The Derelicts

The Derelicts a short film by eGarage from eGarage on Vimeo.

The Pagani Huayra Story

The Inverted Bike Shop

The Inverted Bike Shop from Show Love on Vimeo.

Amongst the multitude of bike shops across Manhattan and Brooklyn, 718 Cyclery (www.718c.com) stands out for their unique approach to the business. This is the “inverted bike shop.”

Created by Show Love (www.showloveworld.com). Contact Peter or Chauncey at showlove@showloveworld.com. Music by The Album Leaf

What’s this all about? Read an earlier post on Dean’s Garage describing the car and stories from the ’70s. The thrill of victory—the agony of defeat.

Mike Parks bought this old C3 Corvette race car. What he bought was the original chassis, two small block racing engines, some spares, and a coupe body that was so bad there was no fiberglass that could be reused.

Race cars have logbooks. And in that logbook was the history of the car, it’s builder, it’s first driver, and all of the owners that came afterward. So Mike Parks, the current owner, was able to track down the driver, Ron Weaver, the builder, Pete Klain, and through Pete, myself, who crewed on the car in the ’70s, but more importantly, created the graphics. Mike, who lives near San Francisco, wanted me to recreate the paint scheme. What a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Brighton Ranch Paint and Body in Scottsdale, Arizona was recommended by a friend who is the curator of a car collection. In March of 2011 Mike came to Phoenix and met with myself and Jay Lewton, manager of the shop, to discuss the project. In September Mike trailered the car down and left it in my care at Brighton. Jay, by the way, was great to work with and very professional.

Recreating the graphics transported me back 36 years. It had me scratching my head more than once trying to figure out how I did it the first time. Man, this is complicated! But it was a great experience. These kinds of paint schemes aren’t in vogue any longer. I suppose the design is a throwback to graphic styles from the ’70s. The idea behind it is to create shapes on the car that complement and exaggerate the car’s form, lines, and surfaces, suggesting motion and speed.

The Klain Corvette is a very memorable car to many race fans from the period because of the paint scheme. The treatment was unique. One of the reasons it stood out was because no other competitor was foolhardy enough to spend so much effort on body decoration for a car likely as not to be damaged on the race course. But I was a designer at General Motors and thought I knew a thing or two about race car graphics. Pete gave me free reign, so his garage became my studio. This final paint scheme was the fourth version and most together version of the car’s graphics.

There are a lot of photos in the gallery showing the process of recreating the paint scheme, many with captions describing the action. The car came out great. It was never this shiny in 1977!

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Click for a gallery of scanned slides of the Klain Corvette from 1975 through 1978.

Watch 16-minutes of old school New England Dragway racing complete with its plumber’s pipe guard rail. You’ll hear long time track announcer Jan Landers, see fans packed to the rafters, and watch some of the coolest race cars of the era beating on each other while surrounded by the lush New Hampshire forest.

Burn On: Drag Racing Documentary (1973) from Brink Media on Vimeo.

I was in Oldsmobile 2 Studio when Ed Welburn was given the assignment to develop the Aerotech. The car was modeled in an out-of-the-way basement studio away from prying eyes. It is interesting to note that two years earlier when the Achieva styling model was being developed, Dave Holls decided to pull the clay out of the studio and put it down stairs so its development could be hidden until it was finished and ready for review. I think the Achieva clay was really starting to look good in the studio and Dave didn’t want Chuck or others meddling with it until it was further along. It came out pretty good and was the subject of a previous post on Dean’s Garage. I did the initial design of the car, full-size renderings, centerline and 3300 sections. But I wasn’t able to see the car through myself, as I was in Olds 1 and the Achieva was in Olds 2. The sculptors did an outstanding job surfacing the Achieva styling model. I wish I could remember the names of those involved.

The Oldsmobile Aerotechs were a series of experimental high-speed vehicles created between 1987 and 1992 incorporating the latest in performance technology with the intention of breaking multiple automobile speed records. The first such car was driven by four-time Indy 500 winner A.J. Foyt to a world closed-course speed record of 257.123 mph (413.788 km/h) on 27 August 1987 at the 7.712-mile (12.411 km) test track near Fort Stockton Texas. Prior to this, on 26 August 1987, the car had posted a top speed over a mile of 267.88 mph (431.10 km/h). The car consisted of a March Indycar single seat chassis enclosed in an extremely efficient aerodynamic body shell. It was powered by a highly turbo-charged version of the 2-litre Oldsmobile Quad 4 engine. The Aerotech body was designed by GM Design staff and was one of the sleekest vehicles ever developed for use on a high speed track. The design of the Aerotech included the capability of adjusting underbody sections to control the distribution of downforce, front to rear. Oldsmobile produced three versions of the original Aerotech to prove the capabilities of the company’s Quad 4 engine. Two were short-tailed (ST) versions and one was long-tailed (LT).

