I think in the back of every car designer’s mind there is this desire to build a car entirely of their own design with no constraints from a studio chief, engineering package, or market survey to guide them. That itch for me was what got me into car design in the first place. As a kid I built Soap Box Racers, then as a young teen went on to design and build contest models for the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. A win in the Guild helped me land that dream job at GM. Even after working in the fabulous Corvette studio for years, the itch was still there.

I started to scratch that itch, innocently enough, by entering a Revell model motorcycle contest. I won the custom division with my 1/8 scale three-wheel design. This was back in 1973-74 when there were long gas lines and cars were only getting 12-15 mpg. I thought my sleek cycle car design would probably get double or even triple that in mileage. So the lure of possibly starting my own little car company became bigger than staying at GM Styling.

At that same time, I was working on the XP-898 experimental foam chassis car that Chevrolet Engineering was experimenting with. The concept was simple—basically build a top and bottom car sandwich chassis/body design like a surfboard and fill it with rigid foam. The Chevy prototype worked great and even had great crash protection. My light bulb went on, and I saw this as the method that a small manufacturer (me) could use to build cars without the multi-million dollar tooling costs. Chevrolet’s VP John Delorean’s light bulb also went on and he saw this same idea as a concept he could use for the car he was secretly planning. (Be sure to read a prior post on the XP-898, “Chevrolet XP-898: Inspiration for two unique designs.”)

I had also been working at the GM Tech Center’s Harrison Wind Tunnel on Chevy designs to lower their drag coefficients. So my next step was to do the same with my three wheel design. It was shaped like a wing, so I was a little afraid that it might try to fly at higher speeds. Also, I needed to find a place to locate a radiator. The first Honda Gold Wing water cooled 4-cylinder touring bike had just been introduced, so that was my engine of choice. I built a much larger 3/8 scale model this time. The guys running the tunnel were excited to run something different and ran it after hours. They even modified the tunnel base to accept a three wheel design. The results were all positive. It didn’t lift, the radiator would cool in the back of the fender, and our Cd was .31—not great, but not bad either.

At this point I made my big life change. After 10 years at GM design, I quit to follow my dream. I got married to Pat, someone who could put up with all of my car nonsense. I bought a duplex with a three-car garage in Costa Mesa, California and even convinced my brother and his wife to come out and help me. With the great help of my brother Lee, we applied almost every step that I had learned in the design process at GM to the three wheeler, that we now called The Phantom. This name must have stuck in my head for years, because later I saw a photo of me at about age 8 with a car I built with buggy wheels that looked like it came from a Little Rascals movie. On the side was painted a lightning bolt and the name Phantom Flash.

Using the 3/8 scale wind tunnel model as a guide, we scaled up full size drawings and made a full size three-dimensional buck to check entry, exit, vision, wheel turn and jounce, engine access, and basic appearance. Next came the buck for the full size clay model. For all these processes we used the identical rail and upright measuring systems used at GM for keeping accuracy from side to side. Costa Mesa was the perfect spot to do this project. There were race car builders, fiberglass shops, upholstery shops and classic car restoration businesses all within a few minutes of our three-car garage shop. It was easy to find people to help us make molds from the clay and cast our first body. This being a prototype, all the foam had to be fit into the body, shaped and then fiber-glassed to form the sandwich body design.

The fabrication included a widened VW suspension with disc brakes added and a 2-inch-thick sandwich steel firewall that separated the passenger compartment from engine, fuel, battery etc. This strong but lightweight wall also served as the roll bar. The steering wheel and instruments lifted up with the canopy top when it is raised. A heavy duty flex cable connected the steering wheel to the rack and pinion steering gear. Another unique feature was the covered headlights. The headlights were fixed in the body pointing straight up. The underside of the lids are mirrors, so when raised to 45 degrees they will project the beam forward. I also wanted skirts on the front wheels, but I also wanted as wide a track as possible. So, I put a Teflon strip inside the skirt bottom and hinges on the top. When the wheels turn, the tire lifts the skirt allowing the tire to turn outside the body width.

A great help came from Rich Straman, a fellow student from IIT (Institute of Design in Chicago). He graciously painted the Phantom Porsche Silver (twice) from his classic car restoration business in Newport Beach.

