehicle did transport visitors at Disney—often called “the happiest place on earth”—and it is in running condition. The batteries in the electric-powered trolley were new in 2021.

The previous owner added some personal touches, like installing a loudspeaker with multiple sirens/horns, as well as plug-in strip lighting, which can change color. The seller says the rearview mirror is original, and “the rear brake lights and one of the front LED lights work.” Included in the sale are a charger and a spare tire.

The seller warns that some rust and wood will need to be repaired or replaced, “so I would consider it a project.” Once that work is done, however, imagine how much fun it would be to take your children (and perhaps their friends, too) to school every day. Chances are, they’d be the happiest kids on earth.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Imagine taking your kids to school in an old Disney World trolley appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Before she was Penny Benjamin in Top Gun: Maverick, or Alicia Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Hollywood star Jennifer Connelly bought a beautiful car—and it wasn’t a Maverick. It was a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible. And that classic, which Connelly has owned for the last 23 years, just sold for $36,500 on BringATrailer.com.

The winner of the auction, Jeff2306, jumped into the fray on the final day; his last bid came with two minutes to go and proved to be enough to snag the car. While some of the commenters on BaT asked “Jennifer who?” they likely know exactly who she is, because the 52-year-old actress has appeared in more than 40 films since her first role in 1984’s Once Upon A Time in America. According to the BaT description, Connelly purchased the Matador Red-over-black-vinyl Oldsmobile in 2000, her busiest year as an actress up to that point.

Connelly’s breakthrough role came a year later when she co-starred with Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.

The actress’ 1972 Cutlass Supreme convertible is powered by a 180-horsepower, 350-cubic-inch V-8 engine—with a four-barrel carburetor, black air cleaner, and gold intake manifold, cylinder heads, and valve covers—mated to a three-speed automatic transmission. The California car features a power-operated black convertible top, power steering, power-adjustable front bench seat, power windows, a Pioneer CD stereo and speakers, faux woodgrain trim accents, power-assisted front disc brakes, color-keyed mirrors, dual exhaust outlets, and body-side moldings. Red-accented 14-inch Super Stock II Rallye wheels wear bright trim rings and Oldsmobile center caps and are mounted with 225/70 BFGoodrich Radial T/A white-letter tires. A full-size spare with a mismatched tire is stored in the trunk.

Work on the Olds that was completed in July 2023 includes the installation of a PerTronix electronic ignition conversion and replacement of the throttle cable, distributor cap, spark plugs, coolant overflow tank, brake master cylinder, tires, and rear wheel cylinders and brake hoses.

Notable flaws include chips, swirls, and scratches in the paint, a non-working air conditioner, and a broken gear indicator needle in the speedometer. The five-digit odometer shows 70,000 miles; actual mileage is unknown.

The Cutlass (chassis 3J67K2M206822) was completed in April 1972 at the Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan, about 17 months after Connelly’s birth on December 12, 1970.

Although Connelly has a more public connection to the 1973 Porsche 911 S coupe that she drove as Penny Benjamin in 2022’s top-grossing film, Top Gun: Maverick, she has a more personal connection to the Cutlass. Did that make a difference in the bidding? It doesn’t appear so.

A 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible in #2 (Excellent) condition has an average value of $32,600, meaning the Connelly factor may have added $3900.

“While celebrity ownership usually equates to buyers willing to pay a premium, there’s generally a bigger bump when the owner is known as a hardcore car enthusiast—which Jenninfer Connelly is not,” says Hagerty Price Guide editor Greg Ingold, adding that the Hagerty Power List provides a detailed account of the impact top celebrities have on vehicle values. “What is truly priceless, however, is this car’s cool factor and the fun that its new owner will have being able to tell people who owned it before he did.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Did Jennifer Connelly’s ownership drive the price of this ’72 Cutlass? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The plot of racing summer blockbuster Gran Turismo is simple, unusual, and more or less true to real-life events: Archie Madekwe’s young gamer Jann Mardenborough yearns to race, but he’s never been in a race car. He does have a knack for playing PlayStation’s racing simulator Gran Turismo, however, and this talent wins him a spot at Nissan’s GT Academy where he learns how to do it in reality. Placing first in his class would mean Jann achieves his dream: he’d get to race for a season as part of Nissan’s team.

Like most sports movies, director Neill Blomkamp’s film is an underdog story. Absolutely no one in Gran Turismo seems to believe in Jann. His parents Steve (Djimon Hounsou) and Lesley (Geri Horner aka Ginger Spice) think he should do something he loves “within the realm of reality.” (They meanwhile regard Jann’s brother, Daniel Puig’s football player Coby, as a legitimate athlete.) David Harbour’s Jack Salter—the race engineer in charge of whipping the gamers into shape—thinks the entire premise of letting novices drive real race cars is completely insane and too dangerous. After all, he says, if something catastrophic happens “you can’t hit reset.”

Even the guys on Jann’s pit crew don’t respect him. His main rival is Josha Stradowski’s pro American racer Nicholas Capa, the driver in the “gold lamé monstrosity” (a 2018 Lamborghini Aventador). He’s that eminently dislikable adversary, a reckless racer full of hubris, just the kind of guy you delight in rooting against. Even Orlando Bloom’s exec Danny Moore, the executive who pitched the idea of the GT Academy racing contest to Nissan in the first place, doesn’t want Jann to win because, from a marketing perspective, he’s not “appealing.” The stakes and the odds against Jann are high: no one wants him there, so he has to prove that he belongs.

The real heart of the film—and its most compelling thread—is the relationship between Salter and Jann. Salter is a Black Sabbath guy while Jann loves Kenny G and Enya; so Gran Turismo asks the age-old question, can a partnership like this ever work? Salter’s a ubiquitous sports-movie archetype, a kind of sanitized Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau’s character in The Bad News Bears). He’s a grumpy former driver and engineer who reluctantly acquiesces to train the gamers at GT Academy how to race. According to Capa, Salter’s a “flamed-out has-been” who burned out about 50 years ago. But he’s also a bonafide, respected competitor who knows the ropes. The film’s most touching moments, and its funniest, derive from Salter’s and Jann’s friendship. That aside, though, the characters feel one-dimensional, like afterthoughts, mere plot points in Jann’s story.

Like most movies “inspired by true events,” the filmmakers have taken quite a few liberties to make the story hit all the right sports-movie beats, so it might be more accurate to say the movie is true-ish. Danny Moore is based very loosely on Darren Cox, the Nissan exec who conceived of GT Academy, and what Moore seemingly accomplishes in a nanosecond actually took Cox more like three years to pull off. (Cox also never got to fly in private jets.) And Jann wasn’t actually the first graduate of GT Academy but the third. The villain Capa is a narrative invention, as is Salter, who’s a patchwork of a several real people in Jann’s life, like team manager Bob Neville, GT Academy trainer Gavin Gough, and engineer and car designer Ricardo Davila. And though the tragic accident that occurs at the Nürburgring really happened, killing a spectator, it took place two whole years after Jann raced at Le Mans, and its use as a setback in Jann’s hero’s journey feels a bit weird and exploitative.

The film does boast eye-candy aplenty for racing fans and gearheads. There are Nissans galore, Capa’s gaudy Lambo, and at one point, Salter shows up in a ’23 Porsche 911 GT3 RS. The races are thrilling, well-shot, and well-edited, with first-rate sound design, an underrated but crucial element in chase and race scenes: Lorne Balfe’s and Andrew Kawczynski’s score during the races is percussive without being too distracting, occasionally we can hear Jann’s heartbeat, but ultimately… the engine is the music. The drone footage from a bird’s eye POV is especially exhilarating. And thankfully, the racing scenes are, for the most part, shot practically rather than pure CGI constructions or green-screen illusions.

There are occasional freeze-frames or pauses in the races, delivered to orient us and clarify where Jann is in the race, or to insert video-game graphics, or to remind us of Jann playing Gran Turismo in his bedroom. It’s frankly unnecessary: it disrupts the flow of the race, and it’s usually employed to relay redundant information. (In fairness, these moments stink of bad notes from studio execs.)

Regardless of these nitpicks, the film nails the appeal of racing: “The rest of the world just falls away, and there is just you and the car and that’s it. It’s kind of magic.” Blomkamp loves cars and racing movies and it shows. There’s even a little nod to the Steve McQueen-starring Le Mans in the way he shoots the races, pushing in on a racer’s face before the race starts and letting everything go completely quiet.

Gran Turismo isn’t just an underdog story and a tribute to outsiders, it’s the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. Its message is hugely appealing: any one of us could secretly be a champion at heart, just waiting to be discovered. It’s also fun as hell, a satisfying watch for racing enthusiasts that you’ll want to see on the biggest, loudest screen you can find.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post <em>Gran Turismo</em> isn’t a perfect film, but it’s fun as hell appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Don’t need to feel important or famous
No limos or my little Nash car
One lucky man
With my feet in the sand
Tonight I just need my guitar

In the wake of the passing of legendary troubadour and businessman Jimmy Buffett at the start of Labor Day weekend, hundreds of thousands of words have been written about him, his legacy, his music, and the escapism his songs and concerts brought to millions, from toddlers to great-grandparents.

It’s been reported in dozens of stories that Buffett, along with his friend and fellow singer-songwriter, Jerry Jeff Walker, fixed up Walker’s 1947 Packard and then headed south from Coconut Grove, presumably on Florida’s A1A highway. A1A ends at mile-marker Zero, right next to the water, in Key West. Jimmy stayed in Key West, while Jerry Jeff returned to Coconut Grove.

But Buffett had a few other cars along the way, and, because Buffett was a storyteller, it should come as no surprise there are stories attached to each one.

Fellow journalist Terry Boyce posted his reminiscences on social media shortly after Buffett’s death: “Although we never met Jimmy Buffett, we did long ago play a small part in helping him obtain an example of his high-school car, a 1963 Ford Falcon Sprint Convertible.

“It was in January 1983, while I was working as Editor of Classic Sixties magazine for Dobbs Publications in Florida, that Buffett’s friend, the late photographer, author and publisher Tom Corcoran, contacted us. He was looking to help the singer/songwriter find a Falcon Sprint Convertible like the one he’d driven as a teenager.

“A sportier and scarcer version of the 1963 Falcon Futura Convertible, the “1963-1/2” Sprint, with its V-8 engine and bucket-seat interior, was a real “Classic Sixties” type of car. We quickly put together a brief notice for the February 1983 issue. Quoting Buffett through our conversation with Corcoran, it asked the readership to be on the lookout for such a convertible. A photo of Buffett seated in a 1966 Mustang and waving a fistful of cash was also provided by Corcoran, who photographed album covers for the singer.

“We received a letter from Oregon reader and Falcon enthusiast Ron Boesl, advising us that he’d found a Falcon Sprint Convertible for Jimmy—who had inspected it at Boesl’s home in Portland, before calling later to confirm he was purchasing the car. The following evening, after the deal was done, Boesl and the Sprint’s newly former owner, Andy Pass, also of Portland, were Buffett’s guests at Buffett’s concert in Portland, a memorable conclusion to an amazing couple of days.

“We ran Ron’s account of meeting Jimmy Buffett and arranging for him to view the Falcon Sprint he’d go on to purchase as a letter-to-the-editor in the April 1983 issue of Classic Sixties. Ron also provided a photo of him with the famed musician and Boesl’s own Falcon Futura convertible, which was similar to the Sprint.”

Seventeen years later, in 2010, Buffett gave the car to Ty Houck, owner of Ragtops Motorcars in Palm Beach, Florida, to sell. Ty consigned the car to the Auctions America sale, held in the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center March 26–28. There was a good bit of presale interest in Buffett’s turquoise-colored ride, mostly unmodified except for a surfboard rack/roll bar contraption that would be covered if the top was up. The car sold for a healthy $39,600. At the time, Hagerty’s Cars That Matter price guide, precursor to the Hagerty Price Guide, listed the car in #2 condition (Excellent) at a value of $28,200.

Ford Falcons seem to be a theme in the Buffett stable, as there are reports of a few others spotted at different times.

The same is true for Porsches. Houck remembers getting a call from Buffett asking for assistance, as he was stranded by the side of the road in a Porsche 356 close to Houck’s place of business in West Palm Beach. By the time Houck arrived, there were multiple fans seeking autographs from the unfazed Buffett. Donny Gould, a senior car specialist at Broad Arrow auctions and a long-standing resident of South Florida, also remembers a red 911 cabriolet with full whale-tail that Buffett drove in the mid-1980s. More Miami Vice than full laid-back Key West, it would be interesting to see where those P-cars are today.

Although I am sure there are other cars that entered and exited the songwriter’s life, this sampling should give anyone a smile knowing that Buffett found fun and satisfaction in the world of old cars.

And that “little Nash car” that Buffett sang about in his song, “Tonight I Just Need My Guitar”? That was a 1958 Nash Metropolitan that Ty Houck sold to Jimmy Buffett many years ago. Resplendent in—what else?—white over turquoise paint, you’d think this would be the perfect mode of vintage motorized transportation in Key West.

Buffett sold the Metro back to Houck years ago, and he sold it on to another collector in Maryland. However, fear not! Houck just called me to let me know that he will be getting the car back on consignment soon.

Interested parties can reach out to him on the Coconut Telegraph. Tell him Dave sent you.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Remembering Jimmy Buffett, car guy appeared first on Hagerty Media.

With the franchise’s seventh entry, Dead Reckoning Part One, the Mission: Impossible series gives us the most unexpected addition to its cast yet: a little yellow Fiat 500, the idiosyncratic star of the centerpiece chase.

2023 is not the first time the yellow Fiat 500 has graced our screens. The tiny car is perhaps best known as the ride of thief Arsène Lupin III, in Hayao Miyazaki’s 1979 film The Castle of Cagliostro. But the 500’s inclusion in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is actually not a nod to Lupin’s machine: filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie had never seen The Castle of Cagliostro. McQuarrie simply clocked the car parked along the Seine River while he was scouting locations for the Paris chase in Mission: Impossible – Fallout and decided to include the Fiat in the next installment.

The Mission: Impossible films are real-life impossible missions. The first four films were directed by different filmmakers, but McQuarrie took the reins with the series’ fifth installment, Rogue Nation. For McQuarrie, one of Mission: Impossible’s seemingly endless challenges is trying to honor this tradition while ensuring that each entry is unique. That meant the chase in Dead Reckoning Part One, set in Rome, had to feel distinct from the elegant, disquieting car-and-motorcycle chase in Fallout.

When the chase begins, though, it feels similar to its Fallout predecessor. This franchise loves to showcase a BMW (the automaker has a long-running partnership with Paramount), so to flee both the Italian police and Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, Hayley Atwell’s Grace hops into a 2020 BMW 330e police car. (Without spoiling too much, let’s just say she’s stolen something the IMF needs to stop an existential threat to the world as we know it.) In his pursuit of Grace, Ethan “borrows” a 2020 BMW G 310 GS police motorcycle. The pair then wind up handcuffed together in what appears to be a 2021 BMW 540i (though the interior of the car looks like it might actually be a BMW M5).

Ethan and Grace are on the run from what feels like a small army, and they gather foes as they go: the Italian police, American agents Briggs (Shea Whigham) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and Pom Klementieff’s mysterious hench-woman Paris. She is perhaps their most formidable adversary; she’s commandeered a hulking 2003 Hummer H2 and drives it like a tank—often, as a battering ram. Ethan and Grace soon realize that, if they are to survive this ordeal, they need to ditch the identifiable BMW.

Finally, the Dead Reckoning chase veers into something completely unlike that of Fallout. As we know, the IMF keeps safe houses, safe cars, and safe boats lying around for its team members when they’re in a jam. When Grace and Ethan arrive at the location of the nearest safe car, they spy a beautiful 2016 Ferrari F12tdf. They look hopeful—but then Ethan pushes a button and reveals the actual safe car: a cartoonishly small, yellow Fiat.

When the pair enter the Fiat, Dead Reckoning Part One goes full screwball comedy, with a touch of rom-com. The car is outfitted, James Bond–style, with all kinds of gadgets. Ethan has no idea how to work any of them. Grace is reassuring, as if his performance issues are more than automotive. It feels like the slapstick chase in What’s Up, Doc? with Barbra Streisand’s and Ryan O’Neal’s characters terrorizing and destroying San Francisco with their hijinks in a blue VW Beetle.

Ethan and Grace do not want to work together, and Grace does everything she can to escape. Through fate and circumstance and handcuffs, the pair is forced into the cramped interior of the Fiat, trying hopelessly to decide who steers and pushes the pedals, who shifts and who brakes. When Ethan asks Grace to turn right, she turns left. No matter how she tries to avoid it, Grace keeps ending up in the driver’s seat. It’s a trust-building exercise from hell, a crash course in IMF spycraft for Grace, and a nightmare first date, all rolled into one thrilling action sequence.

The Fiat is as uncooperative as Grace, though far older than she. Aside from a few cosmetic tweaks, the car changed very little from 1960 through 1975. Judging by the partial canvas roof and the rear-hinged doors (not the safest, which earned them the nickname “suicide doors”), their 500 is one of the earliest models, either a very late ’50s or early ’60s car. (By 1965, Fiat had wisely done away with the suicide doors).

The very first Fiat 500, the Topolino, was actually released in 1936 … thanks to Benito Mussolini. Il Duce had called up the founder of Fiat, senator Giovanni Agnelli, and demanded a car for the masses, one that would cost no more than 5000 lire. Essentially, Mussolini was asking for the Italian equivalent of the Ford Model T. (Interestingly, the T had inspired Hitler to request Germany’s own “people’s car,” the Volkswagen Type 1, better known as the Beetle.)

The Fiat 500 was reinvented by legendary designer and engineer Dante Giacosa and introduced in July 1957 as the Fiat Nuova 500, nicknamed the Cinquecento. It was an even less expensive car than the Topolino. After World War II, Vespas were the transportation of choice, because most Italians couldn’t afford a car. With its low price point and fuel efficiency, the Fiat 500 was intended to be an accessible, four-wheeled option. The two-seater was basic and tiny—only about nine feet long, which made it easy to maneuver in cramped urban environments—and outfitted with a 479cc, air-cooled two-cylinder with 13 hp. For those who could afford to step up from a Vespa, it was the perfect post-war option.

Sales initially stalled, with customers opting for the more popular Fiat 600. Fiat noticed and began to add fun features to the 500: sun visors, a real rear seat that was more than just a bench, front windows you could actually roll down. They slightly increased horsepower and slightly reduced the price. By the time the ’60s rolled around, these changes finally made an impact: The itty bitty 500 became a hit, with 3.6 million cars built before production ended in 1975. (It was not popular in the U.S., however, and imports ceased to be sold in 1961.)

Since this old Fiat was known neither for speed nor for power, the car used in Dead Reckoning Part One was heavily modified and fit with an electric engine. “We built this Fiat 500 so that it would be faster—some would even say the car is possessed,” McQuarrie says in behind-the-scenes footage. Indeed, the yellow coupe sounds and moves like an angry little hornet or a wind-up toy. The cobblestone streets make it especially difficult to drive; the suspension on this Fiat is not one of its strong points. Second-unit director and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood said, “You could barely control the car; it was treacherous.”

With a Fiat pitted against a Hummer, a fleet of police cars, exasperated American agents, and errant parked scooters, the chase feels like David and Goliath at first. Slowly, however, the narrative evolves into that of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. Despite the odds against the classic yellow Fiat, this tiny icon holds its own.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The surprising little star of <em>Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One</em> appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of the pleasant surprises of this summer’s movie selection is Gran Turismo, a film based on the real-life result of one of the Nissan Nismo GT Academy shootouts. It’s a solid, well-directed action flick that should please anyone who has the least bit of interest in sports car racing, or even sports cars in general.

The plot follows Jann Mardenborough, a Welsh lad who wins a Gran Turismo video-game competition. The win gives him a shot to race a Nissan GT-R (it was actually a Nissan Z in real life) against other winning gamers in a qualifying race. The winner, assuming they do well enough to earn a competition license, gets a contract to race for a season.

It follows his racing at a pretty accurate distance, though there are liberties. For starters, it’s made to seem as though Mardenborough is the first GT Academy winner, when in reality he’s actually the third: The first winner, Lucas Ordonez, has had a successful racing career.

After a particularly terrifying wreck, which actually happened, Mardenborough has to prove he’s ready to get behind the wheel again. He does, of course, and eventually gets a shot at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The movie’s biggest-name star is Orlando Bloom, who plays a character based on Darren Cox, the Nissan executive who invented GT Academy. Watching Bloom portray him in a film “was a bit surreal,” the first time he watched it, Cox told Hagerty. “The second time, I was picking out factual inaccuracies, and the third viewing, I just sat back and enjoyed the movie for what it is.”

The biggest inaccuracy? “Clearly—you know me—the character who portrays me is very, very corporate compared to how I am. In summary I’d say I’m a lot less corporate, and a lot less corporate jet, because I certainly don’t remember a private airplane with Nismo on the side.” Nissan is a big company but a relatively conservative one, and Cox’s budget would never have allowed for a private jet.

Naturally, too, some of the action is pure Hollywood. Mardenborough wins his qualifying race by a split-second photo finish (in reality he won by a comfortable eight seconds), and in the movie, Cox’s character pleads with a colleague to make the call not for Mardenborough, but for the driver he narrowly beat, because he’s “better on camera.”

“Never happened,” Cox said.

The real-life PlayStation Nissan GT Academy idea came to Cox after a publicity event at which multiple drivers were allowed to drive a 350Z in an autocross-type competition, with the quickest winning the car. Some of the drivers were Gran Turismo players. “‘You know,’ a driving instructor told me, ‘Some of the guys who are gamers can actually drive.’ That got me thinking,” Cox said. “In reality, it took me three years of blood, sweat, and tears, and putting my career on the line, to get Nissan to sign off on the idea. In the movie, that took like three minutes.”

Add in the fact that Cox was putting this program together back in 2008, when the financial crisis made the budget approval that much more difficult. “We took the program to places like the U.S., but also places where there wasn’t much in the way of motorsports like the Philippines, Thailand, India; we did it in Mexico, Australia, Russia, and Japan.”

Nissan promoted Cox to the head of Nissan’s motorsports program and to the head of Nismo, Nissan’s performance arm. “When I joined, Nissan was doing Japanese touring cars. By the time I left they were doing LMP3, LMP2, LMP1, we’d done the Deltawing, we did a global GT3 program, we were racing in Canada, in Australia, and we were winning. The 2015 season was probably the most successful motorsport year in Nissan history.

“Then you look at how it is after I left in 2015, and basically Nissan is just racing in Japan again and doing Formula E, and that’s only because Renault signed up for Formula E and Nissan took over the franchise.”

It’s a shame that the movie is such a great publicity vehicle for Nissan motorsports, an enterprise which in the context of its own rich racing history barely exists today.

As for Mardenborough, he’s still racing, doing some simulator work for teams, and a little stunt driving, including for the film.