Subsequently, between 7–15 December 1992, another version of the Aerotech, this time powered by a 4.0 litre Oldsmobile Aurora V8 engine and fitted with lights, broke 47 speed endurance records including the 10,000 and 25,000 kilometre world speed records. Other national and international speed records ranging from 10 kilometres to 24 hours were accomplished by a team of drivers working 24 hours a day for 8 days. These records were also set at the Fort Stockton test track.

The Aerotech is also featured in a previous Dean’s Garage post entitled ’80s GMs Image Cars. There is another video of the car in that post.

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Documentary of the Development of the Aerotech

Video includes studio scenes of the clay model at Design Staff.

1992 Oldsmobile Achieva SCX—the last real Oldsmobile?

The 1992 Oldsmobile Acheiva SCX is the last real Oldsmobile in the sense that it was the last Olds to have an engine designed by Oldsmobile, the 2.3 Liter Quad-4. Only about 1,400 SCXs were made with the 190-hp Quad Four. This video is a road test of the car.

I created the basic body design for the Achieva Coupe when I was in Oldsmobile One in 1986. The story and photos of the development of the car is in a previous post on Dean’s Garage.

My 1992 SCX is for sale

I’m thinking about selling my 1992 Achieva SCX. I’m the second owner of this car since 1998. The first owner is a good friend and bought the car new as a GM employee working for Oldsmobile. It has been well maintained. Mobil 1 since 3,000 miles, never overheated. New clutch and shifter cables. Clear title, no accidents. Original paint, no rust. It has been in Arizona since 1995. It needs some paint work to repair a small parking lot ding on the front right fender. The bumpers and rear air dam needs to be repainted. The BFG Comp T/As have tread, but they are nine years old and should be replaced if the car is to be driven any distance. 130,000 miles. Contact me for more information.

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To celebrate Chevrolet’s 100th anniversary, we’d like to focus on the man rather than the car. Louis Chevrolet began developing his namesake automobile in 1911. The Chevrolet brand became an icon and a tremendous success, yet he, Louis, received little profit from it.

Although Louis Chevrolet was much more than a race driver, racing is what made him famous. In 1905, he beat Barney Oldfield and Walter Christie, the two best-known drivers of the day, at New York’s Morris Park in a 90-horsepower Fiat. In the process, Chevrolet set a track record of 68 mph which, in 1905, was like establishing the speed of light. Later that year, he beat Henry Ford and Walter Christie in a one-mile race at Cape May, New Jersey. Those two wins brought Louis Chevrolet instant recognition as one of America’s most skillful and daring race drivers.

It also brought Louis Chevrolet to the attention of William C. Durant, who had just founded General Motors. Durant hired Louis in 1909 to race Buicks, at the same time hiring Louis’s brother, Arthur, to be his personal chauffeur. Over the next two years, Louis piloted Buicks to an impressive list of victories. But because he crashed nearly as often as he won, he had the foresight to invent the rollbar.

In 1910, after Durant lost GM in a stock dispute, Louis Chevrolet began to develop a stylish, upmarket car for Durant’s comeback into the auto industry. That effort ended up being the first Chevrolet, introduced in Jan. 1913. The car boasted a veed radiator, six-cylinder engine, the first gearshift lever in the center of the floor and an emergency brake hidden under the dashboard. The Chevrolet automobile sold 10,000 units in three years (including 3,500 earlier Little models), earning millions for Durant and setting him up to again take control of General Motors. Durant rewarded Louis Chevrolet with $10,000 in Chevrolet stock.

But then Durant decided to bring out a less expensive version of the Chevrolet to compete with Ford’s Model T—a wise move but one that Louis Chevrolet didn’t like. He preferred to see his name on more prestigious cars, so he sold his stock to Durant and walked away. It didn’t take long for Louis to realize his mistake.

Louis Joseph Chevrolet was born on Christmas Day, 1878, the son of a Swiss watchmaker. His father taught him about clocks, watches and things mechanical and also instilled in him a high standard of precision. The family moved to France in 1886 and, as a teenager, Louis became enamored of bicycles. He built several, raced them, and then took a job in a machineshop in 1895.