We first just made the body and painted it with no windows or engine—just a one piece body. This is what we took to the Chicago auto show. In Stage Two we opened the top and put in windows and interior. You could sit in it, but no engine yet. We showed this at the LA Auto show. Finally in Stage Three we put the engine in and all the mechanicals to make it a running vehicle. It still needs a Stage Four to make it more finished in many areas. The new heavy duty disc brakes were part of that. There is a Phantom II in Ann Arbor Michigan. I sold the original mold on eBay when I left New Jersey. Someone made a body and is putting it over a tube frame Chassis.

The paint was barely dry when we were asked to participate in a government test of various three-wheel car designs. They wanted to know if these new lightweight efficient vehicles would be safe to drive on the road. The dynamic driving tests were held at the Edwards Air Force Base in California on the space shuttle landing strip. Against a dozen other cars, we came out on top, with excellent handling, and stability, generating more cornering G-forces than many four-wheel cars.

After showing the car at both Los Angeles and Chicago auto shows, we started to get publicity in a few magazines. This led to a call from an ad agency that wanted to put the Phantom in a Texaco commercial with Bob Hope. The tag line of the commercial was that, “Someday your high-mileage car will be made of lightweight plastics made from oil.” The car was to break out of a giant oil drum, then drive across the desert and next to Bob Hope where the driver would turn out to be a beautiful girl in a silver space suit-like outfit. The catch was, they were worried the girl would drive over Bob Hope, so they wanted me to drive up to Bob. For this I would have to don a blond wig and silver space suit. When the car stopped, we switched places and the beautiful model would open the door. That was my 15 minutes of fame, suited up in drag.

The Jet Fighter design was started after the Phantom, but we realized that we had bitten off more than we could chew. It goes back to the original simple tube frame construction that we should have done in the first place. Had we done that, we might have actually had a little car company. We made a full-size space buck of this model and had a 1/8 scale model. But at this point we were all out of money and I had to find a real job. Subaru.

The Government testing was done by Paul Van Valkenberg. Paul worked for Chevrolet on their racing enterprises, and has written several books on race car suspension and handling. He wanted to test all the possible variations of three-wheel cars, but there were no front drive three-wheelers, so he made one out of a Honda Civic by replacing the back wheels with one in the middle. A real odd duck to see it driving around.

A group of execs left Subaru to try and start another car company based in China. They wanted to do the same thing: import a new car to the U.S. I got the job of designing the car, made up proposals, and got 50,000 shares of the new company for my effort. So what happened? GM bought the Chinese company and took over production. We were left out in the cold.

Today the Phantom is in my Arizona garage waiting for me to finish the restoration necessary to get it back into running condition. Perhaps this time it will be painted a Cadillac Pearl Red.

People who see it today can’t believe that it is almost 40 years old.

Thanks Ron, for graciously supplying photos and the history of this very significant car.

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Stage One photos, 1976

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Hemmings Blog has been posting installments of Michael Lamm’s Auto Biography. His fascinating account of his fixation with the automobile took Michael from Texas, to Portland, to New York and eventually to California. Few examples from the automotive spectrum of the day escaped his gravitational field.

This post features an excerpt, photo, and a link to the full stories found on Hemmings Blog. You’re going to want to collect the entire set.

Chapter One was featured on Dean’s Garage. It told the story of why hot rodding a ’32 Chevy wasn’t the greatest idea.

Chapter Two—Michael’s Favorite Hot Rod

You have to understand that I ran something like an automotive orphanage during those four years, 1950-’54, and while I know this sounds naïve and slightly crazy, my motivation had to do with rescuing cars whose fates were one step away from the wrecking yard. Without me, they would, each and every one, have been parted out and lost forever. So I was saving—or at least trying to save—these cars the way a missionary saves souls. It became something of a crusade. I realized early on that if I didn’t rescue these cars, no one else would. And to save them, I had to own them.

One of my absolute all-time favorite cars was a hot rod I somehow lucked into in 1951, when I was 15. One day it just showed up like a stray puppy: this real, genuine hot rod, not the botched job I’d made of my 1932 Chevy coupe. When I got it, the car consisted of a 1931 Model A roadster body mounted on a 1932 Ford frame. The owner/builder had Z’d the frame just ahead of the rear kickup. Fortunately for me, the car did come with 1940 Ford hydraulic brakes, 1934 Ford 17-inch wire wheels and a 1932 grille shell (but no radiator). The gas tank and battery stood in the trunk. The instrument panel came out of a 1941 Ford pickup, the steering wheel from a 1949 Nash and the veed windshield from a motor-boat.