Bottom line, Cox said, “I thought the movie was great. You look at the audience score on RottenTomatoes, and it’s 98 percent positive. Young kids, both boys and girls, have reached out to me and are quite inspired by the story. If that’s the outcome of the film, that’s great. But you can pull it apart about the timing, that certain tracks were used rather than the real tracks, but at the end of the day it’s an enjoyable film.”

Indeed, the reviews have been generally good. Roger Moore, a film critic since 1984, is notoriously hard to please, but he liked the movie: “My advice? See this in an enhanced, seat-shifting-and-shaking cinema, hold on to your beer (‘Champagne is for the PODIUM!’) and give yourself over to Gran Turismo, a celebration of a game for the ages, a great ‘true'(ish) underdog story and a surprisingly fun popcorn picture.”

“It puts racing and gaming in a good light, and yes, I would have liked to have had more involvement and for my character to have been more realistic,” Cox said, “but it’s a fun movie to watch and people are enjoying it.”

Cox is currently working on a project that involves the Formula 1 race in Las Vegas later this year, and he has two motorsports-related TV series that are under development. In his spare time he races classic Mini Coopers.

Looking back on his time at Nissan, “We’re lucky we had executives like Carlos Tavares, who is now running Stellantis, and Carlos Ghosn, who despite all of his failings supported us in the motorsport program because he saw the benefit to the brand. It was the heyday, really.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Nissan executive tells the real story behind the new <em>Gran Turismo</em> movie appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“Who is the victim?” asks Carlos Ghosn. “It’s me.”

Yes, poor Carlos, the former CEO of Nissan and Renault. And for the first three of four episodes of Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn, it could be true.

Then, in episode four, director James Jones drops the hammer on Carlos’ head. There are several victims, sure, but Carlos Ghosn is not among them.

The docudrama, now playing on Apple TV+, is at times tedious but never uninteresting, though it might have been served better with three episodes instead of four. If you make it through those first three, however, by all means watch the fourth. You’ll feel a bit had for buying into three episodes’ worth of Ghosn’s “poor-me” routine, only to have the tables turn in the conclusion. (His second wife, Carole, co-stars and  sings a slightly different verse of Ghosn’s song.)

There’s no argument that Ghosn, just as he had done at Michelin, gave Renault a boost and arguably saved Nissan. He did it largely by trimming; he was called Le Cost Cutter in France. He was not, based on my very limited experience with him, a particularly savvy product guy. All that said: Did he deserve to be blindsided by Nissan’s case against him, which landed him in jail?

Ghosn’s excesses are well documented. Looming large is a party he threw that was supposedly in honor of the 15th anniversary of the coupling of Nissan and Renault, held at Versailles with a Louis XIV theme, which we’re told cost about $750,000, but that seems low. Ghosn hosted a lot of friends and relatives, but virtually no business associates, which you’d think he might have included. The media loved to talk about the party, which Carole complained was “petty” of them. Nissan and Renault, of course, picked up the tab.

Ghosn blames the fact that he was planning a formal merger of Nissan and Renault (Renault owned 37 percent of Nissan), which Nissan executives did not want, as one reason for the “fake” charges the company leveled. But the real reason was that, during the recession, Ghosn had to cut his own salary from $20 million a year to $10 million. Calling it “deferred compensation,” he and a Nissan executive are said to have cooked up a way to pay Ghosn millions more, ostensibly after he retired. And there is apparent evidence that, separately, Ghosn funneled $50 million from the company and back into his own pockets.

The financial bits essentially fill episodes one and two. The payoff in episode three is a nuts-and-bolts explanation of how Ghosn escaped from Japan, where he was out of jail on $4.5 million bail. Former U.S. Green Beret Michael Taylor, who has ties to Lebanon, planned and personally orchestrated Ghosn’s escape. Taylor acquired a large, rolling musical instrument case, drilled holes in the bottom so Ghosn could breathe, and spirited the multi-millionaire out of his apartment, onto a train, and onto a private jet that Taylor had hired.

It was brilliant. Ghosn climbed from the box in Lebanon—he grew up there, a country with no extradition to Japan—and promptly phoned his pal, the president of the country, to let him in on the scheme. There Ghosn remains.

“I didn’t flee from justice,” he says, in a well-practiced line. “I fled injustice.”

Japan in general, and Nissan in particular, did not see it that way. They weren’t amused by the escape as the rest of the world. Nissan’s attorneys promptly shared their investigation with Renault, which launched its own investigation, and it revealed similar anomalies. Then there is the matter of a hard drive once maintained by Ghosn’s late attorney, the contents of which “shock the conscience,” according to a lawyer for Renault. That company and Nissan issued an “international” arrest warrant for Ghosn, but he’s safe for the time being Lebanon.

The escape gave Ghosn “another chance at life,” he says, and not a terribly bitter one by the looks of it. He is apparently stuck in Lebanon, yes, but he is a national hero there. For a man used to trotting the globe in private jets, of course, the situation may seem a bit confining.

I mentioned there were a few actual victims: One is Greg Kelly, the Nissan head of human resources, who was told by his boss, Ghosn, to help draft the “delayed compensation” scheme. The other two are Michael Taylor and his son, who helped with the escape. Not only did Ghosn fail to pay the Taylors’ operational expenses, he ultimately left Michael stuck with $1 million in legal bills. Kelly and the Taylors spent far more time in jail than Ghosn.

Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn is a tale with a clear perspective, well-told and with a moral reflecting on the consequences of hubris and greed. Now, we wait for the inevitable feature film.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post <em>Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn</em> paints a stark picture of greed and escape appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Here at Hagerty, we love a good rom-com, especially if it includes an interesting classic car or two. Here are our top ten classic-car stars of the romantic-movie genre.

Pretty Woman (1990) – 1989 Lotus Esprit SE

Richard Gere’s high-flying businessman Edward was bound to own an exotic “foreign” classic, but when both Ferrari and Porsche declined to be associated with a film linked to prostitution, Lotus stepped in.  Its gamble paid off—sales of the Esprit, actually a modified 1990 model SE, rocketed in the U.S. following the film’s release. With a tuned engine and carbon-fiber body, this silver Esprit had a top speed of 165 mph and achieved 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds. And, as Vivian (Julia Roberts) put it: “Man, it corners like it’s on rails!”

When Harry Met Sally (1989) – 1976 Toyota Corona Station Wagon

Meg Ryan’s character Sally drove what is probably the least exciting car on our list. The RT119 Toyota Corona had the 2.2-liter 20R engine, a SOHC, two-valve motor that generated a modest 96 hp at 4800 rpm. With yellow/ beige paintwork and tan vinyl interior, the station wagon captured the mid ’70s feel of the film perfectly.

Notting Hill (1999) – 1967 Park Royal AEC Routemaster Bus

OK, so it’s not exactly a star of the film, but we love the old Routemaster, and we love Notting Hill. The one used in the film, registration SMK665F, was brought into service as RML2665 in November 1967 by London Transport. In 1996, she was upgraded with a Scania engine and served another ten years on London’s streets before being retired. Now owned by the Bath Bus Company, SMK665F is available for hire for special events and weddings.

The Graduate (1967) – 1966 Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider

When the young Dustin Hoffman was cast as Benjamin Braddock, his uncle offered to supply the character’s car. The uncle was the legendary U.S. car importer Max Hoffman, and the car was the newly released Alfa Romeo Duetto Spider. Dustin won the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, Alfa sales soared, and Max became richer—the rest is history.

Three cars were actually used in filming, all Euro-specification 1600 Spiders with the standard 108-bhp, twin-cam, carbureted engine that pulled the car to 60 mph in 9.6 seconds. Next time you watch the film, look out for the inconsistencies—in some shots, the car has sun visors and a radio; in others, these are missing.

Dirty Dancing (1987) – 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air

Patrick Swayze’s character Johnny Castle drove one of the most iconic American cars of all time, the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air two-door hardtop. For gearheads, the film is memorable for the scene where Johnny locks his keys in the car and smashes the window with a pole. Continuity errors show that at least two cars (or windows) were used in the filming, and that could explain why owners in both the U.S. and in Australia claim to own the original car.

Love Actually (2023) – 1992 Saab 900 XS

Colin Firth’s character Jamie famously learned Portuguese in order to woo his housekeeper, but we all know it was his Saab 900 that really attracted Aurelia, played by Lucia Moniz. The blue 1992 model contained Saab’s “H” 1985-cc inline-four, generating 130 hp that pulled the car from 0 to 60 in 10.5 seconds. Last taxed in 2012, the car is unfortunately now off the road and registered under a Statutory Off Road Notification (SORN).

The Love Bug (1968) – 1963 Volkswagen Beetle

With his big personality and amazing turn of speed, Herbie cemented the VW Beetle as an iconic car around the world. Ironically, Volkswagen did not support Disney’s use of the car, and as a result all VW badges and logos were removed for filming. Many different Beetles were used in Love Bug, including a number of older, oval-rear-screen models that were modified to make them look like later cars.

For racing scenes, one of the Beetles was fitted with a Porsche 356 Super 90, twin Solex, 1600-cc engine and drum brakes, Koni shocks, and roll cage. Allegedly, it achieved 115 mph during filming.

The Notebook (2004) – 1946 Hudson Commodore

Of all the romantic films out there, The Notebook is the one guaranteed to turn even the most red-blooded alpha male into a blubbering wreck. Through the tears and snot, you may be able to spot a fair collection of 1930s and ’40s American classic cars, but the one that really catches the eye is the 1946 Hudson Commodore Eight Club Coupe driven by Rachel McAdams’ character. The two-tone Series 2 Commodore had a 128-hp eight-cylinder engine under the hood, and was a comfortable ride—Hudsons were known for their relatively opulent interiors.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) – 1969 Mercedes-Benz 280SE Convertible

Hugh Grant’s smooth-talking Daniel Cleaver may not end up with the girl, but he definitely has the coolest car in Bridget Jones’ Diary. His 1969 Mercedes-Benz 280SE Convertible in blue has the 2778-cc inline-six (M130) engine and is an earlier, “high grille” car.

True Romance (1993) – 1988 Porsche 911 Flachbau Cabriolet

Elliot Blitzer will probably be remembered for two things—having a bag of uncut cocaine tipped over his head just before the cops arrest him, and driving a white Porsche 911 Flachbau (Flat Nose) cabriolet. The car was cast perfectly—it was ostentatious, noisy, and flashy, matching Blitzer’s character as a movie executive and aspiring actor. It had Hollywood written all over it. Whether Blitzer’s was the real thing or not is questionable—many companies provided aftermarket bodykits. If Tarantino wanted realism, it was probably a fake.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The 10 most romantic movie cars of all time appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Though this story originally published here in 2020, there is never a bad year to remind yourself that Kyle Smith once submitted his crusty van to the one of the world’s most prestigious vintage car concours. Enjoy! —Ed. 

Every opportunity I’ve had to visit high-end automotive events ends more or less the same way. Concours participants climb into sultry prewar feats of coachwork magic, or perhaps, effortlessly fast Italian cars with snarling V-12s. They drive off into the open road, bound for a heated garage and a microfiber rubdown. It takes me three-quarters of a mile to walk to the dirt parking lot where my beige Camry rental car awaits, with only the rear view mirror reflecting my now-Rosso-Corsa-colored forehead to greet me.

When the email came through in December 2016 announcing that the application process was open for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, this was a clear opportunity to flip the script. Right? Longing to be part of the exclusive club that gets to drive across the picturesque 18th fairway on a particular Sunday morning in August, and perhaps suffering from a bit of optimistic delusion, I started writing an application for the only classic I owned at the time: a 1961 Chevrolet Greenbrier van.

Admittedly, the inspiration for this foolish stunt came from Concours d’Lemons, an event organized by “Head Gasket” Alan Galbraith. Alan started the pseudo-concours event to poke fun at the exclusivity and general best-of-the-best nature of Pebble Beach. The gathering features classes with kitschy names, which are more often than not self-deprecating. A class featured in the early days of the Concours d’Lemons was “Pebble Beach Rejects.” A car could only be entered in this class if the owner could display a rejection letter from Pebble Beach. Despite attending many Lemons events, I’d never seen any vehicle actually enter this class. If the Greenbrier was the only entry, surely it was guaranteed to win.

Fortunately, this was not my first rodeo. Prior to Hagerty, I worked with a few smaller outfits that helped owners apply to top-tier concours events, Pebble Beach included. It’s a whole lot more than checking the box on the printed out form and sending it back with a check for $25 like many local shows. The check is left out completely, as Pebble Beach has no application fee. Typically, the event wants to know the car inside and out (even if the selection committee is already familiar with it), along with its history, who did the restoration (if it had one), and other events where the car has been featured. In the industry, that’s known as provenance.

This is where I had to get creative. The van was rich in patina, yet impoverished in provenance. It was a crusty surfer van that a friend found on the side of a California highway before I bought it and road tripped it to Michigan. However, if you spin a tale hard enough you can get an interesting thread from even the most boring and mundane of vehicles. It is certainly not unheard of for concours applicants to practice the delicate art of wordsmithing in order to paint their car in the best possible light.

My letter stuck to the facts, albeit presented carefully and for maximum effect. For example, the previous owner worked for a company which had an office in the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, and therefore was able to tuck the broken down hulk in a corner of the basement Vault for some time while he was working on it. On display? Well, technically no. Some of the finest pieces of automotive history sat right along side it, though!

I drafted it all in a PDF, attached it to an email, clicked send, and waited. This sort-of prank had two possible outcomes: some type of form letter rejection (remember, this was my ticket to that special Lemons class) or absolute (and justifiable) radio silence.

To be clear, the whole enterprise was a waste of the selection committee’s time, and I fully expected it would be ignored. Instead, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance team rose above my childish humor and honored me with a personalized response—including wishing me luck with entry and participation in other events. I’d done it!

This golden ticket of a rejection technically qualified me for that exclusive Lemons class, but in the end, my van lived in Michigan and the special class was open only during the Monterey event in August. Driving cross country purely for a practical joke is not entirely outside the scope of my M.O., but at the time I couldn’t make it happen.

Fun story to tell people at parties, though. Still, the polite response from the Concours served to amplify the tinge of regret I felt about wasting the selection committee’s time and energy. As much as I goofed off at its expense, I have nothing but respect for the group of professionals that make such events happen every year for our enjoyment. So, please, don’t repeat my escapade with Pebble Beach or any other concours. It will be even less funny the second time.

I never got to experience the feeling of driving my Chevrolet onto the finely groomed golf course in the wee hours of the morning, but with the show canceled this year, I joined many in the Hagerty community and made it my own. I set an alarm for real early on Sunday and made my own Dawn Patrol. While I don’t own the Greenbrier any longer, my ’65 Corvair coupe was happy to fill in, leaking oil on my lawn.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post When Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance—deservedly—denied my car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Jay Leno has driven countless automobiles in his life, yet he still manages to find unique rides. Among the most memorable is the 1948 Ford F6 rat rod featured on the latest installment of Jay Leno’s Garage.

“This is what people will be driving on the last day of gasoline—when it’s all used up,” Leno jokes. “… In most modern cars, you go 100 [mph] and you feel like you’re going 60. In this one, you go 60 and feel like you’re going 200.”

Owned by Brett Gregory, CEO of the Circle G Movie Ranch in Agua Dulce, California, says the truck “checked three boxes” for him: rat rod, vintage tow truck, and blower motor all in one package.

“So you’re ready to die,” Leno says. “Leave this with me and I’ll take care of it. You’ve pretty much accomplished everything.”

Just about every major American auto manufacturer is represented in the F6. Under the hood, the ’48 Ford has a Chevrolet 350-cubic-inch roller motor with a 671 blower that’s mated to a three-speed Turbo 400 transmission. (The driveline averages 3 to 4 mpg.) The build also features ’42 Chevy headlights, Dodge motorhome wheels (19.5 inch tires on the front, 20s on the back), ’50 Pontiac running lights, and so much more.

The roof has been chopped five inches, the front axle raised two feet, and the back lowered to create its head-turning stance. Yet “it looks authentic,” Leno says. “There’s still a lot of 1948 there.”

Created by Larry Mason and Ed West about a decade ago, the patina-laden rat rod has numerous unique—and sometimes hidden—features. The “GPS” is a World War II compass. There are two antique brass fire extinguishers in back. A JVC stereo system with a back-up camera is concealed behind a drop-down panel on the dash. The battery is hidden inside a tool box. And the fuel tank is located beneath a hinged gas can in the truck bed; the can is secured in place by an old Winchester lock.

Though the license plates read BADNUWZ, this truck is anything but.

“It must be a lot of fun when you go to car shows,” Leno says, “because this is what people go crazy for.”

“They really do,” Gregory admits. “… It really makes people smile. They want to come up, they want to talk about it, they follow me on the street, the cameras come out … It’s very, very unique.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 1948 Ford rat-rod tow truck leaves Leno awestruck appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Mention The Love Bug and people immediately think of the spunky little Volkswagen Beetle that became a Hollywood legend. However, Herbie wasn’t the only star car in the 1968 Disney movie. A 1965 Apollo GT, known in the film as the Thorndyke Special, was definitely a scene stealer. And it may be once again.

Fifty-five years after the release of the Disney comedy that starred Dean Jones, Michele Lee, Buddy Hackett, and David Tomlinson, the yellow-and-black sports car with Italian-American roots is back in the spotlight. The Apollo, which will cross the block at Bonhams’ Quail Auction in Monterey on August 18, has quite a story to tell.

“The sports car history books are chock full of ambitious young folks dreaming big, pooling their cash, and setting up shop to take on the world,” Hagerty’s Andrew Newton once wrote. “Then they often run out of money, throw up their hands, and close their doors after just a few years and a few dozen examples are finished.”

That’s essentially the road taken by Apollo, which was the brainchild of Milt Brown, Ron Plescia, and Ned Davis. In the early 1960s, the California friends wanted to emulate the best of the large sports cars then coming out of Italy and Britain while taking advantage of more reliable American underpinnings. The idea kicked into high gear when Brown met Frank Reisner, of Carrozzeria Intermeccanica, while at the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix. Reisner agreed to provide finished bodies, so Plescia went to work on the design, sketching a European-influenced coupe body that Bertone designer Franco Scaglione refined.

The finished product, the Apollo 3500 GT, was unveiled at the Los Angeles Auto Show in January 1963. It had styling elements reminiscent of both the Jaguar E-Type and Ferrari 250 GT, used a steel ladder frame with Buick front subframe and front suspension, and had four-link trailing arm rear suspension. Power was provided by Buick’s lightweight aluminum 3.5-liter V-8, which was mated to a Borg-Warner T-10 four-speed manual transmission. The car offered a claimed top speed of 130 mph.

The price tag of the new Apollo was about $7000 ($69,800 today), and the initial response was overwhelmingly positive. The automaker soon came out with a convertible model, and the demand for more power led to the 5000 GT, which was essentially the same car but with Buick’s new iron-block, aluminum-head 5.0-liter V-8. Apollo also planned a four-passenger car and a mid-engine sports car, but by 1965 the writing was on the wall. Although Apollo offered a solid product, the cost of shipping bodies from Italy to California was predictably huge, and cash flow problems meant the business was unsustainable. Apollo sold its assets after building a total of 88 cars.

Two of those 88 cars ended up in the hands of Disney filmmakers. Modified and prepped for The Love Bug by Max Balchowsky of Hollywood Motors, the Thorndyke Special actually appears on screen before Herbie does, when out-of-work racing driver Jim Douglas (Jones) spies it through the window of a European Imported Car dealership owned by villain Peter Thorndyke (Tomlinson).

When Thorndyke realizes Douglas doesn’t have the money to buy such an expensive car, he sends him on his way, but not before Herbie literally bumps into him. Thorndyke, angry that his employees have displayed the Volkswagen in his high-class showroom, demands that the car be thrown out too.

The fun begins when Herbie follows Douglas home.

After being accused of stealing the car, Douglas eventually buys it and learns that Herbie has the heart of a top-notch race car. Predictably, Thorndyke is infuriated by the duo’s success.

“There isn’t a driver in the world who can get that speed out of a car like that,” he says. “He’s done something to it.”

Thorndyke vows to defeat Douglas and Herbie, and he uses the Apollo to do it. Comedy ensues, of course.

While multiple VW Beetles were used to portray Herbie in The Love Bug, only two were used for The Thorndyke Special, and—as Bonhams tells us—“even then it is only careful and forensic viewing of the movie that reveals this, as there are plainly two different license plates among other details. It seems likely that one was more orientated towards the stunts and the other for the uncompromised, panning scenes.”

It was through those stunts that the owner of this car (chassis #1052) was able to establish its connection to the movie. Purchased in 2004, it was a project car that had already been started but was never completed; the rolling chassis and bodywork were in gray primer. The new owner, an Apollo enthusiast, grew curious about the car’s origins when he found a lot of yellow paint beneath the primer. Only two Apollos had been delivered in that color, and his research showed that those Apollos had been prepared and provided for Disney by Max Balchowsky.

Watching hours of slow-motion film footage from The Love Bug, he was able to match the body damage to scenes in the movie. Bonhams says that when a DVD documentary revealed that the other Apollo had been cut up for filming different angles, it was clear that #1052 was the only one that could have survived, and an exhaustive restoration began. Nine years later, the Thorndyke Special re-emerged at the Concorso Italiano in 2013, where its owner was introduced to Milt Brown, Ron Plescia, Frank Reisner’s widow, and original Apollo salesman George Finley.

Now the film star is back in the spotlight at Bonhams, which has set the presale estimate at $175,000–$250,000. Considering that a 1965 Apollo GT 5000 in #1 (Concours) condition has an average value of $240,000—and one in #2 (Excellent) is valued at $204,000—will the Apollo’s Hollywood provenance push it beyond the estimate? We’ll know in eight days.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Herbie’s <em> Love Bug</em> co-star is back in the spotlight—and for sale appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It was about a year after Barbie started dating Ken in 1961 that her Austin-Healey 3000 hit toy shelves. In real life, about a year after Susie Follick started dating Ken Lybolt, she became the proud owner of a 3000.

While Barbie’s Ken—he of the molded hair and little red swimming trunks—probably had nothing to do with his plastic girlfriend becoming a Healey driver, Susie’s Ken, who has real hair and usually wears clothes, was instrumental in her becoming a lifelong fan of the classic English sports car. And while Barbie has found herself plunked in behind the wheel of numerous exotic machines (including many Corvettes) since she first “drove” her salmon-colored Healey in 1962, Susan “Susie” Lybolt and her husband Ken have remained dedicated to the British marque; they are still driving and showing the green ’64 Austin-Healey 3000 Mk III that she bought 55 years ago.

It was 1967 when Follick and Lybolt met at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, where Ken was an advertising major and Susan was a student in the education department. Susan had grown up in Royal Oak, Michigan, just four houses west of Woodward Avenue. Her dad, Russell Follick, was a Woodward cruiser and a builder of hot rods, so she was immersed in car culture from birth. While it was undoubtedly Ken Lybolt’s charming personality and tousled mane of (genuine) hair that won her heart, she also developed a fondness for the shapely 1960 Austin-Healey 100-6 that he drove when they cruised the scenic Big Rapids area and challenged its winding rural roads.