Legend has it that the next year, American millionaire Cornelius K. Vanderbilt was touring France in his very expensive new car when it broke down. No one could fix it, but young Chevrolet stepped up and got the car running, whereupon Vanderbilt assured Louis that his future lay in the United States.

Louis subsequently became a mechanic for several French automakers, notably Darracq, Hotchkiss, de Dion Bouton and Mors. Mors sent him to Canada in 1899, and from there Louis went on to New York, where he got a chance to drive a Fiat race car. The pairing seemed natural, and Louis Chevrolet divided his time in New York between racing, selling and repairing high-end European cars.

After his father died in France in 1901, Chevrolet began to bring his family to the U.S., including his two brothers, Arthur and Gaston, both of whom joined him in racing. In 1905, Louis married. His wife, Suzanne, gave birth to a son, Charles, in 1906 and another, Alfred, in 1912. In 1915, Louis became an American citizen, but by that time GM and the Chevrolet automobile were in Louis’s past, and he’d moved forward in racing.

In 1914, he began building Frontenac race cars, a name that dominated the Indianapolis 500 for several years. All three Chevrolet brothers entered the Indy 500 in 1916, and Gaston won the race in 1920, only to crash and die six months later in California. Louis also modified a tiny Cornelian cyclecar and drove it in the 1915 Indy 500 but didn’t finish. Frontenac eventually branched out into designing and marketing performance parts for the Model T (Fronty Fords) and others.

That business prospered, but Frontenac lost a fortune trying to develop a passenger car along with Stutz. The Depression hit Louis Chevrolet hard, as did the death of his son, Charles, in 1934. He became a consultant to Chevrolet Division that year but had to leave in 1938 due to a stroke. Louis Chevrolet entered a retirement home in Florida and died on a visit to Detroit in 1941. All his personal papers, engineering drawings, photos, etc., were destroyed in a fire at his sister’s home in New Jersey. Louis and Gaston Chevrolet are buried side by side at the Holy Cross cemetery near Indianapolis.

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Larry Steinegger and Al Eshenbaugh teamed up in the late 50s and had other race cars before this one, which was their last. Their teamwork and friendship was solid and long lasting with Steinegger making the horsepower and Eshenbaugh pushing the pedals. This post includes a gallery of vintage photos from Phoenix, another of photos of the restored car, and two videos.

The team of Steinegger and Eshenbaugh is generally credited with bringing professional racing to the Phoenix area and they carried the Arizona banner at tracks throughout the nation. Steinegger was the builder and crew chief and Eshenbaugh drove the car at a lightning pace down the quarter mile drag strips around the country. They list many championship wins in their resume, and although not as young as they used to be, they are not through yet. They are preparing a car to run on the Bonneville salt flats.

One of the original nine Cacklefest cars, the Steinegger & Eshenbaugh AA/FD (1962-1964) comes with impeccable documentation as one of the quickest and fastest dragsters to hail from Arizona in the 1960′s. The driver was Al Eshenbaugh from Phoenix, Arizona. This car, with a 130″ Rod Stuckey chassis and a 392 hemi on 98%, saw runs of 6.98 at 208.00 during its era. In addition to winning no less than 15 Top Eliminators in a row at Beeline Dragway in Phoenix during 1964, it also took first place one year at the Arizona Fuel & Gas Championships and held the No. 9 spot on the Drag News Mr. Eliminator List for a period of time. They were Arizona State Champions in 1964 & 1965. S&E believed in function over form so the car was, by definition, no frills. This fuel dragster was built to race and that’s exactly what it did. From Cracklefest.

Vintage Drag Racing Photos

A couple of years ago I was privileged to become involved with the project of creating artwork for a body wrap using vintage photographs. Thanks to Brian Wilson of Clear Vision Printing and Graphics.

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History Repeats Itself

After selling the car in 1966, Steinegger and Eshenbaugh did their own things, including raising families. The car was just a great memory for them. It wasn’t until the California Hot Rod Reunion’s became the event of the year that Steinegger’s interest in drag racing was revisited. But even then he didn’t actively seek out his old car. That happened by fate.

In early 1999 an old friend of Larry and Al, Tom Walsh was checking out wrecking yards and body shops for treasures when he found a dragster chassis behind a small body shop in Higley, Arizona. He called Steinegger and wanted him to help identify the thing. Walsh thought it was their old car but wasn’t sure. On instinct he bought it and brought it home.

Sure enough it was the S&E Stucky car. The rear end had been moved and the front axle and torsion bar were gone. The chassis also had some “new brackets” and small block Chevy motor mounts. Not “needing” a dragster, Tom Walsh was looking for racing stuff to decorate his house and Steinegger had an old windowed 392 with a couple of rods out the side. The trade was made and Walsh had a coffee table, and Steinegger had his old dragster. Everybody was happy.