Chapter Three—Back-row Classic

Whenever my auto buddy J.D. Cole and I drove over to the next town, Harlingen, Texas, we’d always go by Elliff Motors, a used-car lot whose back row recycled a steady stream of older, slightly offbeat makes and models. Mr. Elliff had an interest in scruffy cars, and he occasionally picked up strays that weren’t running but that he felt were too nice to part out. Those he’d park behind the back-row fence, out of sight to casual passersby but not to hardened car lookie-loos like J.D. and me.

One day I happened to be driving past Elliff’s alone. I stopped and walked onto the lot, checked out the back row and then strolled past the fence to revisit a homemade Model A boattail speedster that had been there the last time I’d visited. Sure enough, the speedster was still hunkered down in the weeds, but what caught my eye was a new addition, an apparition that, for an instant, I couldn’t believe I was seeing. Here, also knee deep in weeds, stood this huge, magnificent, extremely graceful sedan with long clamshell fenders and dull black paint and, thanks to the ads I’d razored out of old Fortune magazines, I immediately recognized it as a 1932 Cadillac. And there on the radiator stood this deal-changing emblem that proclaimed V-16!

Chapter Four—A Freebie ’34 Buick 

The Buick intrigued me. It was basically all there and, beneath that mantle of dust, looked good. I asked James whether he thought his dad might want to sell it. James had no idea, but he suggested we ask. So we walked directly from the shed into J.C. Dunn’s private office in the main building. I don’t believe Mr. Dunn had a secretary, but the man himself generously invited James and me to come in, and what impressed me was the size of his office and the fact that it looked so uncluttered and modern, totally unlike the Dunn junkyard and hodgepodge storage sheds.

I came to the point straightaway and asked Mr. Dunn whether he’d consider selling me the Buick. He drew a blank at first, but then he remembered the car, and he drawled, very slowly, “No, I won’t sell it to you, Mike, but I’ll give it to you if you can make it run. I put it in there during the war, and if you can drive the Buick out of that shed, you can have it.”

Chapter Five—’54 Hudson

Then one sunny afternoon in early September 1953, about a week before new-car announcement time, my high-school buddy, Larry Myers, came to me in study hall and told me he’d already seen next year’s Hudson, the 1954 model. “This one really is all new and different,” Larry assured me. Larry was Lloyd Lafond’s nephew, so he had the inside track.

I asked him, “Where’d you see it?” Behind Lloyd Lafond’s house, came the answer, in Lloyd’s private garage. “Okay, let’s go check it out right now,” I pleaded. This was serious, jumping-up-and-down business.

So after school, Larry and I went to Lloyd Lafond’s home, walked around back, and Larry flung open the garage doors. There it stood, this big, blue-and-cream, brand-new sedan, facing inward. My first view was of the rear. So far not so good. The car looked fat and finless. Fins were important in 1954. This new model had wimpy, after-thought fins on a broad-beamed backside, with a Ford-like, squared-off bustle.

Larry and I walked around to the front of the car. Ohmigosh, the front was even uglier than the rear. Hudson had again tried to copy Oldsmobile’s “fishmouth” grille, but this time it lacked any semblance of grace. It looked amateurish. And on each side of the new car, the stainless-steel fender slashes had Ford written all over them. If I hadn’t been such a macho, stoic high-school senior, I would have burst out in tears.

Chapter Six—From Hudsons to Beetles

I loved my Beetle, partly because it was so totally different from anything I’d owned before: air-cooled aluminum engine in the rear, four-speed transaxle, all-independent torsion suspension, quick steering, responsive handling, good gas mileage, and what I really admired was how well it was put together. Build quality was every bit as good as Cadillac’s, this at a time when Cadillac really was the standard of the world. Okay, so the Veedub had only 36 horsepower, but it was so willing and maneuverable that it actually felt peppy. I named my car Gregor Samsa, after the large bug in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (see how literary I’d become?).

Another thing that appealed to me was that the VW radiated the Reedian sort of anti-establishment counterculture. One thing Reed tried to pour into our spongy brains was not to accept the status quo; to question authority and society and to come to our own conclusions—not a bad pursuit even today.