Austin-Healey, maker of Ken’s pretty sports car, was the joint venture of the Austin division of the British Motor Corporation and the Donald Healey Motor company, a respected engineering and design firm. Austin had hardware, including engines and drivetrain components, and Healey had style, performance know-how, and panache. The first product of the union was the Austin-Healey 100—an open two-seater. The second, first offered in 1956, was the 100-6, a stylish 2+2 roadster, powered by an engine of approximately 2.6 liters and 102 horsepower, enough to propel the 2480-pound lightweight to over 100 mph. Heady stuff back then.

Ken Lybolt thought so, and in 1960, at the tender age of 15, he purchased a non-running ’57 100-6 Healey from his Midland, Michigan, next-door neighbor for $500. Too young to drive, he spent his days working on it in his parents’ garage, tinkering with the lifeless powerplant and figuring out how to interpret the British English of the Healey shop manual with its references to spanners, bonnets, and boots. More Healeys followed, and by the time Ken arrived at Ferris State he was driving the sporty 100-6 “Big Healey” that would help win Susan’s heart. (“Big” is a relative term here; Big Healeys are quite compact, but they’re large in comparison to the diminutive Austin-Healey Sprite.)

Susan recalls their dates with a certain fondness. It was behind the wheel of Ken’s car that she learned to operate a manual transmission and clutch. Ken had lost the key to his pride and joy, so he would hotwire the ignition and push the car to start it while Susan sat behind the wheel, releasing the clutch when the speed was sufficient to turn over the engine. They made a point of parking on downhill streets when possible. Ken ultimately found his spare key, which had been in his wallet all along. Was he merely trying to get Susan to fall in love with that special feeling one gets behind the wheel of a Big Healey? (He maintains he really had misplaced that key.)

Whether generating Healey love was Ken’s mission or not, it came to be, and in 1968, while back home in Royal Oak, Susan bought her own Austin-Healey, a 1964 3000 Mk III, arguably the best of the Big Healeys.

Susan’s dad took her to the dealership that had advertised the used Healey 3000. A car guy to the core, Mr. Follick was up for this adventure, and he wholeheartedly approved the purchase. However, while Susan had been able to reach the pedals in Ken’s 100-6, she found she couldn’t drive the bigger 3000 without having to move awkwardly far forward in the seat. Dad drove the 3000 home while Susan shoed the family station wagon. Back in their garage, undeterred, he made extensions for the pedals and installed a 2×4 under the seat cushion so Susan could comfortably drive the Healey. The pedal extensions remain in place to this day, and the seat cushion spacer is in place when Susan is at the wheel.

Austin-Healey’s 3000 was revised for 1964 with the introduction of a Mk III version. Sporting a high-lift camshaft and large-throat HD8 SU carburetors, the 2.9-liter inline-six engine now generated 148 horsepower, enough to propel the 2650-pound car to 115 mph. A two-speed electric overdrive in combination with the four-speed manual transmission effectively gave the car six speeds, allowing the engine work at peak efficiency most of the time.

Susan and Ken tied the knot in 1969. The Lybolts were suddenly a two-Healey family, or as Ken likes to joke, “we had no transportation.” Because Susan’s 3000 was the most reliable of their two roadsters, Ken’s car went to new ownership, but they would continue to prize and pamper their 3000 through good times and bad for more than half a century, year after year, to this very day.

At some point, the Lybolts added a classic English hamper—a picnic basket that rides smartly on the rear luggage rack in the manner prescribed by Londoners. At a recent cars and coffee outing they attended, the hamper was filled to the brim with chocolate-chip cookies for their friends.

They’ve also repainted the Healey as necessary. Today it sports Jaguar’s version of British Racing Green, which is a slightly darker shade than the original Austin-Healey color and, to most eyes, a nicer hue. These days the car is a summer-season driver, and in good weather it’s driven nearly every day. The odometer reads 87,000 miles, but the Lybolts said the odometer hasn’t always worked, so the true mileage is probably about 100,000. Despite generous use, the car looks great and runs well.

Somewhere along the way, the couple obtained a copy of the toy Austin-Healey that was introduced as a Barbie accessory in 1962. The salmon color of the Mattel car didn’t work well with the Lybolt Healey’s green, so they had Earl Scheib paint it to match. They were also gifted a genuine 1958 Barbie, an appropriate occupant for the little plastic version. At car shows, or in the Woodward Dream Cruise, Barbie and her Austin-Healey accompany the Lybolts, riding along atop the picnic basket. Plastic Ken is nowhere to be seen.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post “Barbie” + Ken: Big love and a Big Healey appeared first on Hagerty Media.

When we first met John Wick, way back in 2014, his ride was a ’69 Ford Mustang Boss 429 (really a Mach 1). In the film it’s more than a machine, it’s a memento, a reminder of his late wife Helen. To John, a retired bullet-slinging hitman, it’s a car worth killing for; after Helen’s death, the loss of her final gift to him—a beagle puppy named Daisy—and the theft of his Mustang leads John back into his old life as a mythic assassin capable of dizzying carnage.

In an interview with Hagerty, John Wick 4 director Chad Stahelski expounded on what makes muscle cars so integral to these films:

“There’s something cool and intrinsic about the kind of action we’re doing—Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, that kind of generation grew up with those kind of cars, so I think they’re affiliated with that kind of muscle, that masculinity. [ . . . ] “So that’s why we chose them back in the first movie. It relates to the time period of the action films we wanted to go back to.”

The classic rides are key to this franchise’s throwback action-flick feel, and from the beginning John Wick movies have showcased a love for American muscle. In John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), John has unfinished business: to recover his stolen Mustang, he drives a ’70 Chevy Chevelle. But the saga’s third installment (2019) was noticeably lacking in the muscle we’d come to associate with the character. Thankfully, John Wick: Chapter 4 makes it up to us when John—out of nowhere—ends up in a ’71 Cuda while he fights for his life in Paris.

As it turns out, credit goes to podcast host Joe Rogan not just for the return of muscle cars to the franchise, but for the selection of the Cuda specifically. Stahelski met Rogan at the shooting range Taran Tactical Innovations in Simi Valley when they were introduced by its owner, Taran Butler. Rogan immediately complained to Stahelski about the dearth of muscle cars in John Wick’s third chapter.

“Look, I love the movies,” Rogan said, according to Stahelski. “But what the f***, man? Why were there no muscle cars in [Chapter 3]? I love muscle cars.” Stahelski confessed, “Actually, we had done a sequence but I just ran out of money, I ran out of time. So we had to lose an action bit, and that was the car chase.”

The filmmaker made a mental note of the encounter. Cut to a year later, Stahelski was working on Chapter 4 and texted Rogan: “We’re getting ready to do the next thing. If you could pick any car to put in a movie, what would you pick?” Without hesitation, Rogan replied: “’71 Barracuda.” Stahelski explains, “He sent me a picture. And I still have it, the exact Barracuda that’s in the movie is what he sent me.”

The Cuda is the star of a sequence set in the world’s most hellish place to drive: the roundabout surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. The bounty on John’s head keeps increasing, and one of the Parisian goons who wants it rams into John Wick with his Cuda; unfortunately for this hopeful henchman, John survives and lands on the car’s hood. As per usual, things do not end well for John’s opponent. John shoots him through the windshield and then commandeers the car, using it like a battering ram and ripping the doors off in the process.

The doorless Cuda only makes John deadlier, allowing him to drive circles around his adversaries, shooting them with ease. Eventually, though, the car flips, helpfully becoming John’s shield from gunfire (and oncoming traffic).

Keanu Reeves is in that driver’s seat for real, by the way. It took about five months to train him for this sequence: “We took the car-driving to the next level, which I really enjoy,” Keanu Reeves told Total Film. “There’s 180s, forward-into-reverse 180s, reverse-into-forward 270s, drifting … so it was really fun to get a chance to learn those skills, and to play.”

In Chapter 4, the roundabout around the Arc proves an even more harrowing labyrinth than usual, the sequence evolving into a Frogger-like game where everyone involved has to avoid getting shot and hit by vehicles. Planning this scene was a logistical nightmare. The roundabout was recreated to the inch at Tegel Airport in Berlin. To avoid miscommunications and overcome the language barrier, Stahelski’s stunt team planned for every worst-case scenario imaginable. Different-colored cones were used to divide lanes. So Keanu Reeves, Marko Zaror (Chidi), Shamier Anderson (the Tracker), the stunt drivers, and the camera crew knew where to be at all times. If they stayed in their lane, they wouldn’t get hit.

“It’s literally like playing Twister,” Stahelski said. “They know exactly where to step. Our cars know exactly what lane, they’re all color-coded. We’re taking any miscommunications out of the system. You just have to go, ‘look at blue, blue, stay in blue.’ And then we get that, and we rehearse and rehearse, and then you figure out, what if somebody still gets confused? Where’s the outs, so every other car is staggered, so everyone’s always got room to swerve? And then it’s rehearsed and rehearsed, and rehearsed, and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed, with the camera team with it.”

And the production doesn’t simply have to worry about the stunt guys getting hit by just one car — if someone had been hit, forty more cars would be hurtling their way. To prevent this, “we put them on these wires, we have a big grid above so the guys are actually taking a car hit with the wire to make sure he doesn’t go too far, and then we put him down,” Stahelski said. “And if they do [get hit], we can stop him from being run over by another.”

Thanks to this thorough, careful planning and all the safety precautions they put in place, no one was injured beyond a few bumps and bruises. The cars weren’t so lucky, however: five cars heavily modified for stunts were used, but unfortunately, only one survived.

The Cuda is a bit of callback to John’s Mustang in Chapter 2’s opening sequence, though only one of the Mustang’s doors is ripped off, not two. It feels like the Mustang’s avenging ghost. It also evokes Christine, the possessed Plymouth Fury in John Carpenter’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel. With John Wick at the wheel, the car feels possessed, fearsome, a glossy-black demon with Cragar-style wheels, a twin scoop rally hood, and dual headlights. Considering Reeves had to stay on top of the car while it was in motion, the twin scoop rally hood was probably a little more comfortable and easier to hold on to than the shaker hood that denotes a 426 Hemi.

The Barracuda began its life as a riff on the Plymouth Valiant made with a small-block engine. Released just two weeks before the Ford Mustang in 1964, it was technically the first pony car. By 1969, though, Plymouth had beefed up their humble machine and launched the Cuda, their performance package: the fastest and most powerful that they had to offer, capable of speeds up to approximately 130 mph. And those outfitted with a 426 Hemi engine could close in on speeds of 144 mph. Like the Dodge Challenger, it was built on Chrysler’s E-body. (Sometimes they used a Chrysler B-body to fit the biggest V-8 engines.)

The car was beast-like by design, modeled after its namesake: the new grille was designed “to suggest barracuda fish teeth,” according to Chrysler designer Diran Yazejian, and the front fenders’ “simulated chrome inset louvers suggested gills.” That makes 1971 perhaps the most aggressive-looking model year of the Barracuda, and menace is an essential characteristic of any car driven by John Wick. The aesthetic of the car coupled with the power under its hood make this ideal for John to drive—and to weaponize.

These movies have never featured a straightforward car chase. But it feels right for the character: John Wick fights in close quarters, his kills are intimate, up close and personal. The car feels like an extension of John’s body. As Stahelski explained, this was born of an ethos espoused by self-defense expert Marc MacYoung: “…anything you pick up or anything you use as an extension of your will, the will to conquer another, the will to win, the will to kill, the will to survive dominates anything and you will use anything in your reach, power, grasp, opportunity to use that to survive. I always thought that was a cool thing. If you describe John Wick in one word, it would be ‘willpower.’ Anything he touches—from a pencil to a Mustang to a Barracuda to a staircase to a waterfall—this guy’s using it to survive.”

From a budget perspective, a car chase is never an easy sell. It didn’t make sense even for the first John Wick, which only had a $20 million budget. “For your audience out there, cars become very expensive because you’re not moving quickly, and every car is anywhere from ten to hundreds of thousands of dollars per what you’re using,” says Stahelski. “Once you get up to 40 to 50 miles an hour you’re covering city blocks, you have to lock it off, you have to light it late at night. Car chases are logistically more complicated and more expensive than most other action sequences. Even without visual effects, they’re expensive. If you really look at most car chases, it’s a lot of what we call ‘shoe leather.’ It’s going straight fast, wiping by, tracking, or turning corners. You’re trying to tie the chase together. Even to do the simplest car chases, they take time and money. They’re really not worth the bang for their buck unless you have the money to do something cool.”

And doing something cool is Stahelski’s priority, his filmmaking raison d’être. Credit a philosophy that blends Marcus Aurelius (“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way”) as well as Jackie Chan’s approach to action (“make it hard!”), Chad Stahelski and his stunt team create action sequences that push the envelope: like the aerial view of a gunfight involving dragon’s breath rounds, a chase through New York on horseback, or swordfighting on Yamaha MT-09 motorbikes.

This is how Stahelski and co-director of the first John Wick David Leitch came up with what they dubbed “car-fu,” opting for car fights instead of car chases. “When we did the first [John Wick], we knew we didn’t have much money, but we wanted to do something cool. So we’re like, F*** it, we’re just gonna do gun-fu, we’re gonna do car-fu. We’ll make it bumper cars, demolition derby. John Wick is gonna use the car as a weapon. And we’ll limit ourselves to just this one stretch, and we’re just going to bash everything with it. [ . . . ] We’ll just contain it, and make it very violent.”

Inventive, brutal fights that showcase classic cars ensued. The Arc de Triomphe showdown might just be Stahelski and his team’s best work yet, boasting some truly transcendent vehicular action. It’s an unforgettable spectacle that establishes its star Cuda as a new icon in the pantheon of cinematic cars.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post <em>John Wick 4</em> delivers muscle “car-fu” in a Cuda appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Though the Corvette is by far the most consistent model in Barbie’s six-decade-plus collection, the mainstay American doll has claimed a number of other cars. Curious to know what some selections from her complete collection might be worth today? Assuming she keeps her cars in Excellent (#2) condition, let’s stack them up.

She’s owned a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, the big-finned American classic, which could be had as a blue on two-tone pink and white or pink on two-tone pink. According to the Hagerty Price Guide, it’s worth $84,600 in Excellent shape on average. Her first car was a 1962 Austin Healey 3000 MkII ($74,600), which could be had in myriad colors. Her 1962 Mercedes Benz 190SL would snag $139,000 on average.

By 1981, acid-washed Barbie got a Radwood dream car in the VW “Jazzie” Rabbit Cabriolet (about $8000), a decidedly more practical car with fun bumper stickers that read, “High School is cool” and “I Heart Cool Dudes.”

Not to be outdone by Magnum P.I., Barbie went Italian in 1986 with a Ferrari 328 GTB ($191,000) that got iconic five-spoke wheels and red over tan or white over tan interior—both classic specs for this classic girl. She’s not stymied one bit by that gated shifter!

For the off-road adventurer in Barbie, nothing would do but a ’90s-era Jeep. Thankfully, it was after the era of rectangular YJ headlamps that Barbie rocked her pink Wrangler TJ ($23,200). It was an RC car sporting off-road tires and an “Oh, Sh*t” handle for Ken, who tried to conceal his fear while Barbie bombed through Baja.

Her 1994 Jaguar XJS convertible ($31,900) got burl-wood interior trim stickers, white leather, an automatic transmission, and a radio. Porsche jumped into the Barbie business with both a 964-generation 911 cabriolet ($64,000) that had working headlights and, later, a red-on-tan Boxster ($21,000) with a motorized, retractable roof.

Even Ford got a slice of the pie when it sold Barbie a 2003 Mustang GT convertible ($25,000 for a 2005 model)—merely a prototype for the fifth-generation pony car when Barbie curled her perfectly plastic fingers around its steering wheel. Eat your heart out, Vanilla Ice!

Just the cars mentioned here (not even including her Corvettes) would be valued well over $500,000 in total. And we didn’t even get into the camper van, the BMW Z8, her Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, or other cars like her Volkswagen Beetle, Volvo V70 wagon, or pink Fiat 500. Barbie has been a journalist, but on that salary alone she could never afford all these cool cars. Good thing she can pay the bills as a surgeon, pilot, firefighter, Olympic athlete, flight attendant, computer engineer, video game developer, Mars explorer, and CEO.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How much is Barbie’s car collection worth? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Fear not, Barbie fans—the bowtie brand is back in the playhouse garage. Coming to theaters on July 21, 2023, is a new Barbie blockbuster written by Greta Gerwig and her husband, Noah Baumbach. Gerwig directed the movie as well, which follows Barbie’s 2020-era-appropriate existential crisis. Amid the frenzy she gets a sweet set of wheels—a classic first-generation Corvette. Barbie has had plenty of dalliances with America’s sports car, but her most recent was a C5, about two decades ago.

America’s relationship with Barbie started in the ’50s, when Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler noticed her daughter eschewing her baby dolls for paper adult versions. An idea was born, and on March 9, 1959, Barbie debuted at the New York Toy Fair. The long-legged blond with eyeshadow that matched her cornflower blue eyes became the first adult-looking mass-produced doll in the United States. Handler’s daughter’s name was Barbara, but she also had a son named Kenneth. Ken, Barbie’s male sidekick, came along in 1961.

By the early ’60s, the iconic doll’s star was on the rise. She did what most celebrities do with their first big paycheck: She bought a car. Her first was a 1962 Austin Healey 3000 MkII. It came in a variety of colors, including a sedate brown with a blue interior as well as her now-signature pink. But golly, a girl from the fictional Willow, Wisconsin, couldn’t be driving around in a foreign car, so eventually Barbie got herself a Corvette.

The third-generation Corvette (C3) was her first, making mid-’70s Barbie’s American dream come true. Dubbed the Star ‘Vette,  this magenta-colored beauty donned the slim mid-section and fat fenders from the pens of Chevrolet designers Zora Arkus-Duntov and Bill Mitchell. Then there’s Barbie who, if she were an actual woman instead of a doll, would have been anatomically impossible.

Barbie’s pink convertible came with star decals for the hood and door panels. A luggage rack came with a snap-on suitcase. (This being a Corvette, we can assume two sets of golf clubs fit in the trunk.) The interior came fully loaded with a tape deck and three cassettes. It also sported sport bucket seats, a CB radio, and a working steering wheel that turned the front wheels, and sweet “G70-14 Super Slicks” tires.

In 1979, the Barbie Super ’Vette hit toy stores with remote-control capability, though, since it was corded, you’d have to walk alongside Barbie and her plastic man as you cruised the living room. The Super ‘Vette’s sunshine yellow hue sparkled over a blue interior. The toy version seems to have snagged the post mid-cycle refresh details in concert with the big-person version, including the front and rear bumpers revised for federal safety compliance. Barbie is law-abiding, but we’re assuming the RC version’s electric power meant it was exempt from Malaise Era emissions controls.

Mattel took some creative license taken, however, as the real-life 1975 Vette was the final one of the C3 generation to don a convertible top. Ingress and egress would never have been so easy in a coupe, and it helped that 1967 marked the first year Barbie started bending her legs and could swivel at the waist thanks to “Twist ‘N Turn” technology.

There were only two engine options for the real-world, late-model C3: a 350-cubic-inch small-block that made 165 horsepower and the L82, which made substantially more, with 205 max output. Barbie, one imagines, opted for the bigger engine just to see if she could blow any of Ken’s hair back. By 1980 we got the final of Barbie’s C3 iterations. The interior even gained a TV screen—how prescient! The box came with the verbiage “push it everywhere,” which is not the ideal situation for real-deal Vette owners.

Mattel stayed on the Corvette bandwagon into the Dave McLellan–designed C4 generation, built between 1984 and 1996. Brand-new from the chassis up, the C4 represented a sea change for America’s sports car, and Barbie had several. As the C4 shifted from a fiberglass body-on-frame to what GM called a “uniframe” U-shaped frame construction, Barbie also got some significant changes. This was the ’80s, so Great Shape Barbie arrived in her leotard-and-leg-warmers outfit. The C4 got more power during its tenure, up to 375 hp if you got the LT5-equipped ZR-1; the improvement of Barbie’s core strength after adding Jazzercize to her workout regimen is impossible to quantify.

Barbie’s first C4 showed up at toy dealers in 1983 as the sparkling metallic pink Ultra ‘Vette. Around 1984 another Mattel C4 appeared, named Silver ‘Vette, for obvious reasons. While the clean design of this 1980s-era Corvette felt understated by the decade’s excess-laden standards, the Silver ‘Vette came loaded with “lots of realistic features” as the box proclaimed: vanity plates, chrome wheels (stickers), and a working hatchback window.

While we’ve only had eight generations of Corvette, Barbie has seen closer to 12 major facial changes. This doesn’t take into account her myriad mid-cycle refreshes as different makeup trends came and went.

Barbie has run for President of the United States every year since 1992. That year, to reflect this new stoic Barbie, Mattel left the cutesy naming conventions behind; it was now just the Barbie Corvette. Today you can find a pink-on-pink example on eBay for anywhere from $15 (a well-played-with driver) to $75 for a sealed, new-in-box specimen.

Over the years, the Corvette saw its share of race tracks, doing duty as pace car for Indy over several years of its run. Barbie herself, no stranger to motorsports, first appeared to the NASCAR crowd in 1998 with, yes, NASCAR Barbie, in honor of the 50th Anniversary. Helmet and firesuit in hand, Barbie was ready to take the wheel. In 2000, Barbie belted in for Scuderia Ferrari, becoming an F1 driver for the yellow and red. (There was a car, too but it was a limited edition that only sold at the 2004 International Barbie Doll Collections Convention in Chicago.) Let’s hope it’s not much longer until a real live woman can claim an F1 seat.

By the mid-2000s Barbie took a step back from the cockpit, dressing in Dale Jr.—and Jeff Gordon-inspired streetwear, but by 2009, she was back in the driver’s seat again when Race Car Driver Barbie showed up ready for the starting grid.

Radio Shack, back when that was still a thing, offered up a gift set that featured the new-for-1997 C5 as a proper remote-control unit. From what I can tell, it’s her only example of the C5 and the final Corvette Barbie would have. The pale-pink-over-white car could turn and reverse and came with chrome wheels (plastic, not stickers this time), a quad exhaust, vanity plates, and power from four C batteries. Purists may consider the Corvette E-Ray to be the first to drive its wheels with battery power, but Barbie thinks otherwise.

The real-life C5 got the LS1 engine and a new transmission—a rear-mounted transaxle—as well as hydroformed box frame that improved stability, especially on the convertibles. Barbie thanks you, Chevy.

Barbie’s first-generation Corvette (C1) in the 2023 movie is scaled smaller in size but retains the pastel-shaded, two-toned details of the original. This officially marks the first time Barbie has claimed a C1 in the driveway. There’s actually one in every Barbie’s garage (yes, every Barbie in the movie is named Barbie). The director, Gerwig, clearly has excellent taste.

Barbie rarely rides in the passenger seat of her cars, but she did once when her sister, Skipper, went to the DMV. The Student Driver gift set came complete with driver handbook, traffic signal charts, and an insurance card.