Steinegger then took the car to Paul Henderson’s shop and started thrashing on it. They had lots of pictures and memories to go by and also help from Clint Brown who built the original nose and other body parts. Steinegger is a self proclaimed ‘pack rat’ and was amazed at how much stuff for the car he had stashed away. He had Hemi parts, blower drive parts and the original steering wheel. Ray Agee even had the original push bar key and he donated it to the cause. A lot of elbow grease and machine work from J.T. Stewart and the thing came together. From Cracklefest.

Restoration Completed

This is how the project turned out. Pretty cool.

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Steinegger & Eshenbaugh Dragster running on alcohol

1958–1962 Phoenix Drag Racing Home Movies.

20 minutes from the way-back machine. Thanks to Paul Henderson.

Photo by Gary Goldstine, Monterey, 2009.

Porsche 908/3 LS at Monterey

Pagani Zonda R at Nuburgring

Jim Hall’s Chaparrals were a huge influence on myself and many other designers. Chaparrals were innovative, leading edge designs with mysterious connections to General Motors. Big-block starships.

I grew up in Riverside, California, and when the USRRC or CANAM came to town I was at the Riverside International Raceway taking home movies (you can watch a compilation of the movies I shot back in the day here). During the week leading up to race weekend, I’d drive through local motel parking lots to see if I could spot any race cars or trailers with Texas plates. Once I went over to DeAnza Chevrolet before they moved to the Auto Center and managed to watch (through the fence) the Chaparral team work on the cars in one of the garages. Pretty cool stuff for a car crazy teenager. In 1968 I traveled to Las Vegas with friends to watch the Stardust Grand Prix, and witnessed (through binoculars) Hall’s horrible crash with Lothar Motschenbacher’s McLaren M6B.

In 2005 I had the opportunity to visit the Chaparral Exhibit at the Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas. It’s well worth a visit, hollowed ground for Chaparral enthusiasts.

Petroleum Museum Gallery

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Ed Welburn drives the Chaparral 2.

Several years ago Ed Welburn had the opportunity to drive a Chaparral around the Tech Center. Had I known that was a possibility, I’d have stayed at GM and competed for the top spot.

Reprinted by permission from the Automotive Motorsports Foundation Journal, 2000
Carl Grimes’s Wild Wagon at Perryville, Arizona in the ’50s.

Carl Grimes’ Wild Wagon is a fascinating story of home-built hotrodding from the ’40s and ’50s. There are several galleries including construction details (rather scarry by today’s standards) of both of Carl’s Wild Wagon and his Fiat-bodied racing cars. Also included is a gallery of his Studebaker school bus transporter, maybe the first of its kind, and photos from a Perryville program.

In the early 1950s drag racers had very few performance manufacturers that sold parts, so they used components from existing vehicles to build their racers. Carl Grimes was a master at crafting early hot rods, and they were fast and reliable. The Wild Wagon is the only surviving example of his work. He raced it at Perryville airstrip near Goodyear, Arizona (possibly Arizona’s first drag strip) and throughout the southwest.

The basic components for the Wild Wagon chassis and suspension were from a DeSoto of the late ’30s. The rear end was from an Oldsmobile from the late ’40s, and the body was a 1948 Crosley. He fabricated the hood and fenders. The car had 3 engines—the first was a Cadillac V8 that was eventually replaced with a Buick V8, and then finally had an Oldsmobile V8. Various carburetor setups were used on all of these engines.

The Wild Wagon

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Carl was always a strong supporter for NHRA racing. In later years Carl was awarded the very coveted Wally Award for his achievements and support in drag racing. In 1991 NHRA also brought Carl and his wife Sara to the Nationals in Indianapolis to recognize him as the first entrant in the very first NHRA Nationals.

Carl’s Fiat-bodied race car

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Carl’s Transporter

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Carl was quite the innovator—he probably created the V8 Corvette before Chevy did. In 1953 he replaced the 6-cylinder engine with a Buick V8 in a brand new Corvette giving it unbelievable performance for its day. Carl’s Seventh Street Machine Shop & Garage in Phoenix, Arizona are where he created his racers. It was also the local gathering place for many famous local racers such as Bobby Ball, Jimmy Bryan and Clint Brawner, to name a few.

The Wild Wagon is restored and currently on display at the National Hot Rod Association Museum in Pomona, California where only the most significant drag race cars 
are featured.

Carl’s Garage

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Perryville Program

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