Barbie’s passion for driving and cars has hopefully fueled the love of cars for girls and young women across the globe. Now, come on Mattel, put her in a C8.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post In the Barbie garage, Corvette is queen appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Click the Music & Cars tag to catch up on all the stories, or jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

For our final installment of car songs, we’re looking to the open road for inspiration. Here are 11 tunes focused on that long black ribbon of freedom.

Nat King Cole
“ROUTE 66”

Now you go through St. Louis
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty
You’ll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino

Fun fact: Outside of this song, no one has ever accused Oklahoma City of being mighty pretty.

Deep Purple
“HIGHWAY STAR”

Nobody gonna take my head
I got speed inside my brain
Nobody gonna steal my head
Now that I’m on the road again

Meth—not even once.

Willie Nelson
“ON THE ROAD AGAIN”

On the road again
Goin’ places that I’ve never been
Seein’ things that I may never see again
And I can’t wait to get on the road again

It’s literally impossible to come up with something snarky to say about this song. Try it.

The Doobie Brothers
“ROCKIN’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY”

Ford’s about to drop, she won’t do no more

And I smell my motor burnin’
Underneath the hood is smoke

Somewhere, a billion Chevy owners are nodding their heads and laughing.

Golden Earring
“RADAR LOVE”

When she is lonely and the longing gets too much
She sends a cable coming in from above
Don’t need no phone at all

Even in 1973, these guys knew that driving and cell phones didn’t pair well.

AC/DC
“HIGHWAY TO HELL”

I’m on the highway to hell
Highway to hell
I’m on the highway to hell
Highway to hell

No one has ever captured a weekend trip to Ikea better than AC/DC did.

Lindsey Buckingham
“HOLIDAY ROAD”

I found out long ago
It’s a long way down the holiday road
Holiday road
Holiday road

A catchy jingle to be sure, but this song really comes alive when you’ve got your dead aunt Edna strapped to the roof.

Talking Heads
“ROAD TO NOWHERE’”

They can tell you what to do
But they’ll make a fool of you

Nice, subtle nod to parents everywhere.

Kraftwerk
“AUTOBAHN” (This was actually a Beach Boys homage)

Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn
Wir fahr’n, fahr’n, fahr’n, auf der Autobahn

They’re driving on the Autobahn, in case that’s not clear.

Canned Heat
“ON THE ROAD AGAIN”

You know the first time I traveled out in the rain and snow
In the rain and snow
You know the first time I traveled out in the rain and snow
In the rain and snow
I didn’t have no payroll, not even no place to go

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Tom Cochrane
“LIFE IS A HIGHWAY”

This is the road and these are the hills
From Mozambique to those Memphis nights
The Khyber Pass to Vancouver’s lights

We’re not going to say this drive is impossible, but you really need to keep an eye on the tides.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post 11 songs about the highway appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Countless songs address the freedom of driving. Among thousands of candidates, we’ll start by nominating two seemingly disparate numbers, both of which illustrate a great through line of American song—the liberating spirit of adventure and exploration that hitting the highway represented. “See the U.S.A. In Your Chevrolet” was made famous by Dinah Shore in 1950, though the jingle—written by Leo Corday and Leon Carr—was originally sung for the TV show Inside U.S.A. with Chevrolet by Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy. Later covered by Pat Boone and even the cast of Glee, after decades of service as a recurring Chevrolet jingle, its luster has by now largely worn off. Conversely, the status of the once-obscure garage rock classic “Roadrunner”—by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers—continues its ascent to musical standard-dom, its popularity growing like the sprawling suburbia that its narrator simultaneously celebrates and seeks to escape.

And, of course, no discussion of the freedom that cars offer would be complete without “Born to Be Wild,” made famous by Steppenwolf and its appearance in the 1969 film Easy Rider, which is about two meaning-seeking, drug-dealing Californian rebels on an impromptu trip across the American Southwest and South on old Harley choppers. Amusingly, this all-American standard was written by a Canadian sessions musician, Mars Bonfire (real name Dennis Eugene McCrohan). He was broke and out of work and planted in Los Angeles when he penned the timeless anthem, a ditty that turned out—in the way these things do—to be just as useful for breathless corporate marketers as for nonconformists quitting their jobs and hitting the road.

Here are 14 more songs that celebrate the freedom of driving…

Bruce Springsteen
“THUNDER ROAD”

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets

Somewhere in Maine, Stephen King is listening.

M.I.A.
“BAD GIRLS”

Cover me, cause I’m changing lanes

That’s not the purpose of driver aids and you know it, M.I.A! They’re meant to complement proper use of mirrors, not replace them completely.

Sonic Youth
“SHOOT”

Can I have the car keys? I wanna go for a ride
Can I have the car please? I’m going out for a while
Can I have the car now? I wanna drive all around
Can I have the car, dear? I’m gonna leave this town

This feels like the lyrical equivalent of Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?

Iggy Pop
“THE PASSENGER”

He sees the sight of hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city’s ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
‘Cause it just belongs to you and me
So let’s take a ride and see what’s mine

Someone sure is selfish.

The Allman Brothers Band
“RAMBLIN’ MAN”

Leaving out of Nashville, Tennessee
They’re always having a good time down on the bayou, Lord
And Delta women think the world of me

Yes, but the JetBlue women can’t stand you.

Wilco
“PASSENGER SIDE”

Hey, wake up, your eyes weren’t open wide
For the last couple of miles you’ve been swerving from side to side
You’re gonna make me spill my beer
If you don’t learn how to steer

Team Wilco lasted exactly one stage before the FIA banned them from ever competing in the WRC again.

Foghat
“SLOW RIDE”

Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy
Slow ride
Take it easy

I hear you, man. Now tell it to all the bozos over on r/idiotsincars.

Pearl Harbor and the Explosions
“DRIVIN’”

(Drivin’)
Back on the streets when it feels so right
(Drivin’) Drivin’
(Drivin’)
It’s just tonight, I feel the only cure is drivin’
(Drivin’) Drivin’
(Drivin’)
I’ve got no time to think of how you feel
(Drivin’) Drivin’
(Drivin’)
Behind the wheel, so now I gotta drive it, drive it
(Drivin’) Drivin’

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a song about golf.

The Modern Lovers
“ROADRUNNER”

With the radio on
I’m in love with Massachusetts

With the radio off, however, I prefer South Dakota.

The Cars
“DRIVE”

Who’s gonna hold you down when you shake?
Who’s gonna come around when you break?

Such a subtle nod to the Plymouth K-car.

Chuck Berry
“NO PARTICULAR PLACE TO GO”

Ridin’ along in my calaboose
Still tryin’ to get her belt aloose
All the way home I held a grudge
But the safety belt it wouldn’t budge
Cruisin’ and playin’ the radio
With no particular place to go

And that, friends, is why we heed recall notices.

War
“LOW RIDER”

All my friends know the low rider

Yeah, but so does Karen from the neighborhood watch, and you just know she’s got 911 on speed dial.

Gary Numan
“CARS”

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live
In cars

Is it, though?

The Breeders
“DRIVIN’ ON 9” (Ed’s Redeeming Qualities cover)

Drivin’ on 9
Drivin’ on 9
Drivin’ on 9

Also not a song about golf!

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Hit the Road: 14 songs about driving appeared first on Hagerty Media.

While binge-watching old episodes of the TV show Forensic Files, I began to notice that a lot of crimes involve cars. People were hit by them, kidnapped in them, and murdered inside them. Cars were stolen, wrecked, and set on fire. After searching a suspect’s house, the next place police always looked was their car.

“In the forensic sphere, cars are a major source of evidence,” explained Chris Palenik, a forensic microscopist (microscope expert) at Microtrace, LLC. “Whether cars provide the evidence, through losing paint or losing fibers to a suspect or victim; or the opposite, where the car picks up evidence because something hit against it, or a gun was fired in it, or hairs were lost in it.”

Chris and his father, Skip Palenik, have worked on thousands of criminal, civil, and industrial cases—many involving vehicles. Of course, not every car clue is microscopic; some are personal.

“I watch true crime because it teaches lessons about human nature,” Rebecca Reisner, true crime blogger and author of Forensic Files Now, told me. “But I’ve really come to appreciate forensic evidence, because people’s memories are a mix of things . . . and you can absolutely testify that someone was there and you could be totally wrong.”

The numbers game

Solving crime often boils down to “who?” “when?” and “where?” and license plates are the fastest way to identify a car and its owner. In one Forensic Files episode, a team of serial bank robbers was finally caught because a savvy witness wrote down their license plate, helping end their seven-year spree.

Today, automatic license-plate cameras administer everything from speeding tickets to highway tolls, and some police cars even have automated plate readers. Additionally, an endless number of security cameras at toll booths, intersections, businesses, and homes record traffic around the clock. Reisner told me of one episode where a landscaper robbed and killed a woman, then got caught on camera in her Cadillac Fleetwood on his way to use her stolen debit card.

Although license plates are over 100 years old, Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) weren’t even required by law until 1969. VIN databases include information on the vehicle’s current and previous owners, when it was bought and sold, whether it has been damaged, and if it has open recalls (important for civil lawsuits). Criminals often sell cars to get rid of evidence, but unless the vehicle is sold without a title—which makes it illegal to drive in most states—detectives can still track the car down by its VIN. They are stamped in multiple places, and although a car can be burned, crushed, dumped in a lake, or even blown up, unless it’s melted down in a blast furnace, at least one VIN will likely survive. In fact, it was a VIN from the rear axle of the exploded truck used in the Oklahoma City Bombing that led investigators to the killer.

The things we leave behind

After a vehicle flees a crime scene, it can still leave clues. A Florida serial killer once left just a few short tire tracks near a crime scene, and the expert who analyzed them realized they actually came from a tire he designed while working for Firestone! After narrowing down the shops that sold those tires, police tricked their prime suspect into trading in his rubber for a free new set. After matching the treads to those at the crime scene, they got him.

If tire tracks are clear enough, scientists can identify more than just the brand and model. From the moment tires hit the road—even identical ones—they wear in unique ways. These imperfections help single out a specific tire from millions of copies. The ringer for the case above case was a pebble stuck between the treads, which left a telltale mark in the tracks.

Multiple Forensic Files episodes focused on hit-and-run fatalities, where a single collision can leave thousands of tiny clues. Musing on what motivates people to flee the scene, Reisner said, “Just panic, fear, desperation. Those things kind of erode morality sometimes. Perhaps they’ve been in zero trouble in their whole lives and they think, ‘Maybe I’ll get away with this.’”

Frequently, they don’t. With just a few fragments of broken plastic, experts can identify a vehicle’s make and model. Vehicles can also leave marks on a victim, like when investigators matched a Square Body Chevy grille to identical bruises on a little girl’s body.

With millions of similar cars on the road, this evidence typically serves as a starting point. Law enforcement can announce what make and model they’re looking for, and witnesses can provide tips like, “My neighbor said he just hit a deer, but his truck perfectly matches the description from a hit-and-run scene.” Broken glass can also be matched to vehicles, although it’s not always precise. Palenik explained that scientists can’t always use glass to pinpoint a vehicle’s exact make and model, but if they already have a suspect’s car, they can match glass from the scene to that damaged vehicle.

When it comes to automotive paints, identification gets way more specific. “If somebody [or something] gets hit by a vehicle, there’s a decent chance paint will be transferred, whether it’s a smear or a chip,” Palenik said. “And if you find that chip and you can trace it back to a car, that can provide some pretty high-impact evidence in an investigation.”

As all car nuts know, paint colors vary by brand, model, year, trim package, etc. That paint isn’t just “red,” it’s “Ford Race Red” or “Chevrolet Radiant Red Tintcoat” or “AMC Vineyard Burgundy,” and scientists can tell the difference.

“Several decades ago, the criminal justice communities in the U.S. and Canada decided to build the PDQ, or Paint Database Query,” Palenik said. “It’s a collection of paint samples, and they reach out to manufacturers of vehicles and attempt to get a chip of every single paint of every single vehicle made.” Palenik and his team can then take unknown paint from a crime scene and match it to samples in the database, helping investigators narrow down what car they’re looking for.

It’s what’s on the inside

Not all evidence comes from the car’s exterior, of course. Vehicle upholstery and carpets often shed microscopic fibers that stick to clothes and bodies. In one Forensic Files episode, carpet fibers on a dead woman’s body were traced back to a police officer’s Chevy Caprice. In an ironic twist, the high-ranking officer drove the only Caprice with a fully carpeted interior, instead of the department’s basic cruisers, which only had rubber mats.

Just as automotive fibers left on someone’s body can prove they were in a car, evidence left inside the vehicle can do the same thing in reverse. “We see quite commonly that [dead] people are transported in blankets, or in some sort of rug,” Palenik said. Those items usually leave microscopic fibers inside the car.

“Cars are very good keepers of evidence, no matter what people do,” Reisner told me. “You know they tear up the flooring in the trunk and the cops go in there with Luminol and they find there was blood in there. Or even simple things, like it’s a 5-foot-3 person’s car, and the driver’s seat is moved way back, so they know the short owner was not the one who drove this car to the murder scene.”

Fingerprints on steering wheels, gearshifts, and various knobs are obvious clues. Bblood, hair, skin cells, or other forms of DNA can hide in cracks and crevices. Even the best automotive detailer in the world will overlook something, as was the case when a single cat hair found in a trunk helped solve a murder. In another hit-and-run episode, the perpetrator managed to clean, repair, and sell his Jeep Grand Cherokee to a dealership hundreds of miles away, but police tracked it down by its VIN and managed to find a tiny bit of evidence.

“It had to have been washed a million times,” said Reisner, recalling the episode. “But they still found arm hair from the victim stuck in the seam of the side view mirror.”

Vehicles collect all kinds of unexpected evidence in unexpected places, from tree seeds in a truck bed to bite marks in a rubber trim piece. As Palenik told me, knowing exactly what to look for can help investigators save time. Frequently, he searches car interiors for microscopic gunshot residue. “When you fire a gun, there’s a plume generated,” he explained. “Metals can precipitate in the gas and form these tiny particles that you can’t see.”

He’s even tested an interior for fireworks residue after three men were killed in a crash allegedly caused by lighting fireworks while driving. But his strangest automotive evidence came in the form of a dried vegetable.

“Were were given these crumbly gray chunks . . . We thought they were biological, perhaps human. Under the microscope, we determined the cellular structure was that of potatoes.” It turned out someone attempted to use a potato as a homemade gun silencer (which doesn’t really work). Bits of the vegetable were left in their car. Additional tests determined the potato did indeed contain gunshot residue.

Even simple soil can provide a wealth of information. In one Forensic Files episode, investigators used mud on the wheel wells of a Jeep Cherokee to tie the vehicle to a specific gravel parking lot where a gruesome drive-by shooting occurred. In the famous 1960 kidnapping and murder of beer magnate Adolph Coors III, distinct layers of mud on a car bumper helped prove it had visited multiple crime scenes in chronological order.

Reconstruction sites

Not every car accident is a true “accident.” The science of accident reconstruction helps find the truth. At the crash site, investigators record distances, road features, skid marks, and vehicle damage. These, combined with data on vehicle weights, tires, and road surfaces, can be used to calculate vehicle speeds and directions leading up to the crash.

In yet another episode involving a Jeep Cherokee, a police officer investigating a fatal collision was suspicious that there was too much blood inside the Jeep for the amount of damage done to the outside. Plus, the driver’s wife had died, but he had only minor injuries. Accident reconstruction proved the crash was too slow to be fatal, and the woman had been dead before the impact.

In one case, a lack of front-end damage proved a pickup truck was gently eased into a lake, rather than crashed into it at high speed. In a similar episode, police found a plastic bottle cap wedged in the throttle mechanism of a Mazda, functioning as homemade cruise control to cover up a murder. “They were trying to make it look like the driver drifted off to sleep and crashed into the water,” Reisner said. “But the car made a perfect 45-degree turn . . . a perfect straight line into the river.”

Some car crimes involve arson investigators, such as the episode where a mechanic tried to make a garage fire look like a fuel-filter change gone horribly wrong. But when investigators pointed out that a half cup of diesel fuel shouldn’t send an entire building up in flames, his elaborate insurance-fraud attempt fell apart.

The road ahead

Forensic Files originally ran from 1996 to 2011, although CNN relaunched the series in 2020. The old episodes may have outdated music and cheesy special effects, but the science holds up, and the driving reenactments are actually quite good. Today, the evidence generated by cars has only become more complex, as modern vehicles come with event data recorders that track when we accelerate, brake, shift, signal, use infotainment, and more. But solving car crimes still takes hard evidence and expert analysis, as Palenik can attest.

A lot has been said about how you can judge a person by what they drive, and it seems even more true when it comes to solving crimes. A single paint chip or carpet fiber can be the thing that sends someone to prison (or gets them out). But beware, if you think you’re smart enough to pull off the perfect crime after reading this, Rebecca Reisner says otherwise: “People have been doing that for years. Cops will figure it out! We’re not all the geniuses we think we are.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Rolling Evidence: <em>Forensic Files</em> reveals how cars end up at crime scenes appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Whether you’re looking for economical family entertainment or a more intimate way to watch a movie with a love interest, there’s nothing quite like a drive-in theater. While some accounts claim that movies were shown outdoors as early as the 1910s, the first patented “Park-In Theatre”—as they were first called—opened 90 years ago on June 6, 1933 in Pennsauken Township, New Jersey, near Camden.

The brainchild of Richard Milton Hollingshead, Jr., the venue offered moviegoers a new—and for many, an easier—way to watch a film: in the comfort of their own “Private Theatre Box.” Hollingshead, a sales manager at his father’s Camden company, Whiz Auto Products, was reportedly inspired by his mother’s struggle to sit comfortably in traditional movie-theater seats. According to PBS.com, Hollingshead tested the idea of an outdoor theater by using a 1928 Kodak projector, a sheet nailed to a tree in his backyard, and a speaker placed behind the “screen.” He spent weeks perfecting the idea, even turning on his sprinkler to simulate rainy conditions. By spacing and staggering the parking spots, he also ensured that the occupants of each car would have an unobstructed view of the screen.

On August 6, 1932, Hollingshead applied for a patent. “My invention relates to a new and useful outdoor theater,” he wrote in his application, “whereby the transportation facilities to and from the theater are made to constitute an element of the seating facilities.”

The patent was approved on May 16, 1933, and within three weeks, Hollingshead’s outdoor theater was open for business. Charging 25 cents per car and 25 cents per person—and capping the cost at $1 per vehicle—Hollingshead advertised this new-fangled entertainment venue as a more comfortable alternative to traditional movie houses. “The whole family is welcome,” he told New Jersey’s Courier-Post newspaper, “regardless of how noisy the children are.”

The first film shown on the outdoor screen was the comedy Wives Beware (also known as Two White Arms), starring Adolphe Menjou and Margaret Bannerman. Menjou began his acting career in silent films but was able to make a successful jump to “talkies.” In fact, he sang the title song on Wives Beware.

The drive-in’s sound quality was initially poor—Hollingshead mounted three RCA Victor speakers near the screen—but later technological advances allowed individual speakers to be hung on each driver’s-side window. Eventually, passengers could tune the car’s FM radio to the movie soundtrack.

Other entrepreneurs began to copy Hollingshead’s idea. After years of fighting in court, his patent was overturned in 1949. With the threat of legal action removed, drive-in theaters began popping up all over the country, particularly in rural areas. At one point in the 1950s, there were as many as 4000 outdoor venues in the U.S., proving the idea was more than a fad. One of the largest drive-ins was the All-Weather Drive-In of Copiague, New York, which featured parking space for 2500 cars. Its 28-acre property included a children’s playground and full-service restaurant.

Of course, in many parts of the country, drive-ins could only be operated during the summer, limiting revenue. By the 1970s, drive-in theaters began to lose their appeal as people began to buy smaller, less lounge-friendly cars, and VCRs offered movie fans the opportunity to watch from their couches.

According to the National Association of Theater Owners, in 2020 only 549 drive-ins remained in the U.S., a number that no doubt received a financial bump from COVID-19 restrictions that limited or eliminated indoor gatherings. In fact, many “pop-up” drive-ins using inflatable screens opened during the pandemic.

Though it may be a less popular venue, a drive-in is still a fun way to watch a movie. Today most venues offer double features, continuing their reputation as affordable entertainment. Somewhere, Richard Hollingshead is smiling … and so is his mom.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Happy 90th birthday to the drive-in theater appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Hard-partying musicians are certainly well represented among the millions who’ve died in car crashes, but perhaps none of the songs written about such accidents has been as eerily prescient as Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve.” A 1963 hit about a street drag race gone wrong, it echoed loudly in memory when, in 1966, band member Jan Berry drove his Corvette into the back of a parked truck not far from the dangerous corner whose legend he and partner Dean Torrence had helped to cement. Berry and the band’s career were never the same.

The pride of El Sobrante, California, Primus scored its first hit in 1991 with “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver.” Penned by the punk-funk band’s virtuoso bass-playing leader, Les Claypool, it concerns an “I’ll show them” type of guy who’s in over his head and meets his end driving an Oldsmobile 4-4-2 too fast after many too many beers.

Here are seven more hits about fender-benders—and worse.

Jan & Dean
“DEAD MAN’S CURVE”

Well, the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve
And then I saw the Jag slide into the curve
I know I’ll never forget that horrible sight
I guess I found out for myself that everyone was right
Won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve

Sounds a lot like the automotive equivalent of “you’ll shoot your eye out!”

Ray Peterson
“TELL LAURA I LOVE HER”

He drove his car to the racing grounds
He was the youngest driver there
And the crowed roared as they started the race
‘Round the track they drove at a deadly pace
No one knows what happened that day
How his car overturned in flames
But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck
With his dying breath, they heard him say . . .

” . . . I probably should have eased into this whole racing thing. Maybe some SCCA Solo, or just a high-performance driving experience to see if racing was right for me.”

Dave Edmunds
“CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE”(Graham Parker cover)

Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage
Bits of me are scattered in the trees and on the hedges
Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage
Into a brand new car

How’s about you crawl into that ambulance first? Then we can talk about a new car.

David Bowie
“ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR”

Every chance,
Every chance that I take
I take it on the road
Those kilometers and the red lights
I was always looking left and right
Oh, but I’m always crashing
In the same car

Maybe less looking left and right, and more eyes forward? Try that for a while.

Mark Dinning
“TEEN ANGEL”

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh
That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe, but you went running back

PSA: Don’t tug on Superman’s cape. Don’t spit into the wind. Don’t mess with the Lone Ranger’s mask. And never, ever, crawl back into a car when a train is barreling down on it.

The Beach Boys
“A YOUNG MAN IS GONE” (about James Dean)

For this daring young star
Met his death while in his car
No one knows the reason why

Obviously, The Beach Boys don’t read Wikipedia, because it says exactly why right there.

They Might Be Giants
“MINK CAR”

I got hit by a mink car
Hit by a mink car
Driven by a guitar
And the silver chauffeur says
That it’s all in your head

Or . . . it might be in that toad you just licked.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 7 songs about car crashes appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The beauty of Hot Wheels, like many of the toys we treasure, is the way they inspire kids to use their imaginations. Turns out, Hot Wheels does the same for big kids, too. 

Mattel’s iconic die-cast vehicles have been inspiring car lovers of all ages since 1968, and now some of those kids are turning their actual cars into life-size Hot Wheels on NBC’s new hour-long show Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge, which debuted on May 30. 

Like the iconic toy cars that we grew up loving, the competition is good, clean, family fun. And although it airs at a time—Tuesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern—that’s not exactly family friendly, each episode can be streamed on Peacock the following day.

Hosted by aw-shucks nice guy Rutledge Wood, Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge features two “superfans” who are tasked with turning their dream designs into reality. Each contestant has a touching story to tell about a car that changed their lives, and an identical model serves as the basis for their build.

“Buckle up for the ride of your life,” Wood says in the intro, “where car-loving Hot Wheels fans get the chance of a lifetime … transforming nostalgic cars from their past into life-size Hot Wheels of their dreams.”

The winner of each round gets $25,000 and a spot in the finals. The overall champion (of 16 contestants) gets an additional $50,000, plus the honor of having their custom creation made into a Hot Wheels car that will be sold to the public. 

Wood, who auto enthusiasts may know from the American version of Top Gear, is joined by fellow judges Dalal Elsheikh, a Hot Wheels ambassador and designer for Ford Motor Company, and car culture influencer Hertrech “Hert” Eugene Jr. Each week also introduces a new celebrity judge, who in the premiere episode is Terry Crews, host of America’s Got Talent.

The first two superfans to square off are 24-year-old Jadejha Edwards, of Houston, and 58-year-old “Jerzey” Jim Farrell, of Forked River, New Jersey.

Jadejha chooses a 2009 Chevrolet Camaro to match the car her aunt drove when Jadejha went to live with her as a teenager. Now a cybersecurity engineer, Jadejha says her aunt offered her constant encouragement and a safe place to live and dream. “Who I am today,” she says, “started right there in that car.”

Jim, a custom van outfitter, selects a 1969 Dodge Charger like the one that he and his father restored together—and painted bright yellow—decades ago. This one wears black matte paint, just as his previous Charger did prior to its final paint job. “Seeing that car again feels like I’m 18 years old, man,” Jim says.

Given one week to design and build their cars, each contestant receives help from three experts from the “Car Pool,” who are charged with making their dreams a reality. It all begins in the “Chrome Zone,” where hundreds of actual Hot Wheels serve as inspiration. Once the build begins, there are plenty of hurdles to clear along the way. That includes a curveball thrown by the Hot Wheels crew more than halfway through the build: the Inspirationator 5000, the huge centerpiece of the set, selects an actual Hot Wheels car, and the fabricators are required to incorporate one of its design elements into their own cars.

Jadejha wants the Camaro to be green and have a low, wide, futuristic look that reflects her job in cybersecurity—and the sense of indestructability she felt whenever she rode in her aunt’s car. Jim requires two things: the Charger must be yellow, like his first car, and pop a wheelie. That last criterion prompts him to pull the engine from the front and put it in back; he also wants the engine to be a Hemi V-8.

Although we know that each team has seven days to complete the work, the editors of the show manage to manufacture some drama by making it look like the cars are completed just in time. Regardless, both are gorgeous successes and receive plenty of praise from the judges. Jim’s Charger can indeed pop a wheelie (thanks to hydraulics), and that’s enough to steal the show and take the win.

The real winners, however, are those of us who remember the first time we imagined driving one of those spectacular little cars on the track, the street, or some remote two-track. Yes, the show’s jokes are a little lame, and we want to know more about the specifics of each build, but the kids are going to love it all. Even some of us kids who remember playing with their first Hot Wheels cars 55 years ago.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post NBC’s new <em> Hot Wheels </em> TV show delights kids of all ages appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music, musicians, and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Celebrity ownership of classic cars is often a huge driving factor in their big sale prices at auction, and fans have paid thousands of times over the odds to buy cars once owned by their musical heroes. From high-buck supercars to fairly conventional machines with morbid histories, here’s a rundown of the musicians whose cars have fetched big percentages over similar cars.

***

Keith Richards

The Rolling Stones rocker’s cars regularly outsell their normal counterparts, but his 1965 Bentley S3 Continental Flying Spur provided the biggest bang, selling in 2015 for £763,100 ($1.18M), or 304 percent over any other example.

Elton John

Sir Elton is a frequent seller, with 17 different sales over the years. But when it comes to pure profit, his 1956 Bentley S1 Continental fastback at £196,250 (around $283,000) in 2001 accounted for a 341 percent markup.

Elvis Presley

The King’s cars always bring big money, and his 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham is a standout, after reaching £66,083 (around $81,500) during an online auction in January 2022—a 518 percent premium over any other Caddy of the same ilk.

Freddie Mercury

The Queen frontman’s 1974 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow sold last November for $322,861, an astonishing 3871 percent over any other example.

Notorious B.I.G.

In 2017, the 1997 GMC Suburban in which Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious B.I.G., was shot to death sold for $1.5 million, an increase of 18,650 percent compared with a similar Suburban.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post 5 musicians whose cars brought staggering prices appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

If there’s a recorded music subject that tops cars, it’s the related topics of sex and romance. Going back to the beginning, almost 120 years ago, “In My Merry Oldsmobile”—which urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson once called the “best-known song written about the automobile”—is riddled with double-entendre couplets about the young motorist and his passenger, so many that when Oldsmobile later used it in advertisements, the company changed the lyrics. With lines like They like to ‘spark’ in the dark old park, and You can go as far as you like with me, in my merry Oldsmobile, such “aftermarket” modifications by Olds’ ad men surely made sense.

Jumping ahead a century, those squeamish Oldsmobile agency types would be glad they’re not still alive, as Rihanna’s considerably more licentious “Shut Up and Drive” from 2007 illustrates:

’Cause your Maybach ain’t got what I got
Get it, get it, don’t stop, it’s a sure shot
Ain’t a Ferrari, huh, boy, I’m sorry
I ain’t even worried, so step inside
And ride, ride, ride
So if you feel me, let me know, know, know
Come on now, what you waiting for, for, for
My engine’s ready to explode, explode, explode
So start me up and watch me go, go, go, go

The following six songs also fit the theme of cars and romance …

Cyndi Lauper, Céline Dion, Roy Orbison
“I DROVE ALL NIGHT” (covered by)

I had to escape
The city was sticky and cruel

These are the very first words of the song, and no matter whose version you prefer, has there ever been a better lyric about the need to jump in the car and get out of town for a while? That there’s some nooky at the end of the road just sweetens the deal.

Simon & Garfunkel
“BABY DRIVER”

They call me Baby Driver
And once upon a pair of wheels
I hit the road and I’m gone
What’s my number?
I wonder how your engines feel
Scoot down the road, what’s my number?
I wonder how your engines feel

If those engines are big-blocks in traffic, they probably feel pretty damn hot, Paul Simon. If they’re 911 flat-sixes with IMS bearing failure, I’d wager they’re cold and dead.

Scissor Sisters
“LOVERS IN THE BACKSEAT”

There’s lovers in the backseat
Jealous glances now I’m looking for another song
On the radio
I’ll take you to a side street
In the shadows you can touch one another now
And I’ll just watch the show

Whatever, creepshow Uber driver.

Hot Chocolate
“HEAVEN IS IN THE BACK SEAT OF MY CADILLAC”

Can’t stand it
Can’t stand it, baby
When I’m close to you I wanna touch you
There are people everywhere
People who like to stare

Yeah, people like that creepshow Uber driver. Eyes on the road, pal!

Meat Loaf
“PARADISE BY THE DASHBOARD LIGHT”

Two down, nobody on, no score, bottom of the ninth,
There’s the windup, and there it is, a line shot up the middle,
Look at him go. This boy can really fly! He’s rounding first and really
Turning it on now, he’s not letting up at all, he’s gonna try for second

They just don’t write sexy baseball songs like they used to.

Lana Del Rey
“BURNING DESIRE”

I drive fast, wind in my hair, push it to the limits ’cause I just don’t care
I’ve got a burning desire for you, baby

Well, just wait ’til you’ve got points on your license, girl. It’ll affect your insurance rates, and that’ll make for some tough choices in the monthly budget. Then you’ll care. Then you’ll care.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 6 songs about cars and romance appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Tina Turner was known for many things: her unmistakable raspy voice, her unrivaled on-stage energy, and her ability to overcome whatever life threw her way. Did you know she was also an avid an auto enthusiast?

The Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll, who died on May 24 at the age of 83, loved the freedom that cars provided. They represented a blessed escape for the musical superstar, who couldn’t go anywhere in public without being recognized. Perhaps that inescapable cost of fame was part of the reason she lived out her later years in Switzerland, rather than the United States.

Turner always found solace in automobiles, most notably her white Jaguar XJ6, which she received as a gift from Sammy Davis Jr. in 1970. She also had a silver E-Type, given to her in 1973 by then-husband Ike Turner.

According to Turner’s 2018 autobiography, My Love Story, Davis originally wanted to gift her a Mercedes-Benz, but her assistant suggested a Jaguar instead because the singer “was into English cars.” Turner admitted the Jag “awakened my passion for fast cars.”

“It may sound silly,” Turner wrote, “but one of my favorite escapes, and a secret pleasure, was driving my Jaguar. I loved it because it was something I could do by myself, one of the few times I could be alone and free.”

The 12-time Grammy Award winner experienced similar joy in the Jaguar XKE.

“I’ll never forget the moment I got behind the wheel and pulled out of the dealership,” she wrote. “It was late and a little misty when I drove the sleek silver Jaguar on Wilshire Boulevard. As far as I was concerned, there was no one else on the road—just me, driving with the windows down, looking and feeling fabulous. I can still hear the sound of the motor, the vroom that signaled it was ready to take me anywhere I wanted to go.”

RIP to the great Tina Turner, here with her 1973 Jaguar XKE. pic.twitter.com/pVTVA9sc6L

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 24, 2023

In 1978, she nearly lost both cars in a contentious divorce from Ike, whose mental and physical abuse is well documented. Ultimately, the judge sided with Tina.

With the success of Turner’s 1984 comeback album, Private Dancer, she treated herself to a new Lamborghini LM002. Turner and German record producer Erwin Bach, who would become her husband in 2013, had it customized to Tina’s liking. The biggest change to the bespoke Lambo was swapping the LM002’s V-12 engine and manual transmission for a V-8 and automatic gearbox from a Mercedes-Benz 500E. Turner sold it in 2008.

Even if you didn’t know about those vehicles, Turner offered plenty of clues that she appreciated automobiles, most notably when she did a series of television commercials for the 1990 Plymouth lineup.

In one ad for the new Acclaim, Turner walks past the driver’s side door and gets into the back seat. Running her hand over the car’s plush interior, she says, “Mmmm. Now, this car is built for comfort. Wonder what else we have in common?”

Before getting behind the wheel of a Laser, Turner suggests she’s ready for a drive, and confirms what we already knew about her flamboyant personality.

“Sometimes you get to know someone so well that they kind of get … predictable. Well, not this time. This is the new Laser by Plymouth. That’s right: Plymouth. And no matter what you thought about it before, my friend, I promise you: This is not for wallflowers.”

Spoken like a true rock goddess … and, as it turns out, a car lover too.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Tina Turner wasn’t just a rock legend, she was a car lover appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

The year 1963 was a good one for jazz phenom Herbie Hancock. At 23, he had just joined the biggest band on earth, led by star Miles Davis on the Blue Note label. Plus, he had received a fat royalty check for the song “Watermelon Man,” which crossed over to crack the top 100 on the pop charts. Hancock found himself flush, pocketing six grand, the equivalent of about $50K in today’s dollars. That was a lot of money for a guy who grew up middle class in Chicago.

Of course, Hancock has been rewarded many more times since, winning 14 Grammys and an Academy Award for the soundtrack to the film Round Midnight in 1986, as well as earning six honorary doctorates. But that was all still to come. On that day in 1963, Hancock wanted to buy himself a gift to celebrate his early success.

“I had never purchased a car before,” Hancock told us. “The only car I ever drove was an old Dodge.” That car was Hancock’s ride at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he graduated with degrees in music and engineering. So when it came to buying a new car, Hancock recalled his dad’s advice about being wary. Probably for that reason, he planned to play it safe and just get a station wagon, “so I could haul my band around.” But Hancock’s roommate, trumpeter Donald Byrd, drove a Jaguar and talked Hancock into checking out a Cobra. “This guy Carroll Shelby is kicking Ferrari’s ass!” Byrd told Hancock.

A rude New York City car salesman had no clue who the fresh-faced Hancock was when he strolled into the dealership, ogling the gleaming white swoosh of aluminum with its red leather cockpit. “The salesman saw a shabby-looking Black guy. He didn’t treat me like a customer.” Hancock admits he bought the 260-cubic-inch Cobra out of spite. “If he hadn’t pissed me off, I probably wouldn’t have bought it!”

That impulse buy 60 years ago has appreciated considerably; the car could be worth $2 million or more today, and Hancock is now the longest continuous owner of any Cobra.

***

Tom Cotter: You said the Cobra scared you at first? 

Herbie Hancock: My roommate Donald drove the car home. I was afraid because it was so powerful. Before I ever drove it, I’d go into the garage I rented and practice shifting it through the gears.

Eventually you got used to driving it—even cross-country, right?

I lived in New York City, so I mostly rode the subway, but if I needed a car, I drove the Cobra. I spent a lot of time commuting over the Triborough Bridge and on roads like the West Side Highway. The clutch was so hard to push down that I had to anchor myself against the back of the seat to push it. In 1964, when I was playing with Miles, I drove it to Chicago for a gig. It was summer, and the car ran really hot, so I brought along a mechanic friend in case I had any problems. We had to stop a few times to let it cool down, but we drove straight through from New York City to Chicago with no issues. I’d drive it to gigs in Philly and Boston all the time.

A Black man in an exotic sports car—were you ever harassed?

I lived on 93rd Street in Upper Manhattan. Once, I entered the West Side Highway and floored it to merge into heavy traffic. Man, I was going so fast! A police officer chased me down and gave me a ticket. I could tell he had a bad attitude because he didn’t believe it was my car. I did my best to avoid conflicts like that.

You didn’t baby the Cobra. How come?

An accident changed my perspective. A few weeks after I bought it, I gave Donald the keys. He was waiting at a traffic light in Manhattan when two cars crashed going through the intersection and slid into the Cobra, smashing the left front fender. Thankfully Donald didn’t get hurt, but he called me and said, “Herbie, I screwed up your car,” but it wasn’t his fault. I found a shop on Long Island that knew how to work on aluminum, because I didn’t want any Bondo. They had to repaint it entirely. From then on, it was just a car to me.

What did Miles Davis think of your Cobra?

He was always driving Ferraris and Maseratis, right? He had a new one every three or four years. Just before I joined Miles’ band, I was playing a gig with trumpeter Clark Terry at the Village Gate in New York, and Miles was in the audience. At the end, he came to my dressing room and asked if I wanted a ride uptown in his Maserati. I said, “I’d love to, but I bought a car a couple of weeks ago.”

Miles said, “But it’s not a Maserati.”

I said, “No. It’s a Cobra, and it’s right outside the door.”

When he saw it, he said, “Oh, cute.”

This was about 4 in the morning, so we both lined up our cars at the traffic light and waited for it to turn green. I floored it and left him in the dust. Before we got to the next red light, I had already taken out a cigarette and lit it.

“What the f*ck was that?” he asked.

“I told you, it’s a Cobra.”

“Well, get rid of it. It’s dangerous!”

You wrote a song about your car for your album, My Point of View, in 1963.

I had a song, but I still didn’t have a title. Then I got it! It came to me: “King Cobra.” Not having a title’s pretty common. In 1965, I wrote another song without a name. Then I played it for my sister’s friend, and she said, “It reminds me of the water.” That clicked. Then she said, “It feels like a voyage,” and I almost peed my pants. Blue Note liked it so much, Maiden Voyage became the album name.

Apparently, your Ferrari never inspired a song title?

It was a lemon. When I turned 50, I bought a 348. But I didn’t buy a red one, because a Black guy in a red Ferrari is just looking for trouble. I joined the Ferrari Club and once attended a fancy car show in Beverly Hills. The press wanted to interview me. They asked, “Do you own a Ferrari?” I said, “Yes, a 348.” They asked, “Can we see it?” I said, “Well, no. It wouldn’t start this morning, so I drove my Cobra instead.” But when I bought the Ferrari, I walked out into the carport and apologized to the Cobra. I said: “This is for your own good. You’re too valuable. Look, it’s a Ferrari. At least it’s not a Corvette!”

Would you ever sell your Cobra? Who gets the car when you’re gone?

I’ll pass it on to my daughter. Maybe my little grandson will inherit the Cobra eventually. A classic car dealer offered to buy it in the 1970s. He offered me $10,000. He started to take stacks of hundreds from his briefcase, placing them on the table. He said, “All you need to do is sign over the title and all this money will be yours.” So I looked at the money, then I looked at the title. Then I looked at the money, and I looked at the title. Finally, I said, “Sorry, but I can’t sell it. This car is my buddy.” As the man was leaving, he shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “You did the right thing. You should never sell that car.”

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Herbie Hancock has rocked an original Cobra longer than anyone appeared first on Hagerty Media.

George Lucas’ cinematic salute to midcentury cruise culture opens with the jumbled chirps of an AM car radio being tuned, like the pit orchestra warming up at an opera house. Then, as the curtain lifts on a sunset scene of Mel’s Drive-In, the soundtrack locks on to Bill Haley and His Comets belting out their famous 1950s pop anthem, “Rock Around the Clock.” What follows is a 112-minute comic opera of love, longing, joyriding, and high school restlessness that takes place over a single night and is set to a nearly nonstop soundscape of ancient jukebox hits.

“Where were you in ’62?” asked the movie posters when American Graffiti debuted in the summer of 1973. It didn’t matter where you were, because watching the film, whether for the first time or the 40th, puts you right where Lucas wants you to be. Which is in his backwater hometown of Modesto, California, in the last golden days of greasers, bobby socks, poodle skirts, and doo-wop burbling from tinny dash speakers.

Marking its 50th anniversary this year, American Graffiti is often called one of the best car movies ever made. Granted, it’s a low bar; the film catalog, especially from the 1950s and ’60s, is full of lousy car flicks, from Hot Rod Girl to Hot Rod Rumble to The Devil on Wheels. Most were just gasoline porn wrapped in some tin-pot scold against motorized delinquency to please the censors. Few remember them now, while American Graffiti sits on the American Film Institute’s prestigious list of top 100 movies.

It was nominated for five Academy Awards and is thought by some to be the film industry’s first summer “blockbuster,” taking in so much money that it rates as one of the most profitable movies ever made based on its ratio of return on cost. It launched a decades-long craze for ’50s nostalgia and it catapulted Lucas out of impoverished obscurity, making him an overnight millionaire and rocketing him to his next stop in a galaxy far, far away from Modesto.

No mere car movie has that kind of power. Because American Graffiti isn’t about cars, really. Or even the early rock-and-roll that serves as its only musical soundtrack. Those are just the props and the scenery. At its core, American Graffiti is a coming-of-age story, a theme that has sold tickets since Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered whether to be or not to be. Lucas’ inspiration was to figure out how to tell it with a juiced ’32 coupe and a bitchin’ ’58 Impala as costars.

Fans of American Graffiti have erected more than a few monuments to it online. You can while away many hours watching interviews with the cast and crew or reading Kip’s American Graffiti Blog, which is a dense accounting of film factoids. Such as that the Pharaohs gang “with the car coat and blood initiation” was based on a real Modesto car club called the Faros. And that the small-town Mel’s Drive-In featured in the movie was actually located on Van Ness Avenue in the heart of San Francisco, used because it was one of the last circular drive-ins left in California.

Or that the origin of the whole film was based on a previous flop. Not long out of USC film school, Lucas was advised by his mentor, director Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather fame, to develop a more lighthearted project following Lucas’s screenwriting and directorial debut, THX 1138. The somber sci-fi potboiler starred a rookie Robert Duvall as a mal-content living in a dystopian future where people with shaved heads and serial numbers for names drone their lives away in an oppressively bland surveillance society. It was a feature-length version of a 15-minute film school project by Lucas, and it was produced by Coppola’s newly created American Zoetrope production company, established in San Francisco to be at the pointy edge of the long-hair, purple-haze, counter-culture film movement.

Rich with ingenuity but perhaps a bit too avant-garde, THX 1138 (which took its title from Lucas’ college phone number, an alphanumeric sequence that reappears throughout his later career, including as a license plate on Graffiti’s yellow ’32 Ford), bombed. According to a box office–tracking site, the R-rated pic currently ranks as the 32,230th highest-grossing film ever. Thus, the young director was keenly focused on commercial viability when he turned to his next project.

His mind wandered to his teenage years in Modesto, a small Central Valley farm town where bored kids cruised the drag or idled away the nights at soda counters and drive-ins, wondering what life was like just over the horizon. Lucas had been one of those kids, turning 18 in 1962 and fixated on cars and racing. He worked at a foreign car shop and blatted around town in a tiny Autobianchi Bianchina with a rollcage and a Maltese cross on the fenders. At least, until he was torpedoed by a Chevy while turning left into his driveway. The crash punted the Bianchina sidelong against a tree, breaking the seat belt and hurling Lucas onto the pavement. He spent his high school graduation in the hospital coughing up blood, and the world came breathtakingly close to not having American Graffiti, Star Wars, and all the rest.

Even so, Lucas never lost his infatuation with vehicles, incorporating some sort of hot rod, interstellar or otherwise, into almost every film. At USC, his senior student project was called 1:42.08 and featured Pete Brock of Shelby Cobra Daytona fame in a Lotus 23 at Willow Springs Raceway in a wordless montage of driving scenes. The best part of THX 1138 is the final eerie chase sequence in which Duvall flees the subterranean city in an “Autojet,” which was a lightly disguised ex-Sebring Lola T70.

Thus, cars and what Lucas called “the particularly American mating ritual of cruising” were destined to be fixtures in his new movie. Trying to immerse himself in the times as he took his first stab at the screenplay, Lucas raided his record collection and spun 45 after 45 of period tunes on his sister’s turntable. The project faced numerous rejections until Universal finally agreed, but only after Coppola’s name was thrown on the table as executive producer. Script doctors Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, an old USC classmate, came aboard, fleshing out Lucas’ screenplay using their own high school memories. Universal’s purse was tight; the film was allocated a miserly budget of barely $750,000, which meant it had to be shot in a blitzkrieg 28 nights and with a troupe of young actors who were relative unknowns at the time. Ron Howard was the biggest star, having played the freckled tyke Opie Taylor in more than 200 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. The future Han Solo, Harrison Ford, whose brief role in Graffiti was as the reckless hot-rodder Bob Falfa, was then working as a carpenter in Los Angeles.

As the film begins, the four central characters—class president and popular guy Steve Bolander played by Howard; an undiscovered Richard Dreyfuss as the doubt-ridden beatnik Curt Henderson; rat-racing everyman John Milner embodied by a former amateur boxer named Paul Le Mat; and the gawky nerd Terry “the Toad” Fields played by teen actor Charles Martin Smith—have just been booted from the nest of their comfortable high school adolescence. In one fateful night of cruising, brooding, kidnapping, canoodling, and brawling, they will each try to figure out their path to manhood. “You can’t stay 17 forever,” Steve exclaims to Curt at the beginning of the film, launching the boys on their journey.

Lucas wanted a documentary style and gave the actors minimal direction, encouraging improvisation as the camera rolled. Almost invariably, said the actors in later interviews, Lucas chose the sloppiest takes, believing they were the most natural. Such as in the opening scene at Mel’s when Charles Martin Smith rides up on a Vespa, accidentally slips off the clutch, and crashes into a trash can. In the first minute of the film, this unintentional blooper neatly establishes the character of Terry the Toad as the movie’s bumbling comic relief.

Another documentarian trick—though it was really a cost-saving measure—was to shoot the movie in Techniscope, a cinematography format developed in Italy in 1960 to maximize the productivity of expensive 35-millimeter color film stock. Basically, Techniscope cuts the conventional 35-millimeter frame in half, cramming two shorter frames into the space of one while still preserving the frame width. That allowed Lucas to shoot twice the footage on each canister of film. However, when the film was developed and distributed, its 35-millimeter width allowed it to be transferred to conventional widescreen projection stock. Meaning the images still filled up the theater screen, but at the cost of the blown-up images being grainier. Which for Lucas, who had used Techniscope on THX 1138, was what he wanted anyway for a gritty, realistic style.

Naturally, there were disasters. Modesto’s commercial drag was considered too run-down by 1973, so Lucas chose the Bay Area city of San Rafael as a stand-in. However, after the first all-nighter of filming, the city tore up Lucas’ film permit and kicked the production out, citing disruption to downtown businesses. The entire operation had to move overnight some 20 miles north to the more welcoming burg of Petaluma, where most of the film was shot. The vintage DC-7 airliner that Curt boards at the end of the movie had engine trouble and was a week late arriving at Concord, California’s Buchanan Field for the scene. Bob Falfa’s ’55 Chevy was a cinematic hand-me-down, having been built for the 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop. Fitted with antiroll bars and a lowered suspension, it refused to roll over on cue in the penultimate sunrise race scene between Milner and Falfa, forcing Lucas to shoot Falfa’s crash in bits and pieces over weeks.

The film is as much an aural experience as a visual one. Lucas’ original script included his insertion of specific songs for specific scenes, such as The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” for the dance between Steve and girlfriend Laurie, played by the late Cindy Williams. But it isn’t just the 41 rock-and-roll hits that wallpaper the soundtrack—from “16 Candles” by the Crests to “Come Go with Me” by the Del-Vikings to “Since I Don’t Have You” by the Skyliners. It was Lucas’ decision, along with his sound editor, Walter Murch, to feature the music—again, documentary style—as though it was heard on a car radio or from some distant jukebox. Thus, the old 45s were rerecorded, but in gymnasiums, between buildings, or out on streets, with the speakers moved around to achieve different distortive effects.

At times in the film, the music is distant and fleeting, as if playing in a dream or a nostalgic reverie. At other moments, it’s upfront to heighten a scene’s emotional punch. And it was Murch’s suggestion to incorporate Robert Weston Smith, aka Wolfman Jack, as an unseen Wizard of Oz figure presiding over his kingdom of teenagers through the medium of radio. Except for the scene in which Curt meets the Wolfman, most of the famous DJ’s splendid contribution to the film was cribbed from previously recorded live broadcasts from the 1950s.

Unlike most films that use atmospheric music to heighten a scene’s tension, Lucas instead went silent in Graffiti’s few suspenseful moments, using the disquieting break in the soundtrack to ratchet up the drama. Such as when Curt, at the behest of the Pharaohs, into whose captivity he has fallen, sneaks under a cop car to hook a chain to its axle. This was partly an artistic choice and partly a monetary one, as Lucas had no cash to commission a unique score. He spent $80,000 of his budget on music licensing alone, working out to roughly $2000 per song. It’s a ridiculously low number by today’s industry standards, and American Graffiti is thus a film that would be nearly impossible to make today. At least, for so little—in part because the movie helped establish pre-released popular music as an acceptable (and profitable) soundtrack source, driving up licensing fees.

Lucas has said that all the characters contained pieces of him, but the one he most identified with is Curt, played by Dreyfuss. Curt begins the film waffling over whether to leave for college or stay behind in Modesto. As the tale proceeds, he’s seemingly presented with a series of glimpses of life’s smallness if he stays, from the juvenile pranks of the Pharaohs to the high school teacher who got out but then failed, returning to a petty existence of flirting salaciously with his students. “Where you goin’?” Curt asks his old girlfriend at one point in the movie. “Nowhere,” she replies. “Well, you mind if I come along?” The white Thunderbird with the blonde that Curt spends the night chasing proves to be nothing more than a mirage, a giddy fantasy that, in the end, he leaves behind as the DC-7 wafts him away to adulthood.

American Graffiti opened in theaters on August 11, 1973, as the papers trumpeted news of the Watergate hearings and the American bombing in Cambodia. Except for San Francisco Chronicle film critic Anitra Earle, who called it “without doubt the most tedious film I have ever seen,” reviewers generally swooned. Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin praised the movie’s affectionate “reexamination of the last hours of settled youth,” echoing others in saying it was “one of the most rewarding attractions of the year.” The public packed the seats, and as late as the following January, fully five months later, theaters were still advertising daily showings.

The cultural impact was immediate. Nostalgia spinoffs in the form of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley hit the tube, Ron Howard sticking to type as the clean-cut Richie Cunningham. A leather-jacketed Henry Winkler became a household name as The Fonz, all but reprising his role as the kindhearted hood from another ’50s retro set piece, The Lords of Flatbush, from 1974. Fifties-themed diners sprang up across America and singer Billy Joel cut hit songs in doo-wop style.

Meanwhile, as Detroit sank steadily into the 1970s malaise, car customizing experienced a resurgence. The so-called Bubble Top King, Darryl Starbird, who served as a technical adviser on Graffiti (and is mentioned by name in the dialogue), credited the movie with reactivating people’s interest in frenching and pinstriping. “Four or five years ago, drugs and music seemed to be big,” he told his hometown newspaper, the Wichita Beacon, on the eve of a local custom car show in 1974, “but the trend back to cars is coming around strong.” Hot-rod meets started filling up with chopped and hoodless ’32 Fords, everyone wanting to be as cool and unbeatable as John Milner.

It’s hard to believe that only 11 years separates the time period in which the original film is set from the year it was released. We think life moves fast now, but if you released a film about 2012 today, its main defining differences would be iPhone 5s and slower internet. However, so much happened in the world and in the culture after 1962 that Graffiti’s America was virtually unrecognizable by 1973. First John F. Kennedy, then Bobby Kennedy, then Martin Luther King Jr. were gunned down. An unpopular war rang up a horrible butcher’s bill while cities and universities split open in protest and race riots. The Age of Aquarius led to the gloom of Watergate, environmental crisis, and oil embargoes. American Graffiti isn’t just about the end of youth, it’s about the end of innocence, perhaps the one thing that the people who were actually there in ’62 mourn the most.

“Rock-and-roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,” grouses the hot-rod hero John Mil-ner as a Beach Boys track briefly interrupts Graffiti’s endless eulogy to the 1950s. Fittingly, perhaps, the film closes with the song “All Summer Long” by the Beach Boys, meaning you can’t hold back progress. “Every now and then we hear our song/we’ve been having fun all summer long …”

Lucas attempted to neatly tie up his story with an epilogue board preceding the final credits that spelled out the varying fates of his four principals. But the film raked in so much dough that a sequel was virtually inevitable. A suddenly very important and busy Lucas—Star Wars, Indiana Jones, founding Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, etc.—was only involved as an executive producer in the 1979 follow-up, More American Graffiti. It ushered the characters, minus Dreyfuss’ Curt, firmly into the 1960s maelstrom but with less charming results.

Maybe nobody really wanted to grow up after all. That’s the problem with coming-of-age stories; once the characters come of age, you want to hit the rewind and go back to their uninhibited youth. George Lucas did it in spectacular fashion for all of us, creating an inviting multisensory sanctuary that you can curl up in whenever the mood strikes. Because as John Milner declares every time you load up the video, “I ain’t goin’ off to some damn fancy college! I’m stayin’ right here, having fun as usual!” And you’ll always be able to find him at Mel’s, in 1962, having fun as usual.

To this day, the American Graffiti soundtrack serves as the ultimate introduction to early American rock-and-roll, doo-wop, and R&B. It’s best heard on a beat-up triple LP copy or, perhaps better yet, by way of a dusty cassette on rally night. Over 3 million copies were sold in the U.S. alone.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 50 Years of <em>American Graffiti</em> : The cars, the music, and the everlasting impact appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The first time that Joseph Reyer saw American Graffiti, it turned into an all-day affair—and ignited a lifelong obsession with the movie.

“I was about 13 when it came out,” Reyer says of the 1973 film created and directed by George Lucas. “My mom dropped me off at the movie theater, and it was so good that I called her afterward and said, ‘Don’t pick me up. I’m going to watch it again.’ Then I called her again and said, ‘Don’t pick me up yet. I’m going to watch it again.’ She said, ‘This is the last time!’”

It wouldn’t be.

“I’m such a huge American Graffiti fan,” the Detroit-area native says. “I’ve seen it probably 30 times, and I have it in all forms—VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray. I also have all sorts of memorabilia, including an original poster. I’m just nuts about this movie.

“It had such a profound effect on me, especially (John) Milner’s coupe. I couldn’t tell you the (name of the) first girl I kissed, but I can tell you the first car I fell in love with. That one.”

Reyer’s appreciation for the American Graffiti, which turns 50 later this summer, has never waned. Twenty-five years ago he bought a black 1955 Chevy 150 similar to the one that a young Harrison Ford (playing Bob Falfa) drove in the film. He still owns the car. “It isn’t a replica,” Reyer says, “but it’s black, turn-key, and gorgeous, so I went for it.” The seller also had a ’32 Ford, but as much as Reyer would have loved to buy it and recreate the yellow hot rod that Paul Le Mat (Milner) drove in the film, he decided against it. The financial math just didn’t make sense.

A detailed ’32 Ford replica became his holy grail.

***

Reyer’s passion for cars came from both his parents, but his father, Joe, was his biggest influence. “My dad was very supportive of my love for cars. I can remember sitting on the fender of his ’64 Impala. He said he never had to look for me because he always knew he could find me in the garage.”

The son not only followed his father into the garage but also in his professional footsteps, becoming an electrician for Ford Motor Company. “Dad worked at the Michigan Truck Plant for 35 years, and I worked there for 15. He always encouraged me. He really made all of this possible.”

For its part, American Graffiti opened doors for nascent talents to break into the movie business, many of whom became Hollywood heavyweights. Even Lucas, whose resume to that point included just one film—a sci-fi flick called THX 1138—can look to Graffiti as his launch pad to stardom. Reflecting on his own experiences with cars, cruising, and rock ’n’ roll music as a teenager in Modesto, California, Lucas needed only three weeks to write the movie’s coming-of-age script about one end-of-summer night in 1962. That was after his friends, screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, had to back out to work on another film.

“Like most kids who grew up in the Valley, I had a strong interest in cruising,” Lucas said in a documentary included on the Blu-Ray edition of American Graffiti. “When I got to college (at the University of Southern California), I studied anthropology and began to realize that [cruising] was a uniquely American dating ritual involving automobiles.

“When I came up with the idea of doing the movie … I really felt compelled to document the whole experience of cruising and what my generation used as a way of meeting girls and what we did in our spare time. I wanted to document the end of an era, how things change—life passages—how you go from being a student into the real world.”

Lucas shopped the script around Hollywood, but he says “nobody wanted to do it.” After a rewrite, Universal agreed to make the movie, a decision that came no doubt with help from Lucas’ friend Francis Ford Coppola, who signed on as executive producer. Just before production began, Huyck and Katz—freed from their previous commitment—assisted in beefing up the script, particularly the love story of Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) and Laurie Henderson (Cindy Williams).

Lucas spent six months casting the film and says he “saw thousands of kids.” Those he ultimately chose to include in the film did not disappoint. The best known actor of the group was Howard, who starred as Opie on the Andy Griffith Show when he was a kid; the rest were basically unknowns—at the time, anyway. In addition to Howard, Williams, Ford, and Le Mat, the lead parts went to Richard Dreyfuss, Mackenzie Phillips, Charlie Martin Smith, and Candy Clark. Lucas also brought in legendary disc jockey Robert Weston Smith, better known as “Wolfman Jack,” to string together the 41 hit songs that serve as the soundtrack.

Henry Travers, the film’s transportation manager, was responsible for locating and maintaining the cars that Lucas wanted in the film, including the ’32 Ford (originally purchased for $1300), the ’55 Chevy (which was also used in Two-Lane Blacktop), the 1958 Chevrolet Impala driven by Howard, the 1958 Edsel Corsair driven by Williams, the 1967 Citroën 2CV (yes, a ’67 for a movie that was set in ’62) driven by Dreyfuss, the 1951 Mercury coupe driven by the Pharaohs, and the 1956 Ford Thunderbird driven by another newcomer, Suzanne Somers.

The entire movie was filmed in 28 days, mostly at night and on a budget of $750,000 (about $5.1 million today). There was no money for original music or incidentals. The budget was so tight, in fact, that between takes the cast members sat on the curb or rested in cars. Fancy trailers were nowhere to be seen.

As Howard recalled in the documentary, “I finally went to Francis and I said, ‘You know, Francis, I know it’s a low-budget movie; it’s great—the spirit of the movie is wonderful … Do you think we could have a chair? Could we just have chairs?’ And he said, ‘Well, no, there’s nothing in the budget for chairs.’”

American Graffiti went on to make $140 million.

“I met Paul Le Mat once about 20 years ago,” Reyer says, “and I said, ‘It looked like you had a great time making that movie.’ He said, ‘It was the greatest 30 days of my life.’”

***

Reyer, 61, saw plenty of replicas of John Milner’s ’32 Ford through the years, “but there was always just too much to do to make them right.” Then, in 2022, opportunity knocked: an astonishingly accurate replica came up for sale, built by Jack Bell and perfected in Arkansas by second owner Nick Coe, with help from Rob Pruitt, Dan Griffin, Tim Bowman, and Dr. Rachel’s Upholstery Clinic, which cloned the interior of the original.

“The more I looked at it, the more I thought, ‘Holy cow, this guy nailed this,’” Reyer says. “I mean it’s 99.9 percent correct. I’ve seen a lot of replicas over the years, and nothing comes close to this one. I thought, ‘This guy is as crazy as I am.’ I asked Nick, ‘Do we have a sickness?’ And he said, ‘Yes, we do. And it’s a good one.’”

Reyer just had to have the car.

Coe, a fellow American Graffiti fanatic, decided to let the yellow Deuce go only because his son was ill and he could use the money. Reyer assured him that it would be in good hands. “You still have visitation,” he promised.

Among the Ford’s movie-matching features are small-block 327 Chevy V-8 engine, Ansen swing pedals, interior trim off a ’56 Ford, steering wheel, piston gear shift knob, front axle, front chrome shocks, rear suspension, headlights and headlight bars, and tinted windows.

Reyer loves taking the Ford to car shows and advancing the American Graffiti gospel. “I want everybody to catch the bug,” he says. “I’m a super spreader.”

No one is immune, especially not his family, which includes son Jeremiah and daughter Christin, five grandchildren, and a sixth grandchild on the way. “I’m just the caretaker; this will be Jeremiah’s someday,” Reyer says. “And I’m going to get a gearhead out of one of those grandkids, you can be sure of that.”

It’s a lineage that began with his parents, particularly his dad.

“He would be as excited about this car as I am,” Reyer says of his father, who passed away in 2020. “I wish he was still here to see it come to fruition. I restored a ’66 F-100 pickup for him, and it was his pride and joy. I remember he’d look at it in the garage every night before he went to bed. I do that now with this car. I feel like I won the lottery.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post <em>American Graffiti</em> superfan’s ’32 Ford replica preserves the movie’s magic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here.

Band names, like names of race horses and boats, often make no sense. Toad the Wet Sprocket, anyone? The Goo Goo Dolls? Limp Bizkit? Band names start to make more sense, however, when they’re named for stuff we love and relate to, like cars. Oooh, Galaxie 500—now that is a fine name for a band.

Here are 14 groups who rejected obscure references to stuff no one cares about and instead looked to the automobile for inspiration.

The Avantis

Like the car from which they took their name, the surf-rockin’ Avantis really only stuck around for 1963–64, before changing their name. Not to the Avanti IIs, sadly, but to Pat & Lolly Vegas, and later to Redbone.

Car Seat Headrest

This American indie rock band is still going strong, so a more apt name might be Active Headrest. Car Seat Headrest’s name comes from lead singer Will Toledo writing lyrics in the back seat of his car. Sadly, he missed a golden opportunity to call the band Won’t Toledo.

The Cars

The Boston rockers got together in 1976, and when it came time to name the band, they wanted something simple and timeless. In a 2018 Wall Street Journal interview, drummer David Robinson said the name was “meaningless and it conjured up nothing.” Just like seat time in a Mitsubishi Mirage.

Chevelle

Brothers Pete and Sam Loeffler formed their band in their parents’ Illinois garage in 1995. They loved cars, their dad loved Chevelles, so the name was a no-brainer. It’s still unclear whether or not they workshopped Chevette before making the final decision.

Crash Test Dummies

Once, there was this band who
Named themselves after one of those diagnostic dolls …

The Fabulous Thunderbirds

Since their founding in 1974, the bluesy Fabulous Thunderbirds have seen 28 different members come and go, the one constant being Kim Wilson, the lead vocalist. Surely they weren’t all fabulous, were they? Surely some were … square birds.

Galaxie 500

Not to be confused with the Canadian band of the same name, this Galaxie 500 was an American alt rock group of the late 1980s who named itself after a friend’s car. Good thing that person didn’t drive a Mazda Bongo Friendee.

The GTOs

This Los Angeles girl band only released a single album, 1969’s Permanent Damage. Originally called the Cherry Sisters, then Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, producer Frank Zappa finally dubbed them GTO, for Girls Together Outrageously. Girls Together Once seems more apt.

The Mustangs

The British blues rockers often refer to themselves as The Mustangs (UK), which is just like a Capri, but different.

Pantera

The Texas metal band was originally called Gemini. Then they tried out Eternity. Then they discovered the Spanish word for “panther,” and that was that. We also would have accepted Mangusta or Vallelunga.

REO Speedwagon

We heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another that the members of REO Speedwagon met in 1966 on the campus of the University of Illinois. On the first day of his History of Transportation class, keyboardist Neal Doughty saw the name written on the blackboard, and it stuck. Just imagine—if he’d had Linguistics 101 that day, we’d be rocking out to Glottal Stop.

Relient K

These Ohio Christian rockers got together in high school in 1998 and named themselves for the guitarist’s car. To avoid copyright infringement, they spelled the model name wrong. The band is still going strong, which can’t be said for most of the 3.5 million Plymouth Reliants built from 1981 to 1989.

The Rivieras

These guys were big Buick fans, apparently. How else to explain the name they rode to 1960s success, along with the name they rode to much less success when they reunited back in 2000: Wildcat. C’mon, guys, how about a comeback tour as GNX for old time’s sake?

Trans Am

The pride of Bethesda, Trans Am has been producing primarily instrumental “post rock” since 1990. Scottish arts and culture site The Skinny says the band flits from “dischord-inspired guitar experiments to krautrock hypnotics; from hardcore-infused electro soundclashes to arch pop freakouts.” No tire-shredding V-8, then?

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 14 bands named for cars, car parts, or crash-test dummies appeared first on Hagerty Media.

When 81-year-old retired racer Derek Bell talks about going fast at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Porsche, he’s speaking from experience. “I just drove it completely, and stupidly, as fast as I could. And I was going 246 mph. I don’t think anybody has gone faster.”

That’s Bell being interviewed for a documentary called Racing with Giants: Porsche at Le Mans, produced by Mobil 1 and Hagerty Media.

The one-hour special connects Porsche’s 75th anniversary with the 100th anniversary of the running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. (It’s actually the 91st event; the first one ran in 1923.) It also celebrates Porsche’s return to the top class at Le Mans, which takes the green flag on June 10.

“From our own rich history in motorsport and our long-standing relationship with Porsche, this documentary truly celebrates the unique impact that racing has on the cars that we drive every day,” said Bryce Huschka, consumer marketing manager for Mobil 1. “For 100 years, Le Mans has uniquely captured the attention and imagination of fans. Thanks to them, our partners and fellow car lovers, we can’t wait to bring this exceptional story to life.”

“Racing with Giants” features archival footage of Le Mans past and present, along with interviews with multiple drivers and Porsche team principals, including Allan McNish, Patrick Long, Jacky Ickx and Nick Tandy. Porsche has long competed at Le Mans, though recently solely in the slower GT class. The company will go for an overall victory this year, with new Porsche prototype cars fielded by racing legend Roger Penske.

Following a premiere in New York City, the documentary will air on Hagerty’s YouTube channel beginning June 1 at 8 p.m. ET. You can watch the official trailer below.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Watch a sneak peek of the <em>Racing with Giants: Porsche at Le Mans</em> documentary appeared first on Hagerty Media.

When a Fast & Furious movie hits the theater, as Fast X does today in the U.S., it’s guaranteed to be a globetrotting adventure with wild, car-centric action. It’s also sure to rake in the dough.

The film franchise is Universal Studios’ most lucrative, with more than six billion dollars in gross revenue. Yes, $6,000,000,000. That kind of appeal can bring acclaim not only to the actors but also to the films’ star cars, elevating the status and value of on-set vehicles far above that of their behind-the-camera peers.

We took a look at all of the public sales of four-wheeled stars in the Fast franchise to see which ones were most elevated by their star power. Here are the top seven auction results, all of which brought six-digit results.

To compare each car used on-screen with its “normal” version, we’ll be using data from the Hagerty Price Guide, which uses a 1-to-4 rating scale to evaluate a vehicle’s condition. The definitions are broken down here.

Paul Walker’s R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R

Sale price: $1,357,000

Besides its beautiful Bayside Blue paint, widebody conversion, and Volk wheels, this 2000 (R34) Nissan Skyline GT-R also features a host of performance mods that double the factory-rated output of its twin-turbo inline-six to 550 horsepower. Even better, all of the upgrades were personally selected by the late Paul Walker.

Walker commissioned the car to be built by Kaizo Industries, who imported the Skyline, sans engine, into California with plans of retrofitting the car to comply with U.S. Department of Transportation regulations. This was the hero car in the franchise’s fourth film, 2009’s Fast & Furious. While other RWD stunt cars and prop replicas were used in filming, this was the only actual GT-R on-screen; the rest of the Skylines were lower-performing, GT-T models dressed up as GT-Rs.

After filming wrapped, U.S. Customs impounded the car: As a model not originally sold in the states, it is not legal for import until 2025. After a drawn-out legal process, the car was shipped to Germany where it has been on display ever since, reportedly with the seat left in the position Paul Walker left it. Its recent sale earlier in May 2023 makes this the most expensive Skyline ever sold at auction.

1994 Toyota Supra Turbo

Sale price: $550,000

Paul Walker drove this car in the original The Fast and the Furious (2001) and it made an appearance in 2003’s sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious. This car set the record for the highest price paid for a Supra at auction. Its impressive sale price, far above a ’94 Supra Turbo’s #3 (Good) condition value of $91,800, is due to its well-documented use on-screen with Walker behind the wheel.

Famed movie-car builder and car customizer Eddie Paul built the Supra for the first movie and repainted it for a new role in the sequel. Before its record-breaking sale in 2021, the car was returned to its most recognizable and famous configuration, with those iconic Troy Lee graphics it wore for its movie debut.

1993 Toyota Supra

Sale price: $203,000

While this Supra is not a Turbo, and its nitrous oxide bottles—”actually, let’s make it two”—are not attached, it was the stunt car used in the 2001 movie’s finale. The status greatly adds to its appeal in the eyes of collectors. Like its nearly identical hero-car counterpart, this Supra is equipped with an APR wing and Bomex body kit and was fitted with a roll cage.

The $203K it brought at Mecum’s 2015 Indianapolis sale vastly exceeded the value of a naturally aspirated Supra at the time, and the current #3 (Good) value, while up more than nine percent year-over-year, is still about a quarter of this famous car’s sale price.

1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse

Sale price: $155,000

Like a lot of the cars featured in the Fast movies, this Eclipse got a lot of movie magic and creative filming to make it appear far more exotic and powerful than its build sheet says it is. This four-speed automatic model is neither a turbocharged GS-T (Grand Sport Turbo) nor a GSX (Grand Sport X, for all-wheel drive) variant, but it is one of six Eclipses used to fill the on-screen role of Brian’s—played by Paul Walker—street-racing machine. Sometimes, movie magic matters more.

All of the car’s signature graphics are preserved. So are its diamond-plate floorboards, which are miraculously intact, as is the intake manifold, which we have been assured is no longer in danger.

1969 Chevrolet Yenko Camaro re-creation

Sale price: $132,000

You might recognize this LeMans Blue Camaro from 2 Fast 2 Furious, in which it was driven by Paul Walker.

The sale price of this Yenko-lookalike, big-block Camaro would not be quite this high without its movie pedigree, despite the extensive work done to restore it. A real Yenko Camaro is a rare and valuable piece of muscle-car lore and commands huge prices: Even in less-than-perfect condition, a genuine Yenko is worth more than $300,000.

Another ’69 Camaro built for the movie, but with a 350 small-block in place of the 427, sold for just $37,000.

1970 Dodge Challenger 426 Hemi re-creation

Sale price: $112,200

This is the first vehicle on the top-sales list that wasn’t driven by Paul Walker. Instead, this car was driven by Tyrese Gibson in 2 Fast 2 Furious. Since Vin Diesel and his character Dominic Toretto’s supercharged Dodge Charger were both absent from the sequel, this Mopar pony car helped give the franchise another serious dose of muscle car alongside the aforementioned “Yenko” Camaro.

A rotisserie restoration, from the car’s powder-coated subframe up, left the car in better shape than new; no offense to Tyrese, but this car would have brought nearly $112,000 even without its Hollywood connection. Were it an original Hemi car, its #3 (Good) condition value would be $186,000. There’s just something about a Hemi E-body …

1965 Ford GT40 re-creation

Sale price: $110,000

Have you priced a decent GT40 replica lately? Even in 2014, this was well-bought. It’s powered by a 347-cubic-inch small-block “stroker,” an engine that likely makes it every bit the handful as the original, FE 427 GT40. The right-hand-drive replica wears a fiberglass body and was modernized with a five-speed manual transmission but otherwise very much looks the real deal. After appearing in Fast Five in 2011, this car was given a nut-and-bolt restoration. The work was completed in 2014, just prior to its sale.

With most of the most valuable Fast cars coming from the early movies and the top five having a connection to the late Paul Walker, we don’t expect this top-seven list to change. However, as a Pontiac fan, I can see the first Fiero in space potentially cracking the list. If so, we’ll have to write another, expanded version.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The 7 most expensive <em>Fast & Furious</em> movie cars ever sold appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam out with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here. Click here for Jamie Kitman’s historical tour of harmony and horsepower, and read below for 19 classic songs about specific cars. 

One of Prince’s earliest hits, allegedly a song about sex, can also easily be misunderstood as a song about a “Little Red Corvette.” Except that Corvettes aren’t that little. “Hot Rod Lincoln” was a rockabilly hit in 1955 for Charley Ryan (with an insistent slide guitar standing in for a horn) and again in 1972, with a faithful rendition by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Illustrating that time wouldn’t dim the cultural significance of the car, the Tom Robinson Band’s punk classic “Grey Cortina” from 1978 is at once a sincere tribute but also a snarky takedown of the tackier elements of England’s motoring culture.

Of course, no discussion of car songs would be complete without reference to Tom Waits’ wistful 1973 classic, “Ol’ ’55,” (later covered by the Eagles and many others), a morning-after reminiscence that calls out what may have been Waits’ own 1955 Cadillac but could have been any of a bunch of different cars; 1955 was a good year for sentimental iron.

Cars have always been good fodder for sentimental songwriters, so please enjoy our absolutely incomplete list of songs about cars. If we missed your favorite, share it in a comment!

***

Vince Taylor & His Playboys
“BRAND NEW CADILLAC” (later covered by The Clash)

Well, my baby drove off in a brand new Cadillac
Ooh, my baby drove off in a brand new Cadillac
Well, she looked at me, daddy, I ain’t never coming back

If she ain’t coming back, it’s safe to assume his baby was driving a 1980 Seville diesel, and she’s still stranded somewhere.

Jan & Dean
“BUCKET ‘T’”

Found her in a barn in Tennessee
I paid five bucks for my Bucket T

Paging Tom Cotter! Paging Tom Cotter!

The Beach Boys
“FUN, FUN, FUN”

Well she got her daddy’s car
and she cruised through the hamburger stand now

Of course, they conveniently leave out the fact that she literally drove through the place. The CCTV footage is wild.

The Beach Boys
“409”

Well I saved my pennies and I saved my dimes
For I knew there would be a time
When I would buy a brand new 409

Today, those same pennies and dimes will get you a base Versa. Nobody writes songs about those.

Ronny & the Daytonas
“G.T.O.”

She beats the gassers and the rail jobs
Really drives ’em wi-ee-eye-ild

And when the late marketing man Jim Wangers got involved, she beat that other GTO.

The Who
“JAGUAR”

Every lovely spot, near or far
You can reach them, too, in your car
Or you might be there now if you own a Jag already

If by “you might be there now” they meant “in ‘Limp Home mode’ in my XK8,” then yes, I’m there already.

The Rip Chords
“HEY LITTLE COBRA”

The Stingrays and Jags were so far behind
I took my Cobra out of gear and let it coast to the line

Oh, so it’s an ode to SCCA A-Production.

Wilson Pickett
“MUSTANG SALLY”(actually a cover)

One of these early mornings
You gonna be wiping your weeping eyes

Fun fact: Mr. Pickett was standing at the exit to his local cars and coffee when this one came to him.

T. Rex
“JEEPSTER”

You slide so good
With bones so fair
You’ve got the universe reclining in your hair
Cause you’re my babe
Yes you’re my love
Oh, girl, I’m just a Jeepster for your love

They originally called the song “CJ-7,” but that didn’t make any sense …

Fountains of Wayne
“’92 SUBARU”

This thing is a beast, value will only increase
In negotiating terms like peace in the Middle East
There’s only three of its kind, they’re never easy to find
Got people waiting in line to pay me double for mine

LOWBALLERS WILL BE IGNORED! I KNOW WHAT I HAVE!

Janis Joplin
“MERCEDES BENZ”

Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends

Potato-potahto, Janis.

Frank Ocean
“WHITE FERRARI”

You dream of walls that hold us imprisoned

It would seem that Mr. Ocean has spent some time in the back seat of a 365 GTC.

Bruce Springsteen
“PINK CADILLAC”

Honey, I just wonder what you do there in the back
Of your Pink Cadillac

She hawks Avon, Bruce.

The Playmates
“BEEP BEEP”

Now we’re doing a hundred and ten
This certainly was a race
For a Rambler to pass a Caddy
Would be a big disgrace

I think the bigger story here is a Nash Rambler going a buck ten without shaking itself to pieces.

The Beach Boys
“LITTLE DEUCE COUPE”

Well I’m not bragging, babe, so don’t put me down
But I’ve got the fastest set of wheels in town

Uhh, my buddy with the 409 would like a word.

The Routers
“STING RAY”

This song has no lyrics, so they could have called it literally anything. Like “DONKEY” or “COFFEE TABLE.” But because we’re talking cars, let’s go with “SCOUPE” and call it a day.

The Mountain Goats
“NEW CHEVROLET IN FLAMES”

We went down to Pete Brown’s Chevrolet
Cause Pete Brown can satisfy all your new car needs

Wait, is this about the Bolt?

Madness
“DRIVING IN MY CAR” (about a Morris Minor)

I like driving in my car
It’s not quite a Jaguar
I like driving in my car
I’m satisfied I’ve got this far

That’s more than we can say for the bloke limping home in his XK8.

Neil Young
“TRANS AM”

It crawled along the boulevard
With two wheels on the grass
That old Trans Am was dying hard
But still had lots of gas

Now THAT is a car just begging to be jumped.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 19 classic songs about specific cars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

We dedicated the May/June 2023 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine to the deep connections between music and cars, including several fun lists featuring your favorite car songs. Come back often or click the Music & Cars tag to stay up to date on these stories as they roll out online. You can also jam out with our custom Music & Cars playlist on Spotify, available here. Read on for Jamie Kitman’s prelude, a historical tour of harmony and horsepower. 

To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever named a car after a song. Yet countless songs have been written about (and named after) cars. And driving. And, as the young folks say, we’re here for that. Throughout history, the most popular songs have been written about romance, yet cars—not only as instruments of romance, but also as romantic ideals and objects of desire themselves—have filled many a verse, chorus, and bridge. That’s not to mention the countless ditties that have been penned to convey the experience and psychological significance of driving. The feels, if you will.

Start with 1905’s “In My Merry Oldsmobile” and see what I mean. Move on to “The Little Ford Rambled Right Along” (1914). Then pass some time with “Henry’s Made a Lady Out of Lizzie” (1927), Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” (1936), and the Andrews Sisters’ recording of “Six Jerks in a Jeep” (1942). Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner share credit for “Rocket 88” (1951). Cue up the Beach Boys’ cut “409” (1962), and Bob Dylan’s “From a Buick 6,” (1965). Keep forging ahead in time to Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” (1972), War’s “Low Rider” (1975), Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (1975), and maybe Motörhead’s “Motorhead” (1977). Then, take in Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” (1980), and, in a different musical vein, Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” (1985), before moving on to hip-hop, with A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (1990), Vanilla Ice’s “Rollin’ in My 5.0” (1991), 2Pac’s “Picture Me Rollin’” (1996), 50 Cent’s “Get in My Car” (2005), and Rick Ross’ “Aston Martin Music” (2010). Come up for air and it’s 2020 and Lil Yachty drops “Ferrari Music,” while in 2021, Young Thug and Gunna release “Ski.”

The point is, there have been few deeper wellsprings of subject matter for lyrical consideration than the automobile. Indeed, with all the car-centric songs out there to choose from, selecting examples for the preceding paragraph presented us with a seemingly infinite number of possible formulations, no mainframe computer required. There hasn’t been a month, much less a decade, without a carload of car songs. And then there are the bands named after cars, starting with The Cars.

It’s no wonder. The advent of recorded music is roughly contemporaneous with that of the automobile, a rather successful device that recorded sound has grown up right alongside, starting with wax cylinders, acetate and later vinyl records, radio, eight-tracks, cassettes, compact discs, digital audio, and more recently, wireless digitized sound and satellite transmission. There are no new Oldsmobiles anymore, alas, and many of the ones left often aren’t very merry. But people are still blasting music in their cars and enjoying it as much as ever.

There’s something singular about listening to music in a car. And something unique, too, with the car as setting and symbol, both conscious and subconscious. It sets one to thinking, thinking, as we’ll see, about all sorts of things. When you put tunes in a moving vehicle, it can lead not just to soul-cleansing introspection but also toe tapping. And thrumming on the steering wheel or banging on the dashtop. Often while singing along at the top of your lungs. I’m going to go out on a limb and say cars and music go together fundamentally better than music went with horses, chariots, or landaulet carriages.

According to an American Automobile Association report from 2019, Americans spend a collective 70 billion hours annually behind the wheel. That’s a lot of time for listening to music on the go, made ever more possible with each passing year thanks to an explosion in in-car audio technology and the advent of the cloud. Together, they’ve worked alongside decades of miniaturization as drivers of enhanced listening possibility. For those of a more terrestrial bent, there remain tens of thousands of radio transmitters broadcasting thousands of land-based radio stations to drivers, a cornucopia augmented in recent decades by an ever-expanding profusion of satellite stations beaming la musique down to enabled automobiles from above.

Recently, we asked the regarded music critic Michael Azerrad, author of several books, including the authorized Nirvana biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, for his thoughts on the supernatural connection between cars and music. Traveling around the country as a journalist and a onetime touring musician himself, he has had occasion to consider this topic.

“A car is a great place to listen to music—it’s not like you can get up and do something else, and what you see through the windshield provides a constantly evolving visual soundtrack. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the greatest stereo, since the human ear adjusts to any aural conditions—how many hundreds of millions of people,” he asks, “have had peak listening experiences while listening through a crappy little mono speaker in the dashboard?”

Azerrad continues: “Listening to music in a car is very intimate and intensely private—nobody knows what you’re listening to, and you can pound on the steering wheel and sing as loudly and out of tune as you want, and no one will hear. So, you’re engaging with the music more than you can pretty much anywhere else.  If you’re alone, music will keep you company, and if you’re with other people, it can unite all of you; either way, that forges emotional bonds that you’re just not going to get with, say, talk radio.

“There’s just something about the kinetic energy of music—particularly rock music—that pairs well with driving. And bear in mind, musicians do a lot of traveling on highways, so movement is often built right into the music from the start. To take a literal example, perhaps the ultimate driving album, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, was directly inspired by the sounds of cars whooshing down pristine modern freeways.” Quite so, though if I may get personal for a moment, Kraftwerk never did as much for me as it did for many of my friends. But the Kinks’ “Drivin’” from their 1969 masterpiece Arthur, which celebrated the freedom—or at least the illusion of it—the automobile offered, somehow clicked for me and my auto-fevered brain, despite my tender years.

“And all the troubled world around us

Seems an eternity away

And all the debt collectors

Rent collectors

All will be behind us

But they’ll never find us

’Cos we’ll be drivin’, drivin’, drivin’, drivin’”

— The Kinks, “Driven”

The track, like many a Kinks classic, was written from a working-class perspective. Other numbers—for instance, “House in the Country”—allude to the automobile as symbol for persons of wealth (“He’s got a house in the country and a big sports car”). Later still, when the Kinks were more fully established in the rock firmament, they wrote songs like “Motorway,” about the rigors of touring, or the poignant “Sitting in My Hotel.”

“If my friends could see me now,

driving round just like a film star,

In a chauffeur driven jam jar, they would laugh.

They would all be saying that it’s not really me,

They would all be asking who I’m trying to be”

— The Kinks, “Sitting in My Hotel”

By way of further biographical footnote, I first became aware of the Kinks as a young child, with 1964’s theretofore impossibly rocking “You Really Got Me,” which I heard on the dashtop speaker serving the lame-o AM radio in my parents’ 1960 Plymouth Valiant wagon. I thought it sounded great. Legend has it that band member Dave Davies stuck a pencil through the speaker of his amplifier to achieve its signature distorted guitar tone, a sound that cut through the fog even on the tinniest of car radio speakers.

Eleven years later, one of the greatest experiences of my early driving career was being able to cue up Kinks’ leader Ray Davies’ moving indictment of consumer culture, “Shangri-La,” in the cassette player of the parental units’ almost-new 1974 Saab 99LE (which also had—gasp, such luxury—an FM radio.) If fuel-injected Saabs with cassette decks were the fruits of consumer culture, well, count me in. Not that we only got carried away by the British Invasion around my house. My sister, Suzy, and I had demanded extended rides in the family’s new 1967 Volvo 122S wagon (which replaced the Valiant) against the chance we could catch on its Bendix AM receiver the Monkees’ single, “Last Train to Clarksville.” Over and over again. Nowadays, of course, it’s a different world. Your kid can listen to any song they want on demand and as often as they want. I pity the modern parent.

Kids are people, too, and anyone with a pulse has some connection to music. Car guys and car gals are no different. Remembers Bob Boniface, head of design for Buick (and formerly Cadillac): “I used to listen to the [underground alt rock giants] Pixies on WFNX in my car when I lived in Boston. When I moved to Detroit in 1989 to study transportation design at the College for Creative Studies, I discovered that there were no alt rock radio stations in the area. I bought Doolittle on cassette the first day. To me, the Pixies’ music borrowed from nothing—it was pure creativity, and it had a profound impact on my own creative process. I would always start an important sketch assignment by playing ‘Debaser.’” A happy coincidence, of sorts, as Pixies’ frontman Charles Thompson, aka Black Francis, told me he still owns the 1985 Cadillac Fleetwood he bought in 1988 with his first royalty check.

It would be easy to fill volumes free-associating one’s way through this subject, but to give some shape to an inevitably rambling exercise, what follows is a brief outline of the many branches of the car song family, prepared with the kind assistance of the aforementioned critic Azerrad and John Flansburgh, guitarist and founding member (along with John Linnell) of multiple Grammy Award winners They Might Be Giants, a band whose vast catalog includes many songs about cars, including “Electric Car,” “Thunderbird,” “Boat of Car,” “Mink Car,” “The Bloodmobile,” “AKA Driver” (about “Nyquil drivers”), and several others I can’t recall, even though I spent 32 years managing the band. Space limitations and regard for your patience and my own sanity will limit the number of songs referenced, though I’d invite you, the reader, to insert your own favorites in each category and to make up your own.

***

This article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe and join the club.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Music & Cars: The songs, bands, and albums influenced by the automobile appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Starting out as an imaginary band in a make-believe television show about “four insane boys” trying to make it in the music business, The Monkees—Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Micky Dolenz—eventually became an authentic, chart-topping band. Their famous car, however, has been the real deal all along.

The Monkeemobile, an iconic custom car that takes a back seat only to the Batmobile among ’60s TV cars, was the creation of Dean Jeffries and is now considered a cultural icon. Getting to know the Monkeemobile first requires getting to know The Monkees.

Contrary to popular belief, Jones, Nesmith, Tork, and Dolenz weren’t actors who became musicians; they all had musical backgrounds. Jones starred as the Artful Dodger in the Broadway musical production of Oliver!, Nesmith had been recording music in Los Angeles since the early ’60s, Tork was performing folk music in New York’s Greenwich Village, and Dolenz was a former kid actor who played guitar and sang in a couple of bands, including The Missing Links.

In other words, the four already knew the challenge of making it in the music biz.

The idea for The Monkees was first suggested by aspiring filmmaker Bob Rafelson in 1962 but never gained momentum. Rafelson and collaborator Bert Schneider revived the idea after the Beatles found movie success with A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), and Screen Gems Television bought the idea in April 1965.

Jones was the first to be cast for the show, since he was already under contract with Screen Gems. Nesmith, Tork, and Dolenz were among 437 aspiring actors/musicians who answered this ad in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter in September 1965:

Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s* types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.

*A popular late-night hangout in West Hollywood.

Nesmith was the only one of the future Monkees who actually saw the ad; Tork learned of the cattle call through his friend Stephen Sills, while Dolenz heard about it from his agent. Although Jones was a good drummer, he was only 5 foot 3, and the show’s producers thought he’d look even more diminutive sitting behind the drums, so they made him the frontman.

Nesmith and Tork could both play guitar and bass, and since neither was interested in playing the drums, Dolenz was tasked with learning to play from scratch.

Regardless of The Monkees’ musical talents, Don Kirshner, Screen Gems’ head of music, originally had the four fake their parts and used studio musicians for the show while bringing Jones and Dolenz into the studio to record vocals. Jones had a strong voice and sang ballads like “Daydream Believer,” while Dolenz handled the rest. Nesmith often said Dolenz’s voice defined The Monkees’ sound more than Jones’ did.

The first episode of The Monkees aired on NBC on September 12, 1966. It was an immediate hit, ran two full seasons, and won two Emmy Awards, but before long The Monkees’ music was more popular than the show itself.

After Screen Gems Television released the group’s first album without indicating that the instruments heard on the record were played by studio musicians, Nesmith and Tork were embarrassed and infuriated, and The Monkees successfully fought for control of their own music.

“Everyone was accomplished,” Nesmith once told Rolling Stone. “The notion [that] I was the only musician is one of those rumors that got started and won’t stop—but it was not true … We were also kids with our own taste in music and were happier performing songs we liked—and/or wrote—than songs that were handed to us.”

On January 16, 1967, the band held its first, full-fledged recording session. The group’s “second” album, More of the Monkees, spent 70 weeks on the Billboard charts and was No. 1 for 18 weeks. It was certified quintuple platinum, selling more than five million copies, and was the third-highest-selling album of the 1960s. The Monkees sold 75 million albums worldwide during their career.

Only Dolenz is still alive. Jones died in 2012, followed by Tork in 2019 and Nesmith in 2021.

As The Monkees—both the show and the group—vaulted into television and music history, so did the amazing, instantly recognizable Monkeemobile. Who knows what the car might have looked like if designer Dean Jeffries hadn’t received permission from his employer to build it.

When he received the request to build the Monkeemobile, Jeffries was under contract with Model Products Corporation (MPC). He approached CEO George Toteff and shared the offer that he’d received. Toteff was immediately supportive—in fact, he turned it into a win-win.

Toteff reached out to Pontiac advertising exec Jim Wangers, who is often referred to in the classic-car community as the godfather of the GTO, arguable the world’s first muscle car. Two worked out a deal that was mutually beneficial. Wangers took advantage of the promotional opportunity and sent Jeffries two 1966 Pontiac GTO convertibles, both powered by a 389-cubic-inch, four-barrel V-8 mated to an automatic transmission.

Meanwhile, MPC was given exclusive rights to produce toy Monkeemobile model kits and went on to sell seven million of them.

The first Monkeemobile that Jeffries built for the show was completed in 10 days. The second, slightly different and used for promotional appearances, was finished in four.

Among each car’s distinct features were a split two-piece windshield, stretched nose and tail, swooped hood, flares in back, exaggerated headlamps and taillamps, touring-car convertible top, four bucket seats and a third row bench seat where the trunk was originally located, rear-mounted parachute, and GTO emblem on the front grille. In addition, side pipes protruded from just behind the front wheels, and a GMC 6-71 supercharger stuck out of the hood.

The promo version was also equipped with a solid rear axle (without springs) and was given extra weight in the rear so that it could pop a wheelie.

When the NBC show ended in March 1968, designer Jeffries was offered the opportunity to own one of the Monkeemobiles for $2000 (or less, depending on who’s telling the story), but he thought he could always build one of his own, so he passed.

Later that year, the TV Monkeemobile accompanied The Monkees on a world tour and was somehow left behind in Australia. It eventually showed up in Puerto Rico, where it was used as a hotel courtesy car, but when the hotel went out of business in 1992, the Puerto Rican government auctioned it for $5000 to a collector in New York, who restored it in time for a Monkees television special in 1997. It was later displayed at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. The car remains in the John Norris family—it’s owned by Norris, his three sisters, and an uncle—and now resides in New Jersey.

Another custom car icon, George Barris, the creator of the ’60s Batmobile, bought the second Monkeemobile and added a few modifications of his own, including new paint and a modern sound system. In 2008, Barris auctioned the car at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale, and Michigan’s Mel Guthrie purchased it for $396,000. He has no regrets.

“I’m very proud of this car. I’ve loved it since I was a little kid,” Guthrie told a Hagerty film crew in 2014. “I used to watch reruns of the show after school … I just thought this was the coolest car ever … I never dreamed that I would own it.”

And few could have dreamed that—nearly six decades later—the show, the band, and the Monkeemobile would become so beloved that they still draw adulation from fans from all over the world.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Unlike The Monkees, the Monkeemobile always made its own music appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Jack Swansey holds a degree in anthropology with a focus on car culture, and he is the world’s leading ethnographic authority (by default, if you must know) on NASCAR fandom. His love of the automobile fuels him to discover what cars mean to the people who own, drive, and love them. —EW

“What got you into cars?”

It’s a question I’m asked a lot. Unable to translate into a suitably small-talk-sized answer my decades of passion and fascination with speed, history, and engineering, I usually say, “I don’t really know, I just am.”

But if you were to corner me at a party and press me on the best way for a person to get interested in automobiles, I’d tell you that you should have been playing Gran Turismo 4 in 2006.

In the last Auto Anthro, I concluded that the joys of car culture are the same anywhere in the world. In fact, car culture offers the same joy as any culture: communitas, that feeling of being a part of something greater than yourself. It’s a feeling shared equally by Soviet-era missile engineers fabricating parts for their Moskvitches and 12-year-olds quoting Donut Media on voice chat. I also alluded to the concept of mechanical sympathy, the awareness that a driver is only one part of the complex mechanical (and, increasingly, electrical) systems of the car, and I suggested that somewhere in the connection between those two experiences was the final, magical piece of the puzzle that explains our fascination with cars.

That final puzzle piece can be found in the first place you’d think to look: underneath a Japanese game developer’s desk in the mid-1990s. I’ll explain.

The magnum opus of car-mad game developer Kazunori Yamauchi and his studio Polys Entertainment, (now Polyphony Digital) the original Gran Turismo launched in December 1997 for the Sony PlayStation. It went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide, becoming, at the time, the best-selling home console’s best-selling game.

Its story has become the stuff of legend. When Yamauchi first pitched “the real driving simulator,” his bosses at Sony turned him down. Undaunted, by day he and his hand-picked squad of 15 developers made two competent if uninspired kart racers under the Motor Toon Grand Prix banner. By night, they built what would become GT. And yes, in the five years it took to bring GT from concept to reality, they often slept under their desks.

Even in 2023, the sheer ambition of their creation is impressive. On PS1 hardware, they crammed in 11 fictional tracks and 140 fully licensed cars, when the same year’s Need for Speed II had just eight tracks and nine cars. The handling model incorporated different tire compounds, turbo lag, and weight transfer over elevation changes. Two years later, Gran Turismo 2 added mixed-surface racing and 410 more cars, and that was that.

In the 25 years since Gran Turismo‘s arrival, across seven mainline games and nine spin-off titles (ten, counting the motorcycle-focused Tourist Trophy), more than 90 million copies have been sold. No other automotive media has had more influence on modern car culture. Sure, the Fast and Furious movies are the six-billion-dollar elephant in the room, but now, as the cars of golden-era Gran Turismo eclipse that magical mark of 25 years, cars-and-coffee lots across the country are filling up with recent adoptees from the Japanese domestic market.

These aren’t just Skylines and Supras, either. The current fad for ’80s and ’90s iron has also swept up oddities like the Nissan Pao, Toyota Sera, and Autozam AZ-1—cars that made their original American debuts decades ago in Gran Turismo 4. They were admired then by the same people who are now taking their Bring a Trailer auctions to the stratosphere.

But the usual story doesn’t answer the question I always like to ask. Why? And, as a follow-up: How? Exactly what about maneuvering a pixelated RX-7 around Trial Mountain turns a person into a lifelong auto enthusiast?

Buckle up folks, it’s about to get anthropological.

In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, political scientist Benedict Anderson laid out his titular theory, a model for national identity that suggests any sufficiently large social group is, to some extent, an imagined experience.

For example, it is impossible for a Green Bay Packers fan sitting in Lambeau Field to know every other Packers fan in the venue personally. But when they look around and see tens of thousands of fellow Cheeseheads decked out in green and gold, or see other fans on TV when watching from home, or even don’t see them but know they’re there, that fan feels communitas.

An “imagined community” doesn’t mean a community isn’t real or isn’t meaningful, it just means its members must sometimes take for granted that it exists—usually because it does.

In the GT games, the main “career mode” experience had players buy a cheap, used car in order to win races so they could afford performance parts and faster cars, which granted access to higher-paying races. Career mode was only available to a single player at a time, and in the first four games, the best-selling and most influential ones, there was no way at all to play online with other enthusiasts around the world. Anderson’s imagined communities model can explain how this lonesome experience still provided communitas.

Not with other players. With the cars.

Human beings are such social animals that even our relationships with non-human objects teem with personification. I’m confident that at least some of you feel personally victimized by your printer. Cars, with their distinctive personalities and rich symbolic potential, are some of the most socially active objects around. That’s why we love them. Gran Turismo created a generation of gearheads by demanding its players develop a social relationship with its cars: imagined mechanical sympathy.

“Be careful going around the corner, as the car will swerve to the left on braking, making it unstable,” advises the intro text to one of GT1’s “license test” challenges. In 19 simple words, it set the players a challenge: To advance in the game, they must develop an intuitive understanding of the principles of weight transfer. Even if it was incomplete, the advice was one of a thousand nudges in the right direction that Yamauchi’s masterpiece made.

It may seem obvious now, but in 1997 it was pioneering: GT created the structure of a role-playing game, with its deep worldbuilding and statistical memorization, out of automotive knowledge. Being a car enthusiast made you better at the game, whether you were anticipating lift-off oversteer from a Toyota MR2 or saving your credits by forgoing the new R33 GT-R for a used WRX and a stage 3 turbo. And even if you didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of mid-1990s Japanese cars, GT was all too willing to teach you, with tutorials describing everything from the handling characteristics of the A70 Toyota Supra to the function of a flywheel, all in a pre-internet era of gaming.

Even the oft-maligned lack of modeled crash damage in the first four GT games worked toward this goal (albeit by happy accident—Yamauchi simply refused to incorporate crash damage unless it could be done perfectly). If the cars didn’t get beaten up, what was the point in a player getting angry, driving around the track the wrong way, and ramming the computer-controlled opponents head-on? And besides, even at age 6, 8, 14, or 40, could you really bear doing that to your Mazda Demio? You know, the car you won from the Sunday Cup, which inspired you to save up your credits in order to splurge on a big turbo and racing tires? It’s not like there were any actual consequences. You could always just restart the race. But that would just feel wrong.

Congratulations, player. You now care about cars. Welcome to the community.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Auto Anthro: How <em>Gran Turismo</em> created a generation of gearheads appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“Well, you may go to college / You may go to school / You may have a pink Cadillac / But don’t you be nobody’s fool.” — Elvis Presley’s “Baby, Let’s Play House”

You can’t tell the story of Elvis Presley without Cadillacs.

Thankfully, director Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis appreciates just how essential the Caddy was to the King. The Oscar-nominated 2022 film even invents the moment when a 12-year-old Elvis (played by Chaydon Jay) first started to fall for the elegant machine: while reading a comic book about his favorite character Captain Marvel Jr., he fantasizes about being a superhero himself.

The kind who buys a pink Cadillac for his mama.

Owning big, beautiful cars was one of the singer’s real-life ambitions that persisted into adulthood, becoming a preoccupation when Elvis drove a truck for Crown Electric Company, a Memphis business that he worked for in 1954. (In the film, the truck is a pastel green ’53 Chevy pickup.) Recalling that time in his life, Elvis said, “When I was driving a truck, every time a big shiny car would drive by it would start me sort of daydreaming. I always felt that someday, somehow, something would happen to change everything for me and I’d daydream what I would be.”

Elvis transformed that vivid daydream into reality. No one knows for sure how many Cadillacs he owned in his lifetime, but the number could easily be as high as 200 or more. It’s difficult to get an exact count because he gave them away like candy to family, friends, even strangers. He gifted Cadillacs to the founder of Sun Records Sam Phillips, his hair stylist, his valet, his karate instructors, his bodyguards. Elvis famously bought a gold-and-white Cadillac Eldorado for bank teller Mennie Person on a whim: after he saw the woman admiring his custom Cadillac limo outside Memphis’ Madison Cadillac, his favorite dealership, he brought her inside the showroom and let her take her pick of their inventory. This was not a unique event.

His mother Gladys recalled: “Elvis would hear us worrying about our debts, being out of work and sickness, and he’d say, ‘Don’t you worry none, Baby. When I grow up, I’m going to buy you a fine house and pay everything you owe at the grocery store and get two Cadillacs—one for you and Daddy, and one for me.’”

Dialogue between Austin Butler’s Elvis and Helen Thomas’ Gladys in the Elvis film echo that real-life exchange. When his mother worries about Elvis going on tour, he promises: “I’m going to buy you one of them pink Cadillacs, like you saw back when you was working at the hospital.”

She counters that she “don’t need no pink Cadillac,” and Gladys wasn’t lying. She had no license and didn’t know how to drive. These details did not concern Elvis, who was inherently aspirational; when he could barely afford a Coke, he longed to drive The Standard of the World.

His story, however, isn’t related to us by Elvis himself in his own biopic, but by “snowman” Colonel Tom Parker. Played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Hanks, Parker is the conman who alleged he “made” Elvis Presley but who was, in truth, a “blood-sucking old vampire.” In the film, Parker uses the Cadillac as a temptation to entice a young Elvis into signing with him, promising him “a family business” and a thousand Cadillacs for his parents.

“That first record changed everything,” Parker narrates, and sure enough, just a few moments later, we see Elvis rolling up to the newly purchased Graceland in a pink 1955 Cadillac Fleetwood 60 with his family in tow. (Later on, the long driveway leading up to Graceland will be lined with a profusion of fancy cars.) Technically, however, this was Elvis’ second pink Cadillac; though it never appears in the film, he’d driven his first Caddy on tour with the Blue Moon Boys, but that ’54 Cadillac Fleetwood 60 was destroyed when a wheel bearing caught fire, and Elvis had to watch his dream car go up in flames. He’d barely owned it three months. Elvis was devastated.

Elvis’ then-manager Bob Neal helped him buy his second Cadillac, which was blue with a black top, and Neal’s wife Helen proposed painting it pink and black. Art, one of Elvis’ neighbors from Lamar Ave, repainted it a color they’d dub “Elvis Rose.” When bandmate Scotty Moore wrecked the second Caddy, Elvis had it repaired and had the top painted white.

Maybe his love of eye-catching Caddies stemmed from the flamboyant superstar’s love of colorful comic pages. It’s worth noting, though, that the film actually gets the color wrong. The one featured in the film is too dark—more of a Pepto pink than the pastel bubblegum color of the real-life Caddy. It does, however, aligns with Luhrmann’s love of saturated color, and we concede to the director that it indeed pops on screen against Graceland’s pale facade.

It’s easy to see why Elvis loved his pink Cadillac so much. Bill Mitchell’s Cadillac design kicked off the 60 Special in 1938, and it initially introduced as a mid-grade model above the entry-level Series 69. The ’55 Elvis purchased got 250 hp from its 331-cu-in V-8 and four-barrel carb—an upgrade compared to the freshened ’54 just the year prior—and with those beautiful tailfins it could boast both style and substance. This Caddy was longer and lower, with a wheelbase 4 inches larger than an Eldorado’s, a new eggcrate grille, and a cushy, spacious, opulent interior.

Elvis didn’t just limit himself to Cadillacs. The man had a penchant for large, colorful cars: Lincolns, a ’62 Ford T-Bird, a ’71 Stutz Blackhawk. He loved American cars, but there were certainly exceptions to that rule in his collection, including a ’57 BMW 507, a Mercedes-Benz 600, a customized ’63 Rolls-Royce Phantom V, a ’75 Ferrari Dino 308 GT4, even a ’56 Messerschmitt KR200. The film couldn’t showcase every single one, of course, but it does feature Elvis’ yellow 1953 Chevy Bel Air, which he drives on tour with Hank Snow, then the white 1956 Cadillac Eldorado convertible that he had painted purple. (Legend has it Elvis crushed a bunch of grapes on the car’s fender and declared, “that’s the color I want.”)

The Eldorado gets the spotlight in the film when Elvis escapes Graceland in it and shows it off on Beale Street when he visits B.B. King and watches Little Richard for the first time at Club Handy. (Unfortunately, the film does not depict the time when Elvis shot his ’71 De Tomaso Pantera.) Of all the cars he owned, however, it’s the pink Cadillac that’s become synonymous with Elvis, a car almost as famous as the King himself. It lives on at the Graceland Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

Elvis’ impressive automotive collection became a signifier of his success, of how far he’d come, from Tennessee truck driver to international superstar living in glorious excess. Cadillac in particular represented ascendance for Elvis, a symbol of salvation from poverty for both him and his loved ones. Luxury cars were an intrinsic part of his unceasing ambition, and the pink dreamboat in particular has come to represent the singer’s legacy as well as his generosity. For Elvis Presley, a Cadillac was the American dream, clad in chrome.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post New <em>Elvis</em> movie is a buffet of The King’s Cadillacs appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’d be right at home cruising “The Streets of Philadelphia” or tearing up “Thunder Road.” First, though, this Chevrolet Chevelle convertible formerly owned by Bruce Springsteen is cruising to the Mecum Indianapolis auction block. An SS tribute car configured with a 396-cubic inch big-block engine and a Hurst on the floor like the Chevy in The Boss’ “Racing in the Street,” this Chevelle is a rock star in its own right. Will Springsteen’s ownership elevate it to a sale price beyond the value of similarly-built models?

If more than one bidder has an attitude of “No Surrender” and raises their paddle with a “Hungry Heart,” chances could be good.

“Celebrity cars are always a draw and almost always bring a premium. The estimate suggests that this Chevelle might bring two to three times or more than the market value this car would otherwise bring if not owned by The Boss,” says Hagerty Price Guide editor Greg Ingold.

“But here’s the thing: Simply being a celebrity doesn’t necessarily equate to big premiums; it usually helps to be a massive car person as well. While Springsteen is undoubtedly that—nobody can argue otherwise—it’s not as big a part of his persona as it is for Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, for instance.

“Bottom line: How high this car will go is anyone’s guess.”

The Chevelle (VIN #136679B400523), which will cross the block on May 20 at Mecum’s Indianapolis Auction, has a presale estimate of $150,000–$200,000. Mecum confirmed that the vehicle is not a factory SS 396. Even so, the estimate is well above values for the 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle 396 SS convertible, which come in at $70,200 for an example in #2 (Excellent) condition and $90,600 for one in #1 (Concours) condition. (To read a breakdown of how we evaluate a vehicle’s condition, and 1-to-4 the scale we use, click here.)

The Chevelle was owned by the legendary rock star from 1981 until Christmas 1987, when Springsteen gifted it to Toby Scott, who worked as a recording engineer or mixer on 18 of Springsteen’s albums. A prolonged rotisserie restoration that started in 1988 and wrapped up in 2020 included returning the Chevelle to its original LeMans Blue from the Midnight Black it wore during Springsteen’s ownership.

Shortly after its rebirth, the car was delivered to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in August 2020 and displayed with the same surfboard that The Boss would put in back whenever he headed to the beach in New Jersey.

The 396-cubic-inch big-block V-8 in the classic GM A-body produces 350 horsepower and is mated to a four-speed manual transmission. Though the Chevy featured in “Racing in the Street” wears Fuelie heads, the real-life car does not—small-block Fuelie heads won’t fit the big-block 396—and Springsteen acknowledged that bit of creative license in a 1978 radio interview.

Other features include a white convertible top, white bucket seats, a white side stripe, chrome Cragar SS wheels with BFGoodrich Radial T/A raised white-letter tires, power disc brakes, electronic ignition, MSD tachometer adapter, serpentine belt system with polished alternator and water pump, ceramic-coated Hooker headers, and dual exhaust. The Chevelle also has a period radio, which has been installed but is not hooked up.

It also wears Super Sport emblems, SS-style blacked-out grille and rear panel, and a double-domed hood.

The sale includes a signed letter from Springsteen regarding his ownership, a document from his mechanic describing the purchase of the car on Springsteen’s behalf, and a photo of the license plate that the car wore while registered to The Boss.

Advertised as “America’s most popular mid-size car,” nearly 455,000 Chevelles—in coupe, convertible, sedan, station wagon, and pickup (El Camino) form—were produced in 1969. Only one was owned by Bruce Springsteen.

While Springsteen didn’t make our 2022 Power List of Musicians whose ownership adds significantly to the value of a car, there’s no denying his presence in American culture. We’ll be watching to see if his provenance tacks on a decent premium to this Chevelle, especially considering its sentimental ties to one of his most iconic songs.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Bruce Springsteen’s Chevelle could be yours appeared first on Hagerty Media.

John Wick is a rarity in the modern movie landscape. Though it is a successful Hollywood franchise, there was no prior source media for the 2014 film that kicked off this action-film craze. The tale follows Keanu Reeves’ titular character, a legendary retired hitman who, while mourning the loss of his wife to cancer, suffers considerable indignity: The ignorant son of a Russian gangster kills his Beagle puppy, a gift from his late love. Adding insult to injury, the perpetrator also steals his car.

This premise isn’t the point, of course. In many ways this is a variation on the classic revenge flick trope, in which the protagonist sets out on a bloody path of vengeance. The movie won fans with its mix of beautifully choreography, over-the-top sequences, and Reeves’ dedication to tactical detail and gruff demeanor. He’s called “Baba Yaga,” the Russian folk version of the Boogeyman, for a reason. (Though Wick’s house does not, to our knowledge, grown gigantic chicken legs and walk around.)

At this moment, John Wick: Chapter 4 sits in the second slot of the domestic box office. That has us revisiting some of our favorite moments from the series, particularly Wick’s fondness for hot American metal. Check out John Wick’s impeccable taste in cars:

Mustang Boss 429

The main plot of the 2014 original film kicks off with Wick’s chance gas station meeting with Iosef Tarasov, played by actor Alfie Allen. Tarasov, emboldened by his status as the child of a Russian mob boss, takes a shine to Wick’s car—what purports to be a 1969 Mustang Boss 429. (Experts will recognize some errors in the bodywork, a lack of badging, and an automatic transmission,  but for the purposes of a suspension-of-disbelief action flick, it checks the box.) Tarasov plays up the tough guy act to intimidate Wick into selling, to no avail.

Instead, the problem child assembles a crew that marches on Wick’s home, kills his dog, and steals his Boss. Little did they know, they poked the wrong bear.

If it were real, Wick’s Boss 429 would represent one of just 857 that were pressed in the first of two years of production to homologate Ford’s 7.0-liter NASCAR motor. These monster ponies represented the high-water mark of non-Shelby ‘Stangs and were, according to many, underrated at 375 hp and 450 lb-ft of torque.

Chevelle SS 396

While visiting a performance shop belonging to Wick’s friend, we catch a glimpse of some tasty rides, including a Porsche 993-gen GT2 and a Gulf-livery Ford GT40. There, Wick takes delivery of his replacement ride, a 1970 Chevelle SS 396.

The Chevelle sees minimal screen time in the original film, receiving a stay of execution when Wick opts instead for a modern 5.7-liter Dodge Charger for his final assault on the Russians. But there is something fitting and sinister about that green-painted Chevelle—a custom hue that is too dark to be the factory Forest Green—rumbling through Manhattan that leaves an impression.

As with any car in this franchise, it’s best not to get too attached. The SS 396 becomes the tank that Wick rides to battle to recover his (also ill-fated) Mustang in the stunning opening sequence of Chapter 2.

Rolls-Royce Ghost (Series II)

After destroying some classics, John takes a well-advised break old metal and, for the rest of Chapter 2 he’s mostly seen on foot, riding public transit, and, at the very end, behind the coach door of a Series II Rolls Royce Ghost. While the Ghost is too new for collector value data, it might be the most suitable ride for the Boogeyman—at least one that looks dashing in a suit.

Range Rover (LP)

Car-wise, John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum is the low point of an otherwise excellent quadrilogy, but it isn’t without its vehicular merits. It also introduces the audience to Halle Berry and her pair of Belgian Malinois attack dogs to make up for its lack of large-bore V-8s.

Around the halfway point, Wick, Berry’s character, and the show-stealing pups escape into the desert aboard a second-generation Range Rover, the film’s only real automotive star. According to the wonderful Internet Movie Car Database, it is a ’95 model. These Brit rigs are treated as collectibles primarily among the top-condition examples (roughly $54,000–$68,000), but the Rangie in the movie looks to be more of a driver-condition beast.

1971 Plymouth Cuda

Baba Yaga returns to form in Chapter 4 at the helm of a menacing ’71 Cuda. Unfortunately, John Wick does John Wick things to the poor Plymouth. The critical Cuda scene takes place at night, so it isn’t immediately clear what’s lurking under the hood, but given the amount of criminally-sourced gold coins at his disposal, his track record for good taste, and the magic of prop acting, we’re wagering it’s the pricey 440 Six Pack or Hemi.

With the continual success of the Wick franchise, Reeves no doubt would hit another home run in a fifth installment. Maybe he’ll trash an AMX to round out his game of classic muscle-car BINGO (GM, Ford, Mopar, AMC). As it stands, in four outings, the Boogeyman has amassed an on-screen car resume to rival some of the greatest silver-screen stars.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Cars of <em>John Wick</em>: The Boogeyman and American muscle appeared first on Hagerty Media.