Driving a VW in the late 1950s meant you were countercultural at best and a hippie degenerate at worst, and yet we owners observed a certain etiquette. For example, we’d wave to each other out on the road, a symbolic gesture that acknowledged a fellow counterculturalist. By waving, we were also congratulating ourselves for being, we thought, ahead of the curve – trendy, smart, cool, correct in our choice of automobiles and going a bit against the establishment grain. We were a cult, a self-selected select group, and being part of that group made us feel superior… I think there’s no other word for it.

Chapter Seven—First Dibs

I occasionally tuck my business card under the wiper blade of a car I’d like to buy. On the back of the card, I’ll scribble something like, “When you get ready to sell this car, please give me first dibs. Hang onto this card.”

Over the years, I’ve had three owners respond, one of whom was a little old lady here in Stockton. She’d bought a cranberry-colored 1953 Plymouth Cranbrook convertible new, and she’d taken meticulously good care of it until her nephew challenged a lamp pole at a local mall parking lot.

I’d left my card on her windshield five years earlier, in 1970. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given a 1953 Plymouth a second thought, but this convertible was so nice. It had the continental kit and just about every other option and accessory available that year, so I thought, What the heck; I’ll leave my card. Can’t hurt.

Nothing for five years, and then one Sunday morning in 1975, she called. “Do you remember that Plymouth convertible you left your card on some years back?” (No.) “Well, you wanted to buy the car back then, and now I’m ready to sell it, but there’s a slight problem. The car hit a lamp pole and crumpled the front end. Would you still be interested?”

Chapter Eight—Chrome Yellow Nash-Healey

My first problem with the Nash-Healey was the lean misfire. The twin Carter YH sidedraft carburetors just didn’t want to accept a lot of gas. So I had to get up as much speed as possible on downgrades and then feather the accelerator on the other side. Traffic behind me wasn’t thrilled.

That’s when I started to smell coolant. The temp needle hadn’t budged, which, to me, meant the gauge wasn’t working. But no matter, the engine was definitely heating up. About halfway between Fairfield and Rio Vista, the engine started to sputter, and then it simply quit. I knew there was plenty of gas in the tank.

I settled onto the shoulder just where Route 113 crosses Highway 12 and sat there for a few minutes, listening. I could hear steam rumbling inside the block, but no hissing. I got out and lifted the hood, and it was like opening an oven. The heat slapped me right in the face.

It was then that I noticed, for the first time, the wooden clothespin attached to the fuel line. That made it obvious that the Nash-Healey had suffered vapor lock before. Why people put clothespins on fuel lines to ward off vapor lock I have no idea, but it’s a common “cure” that’s never worked for me. Nothing to do, but sit with the hood open and wait for things to cool.

Read the rest of the excerpts on Hemmings Blog. Courtesy of Michael Lamm.

The actual top surgery didn’t take long, just an hour or two. I ripped out the headliner, lowered the windows and began torching. I left the windshield header intact but cut through the metal roof section just behind it, door to door, then proceeded around to the pillars, quarter panels and the section below the rear window.

What I hadn’t realized was that Chevys of that day contained an inordinate amount of wood in their body structure, and I kept having to put out little fires as my torch moved through various wooden parts that connected the roof to the main body. And that brought home another big difference between Fords and Chevys of that period: Fords used mostly steel body framing and Chevys (in fact, all GM cars) used wood, which made Chevy bodies considerably weaker than those of Fords.

Well, right after I cut and lifted the top off my 1932 Chevy, I jumped behind the wheel, started the engine, and began backing down the concrete apron in front of Miller’s Garage. As it happened, the car had been parked on the apron at an angle, so when the rear wheels rolled down into the street, I could sense the body torque slightly, and I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, that doesn’t feel good.”

Read the entire post on Hemmings Auto Blog.

Michael Lamm’s post on the “Chrysler” Streamliner created quite a response from many Dean’s Garage readers—clippings from Magazines, photos, and even a Jack Armstrong video that featured the car.

The gallery of images is from Geoff Hacker of Forgotten Fiberglass.

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Back in the early 1970s, I edited and co-owned a magazine called Special-Interest Autos. My partners were the principals of Hemmings Motor News.

As SIA editor, I regularly flew from California to Detroit to research articles and gather photos for future issues. In doing that, I’d typically drop by as many Detroit research facilities as time allowed. They usually included three or four libraries at General Motors (GM had 37 active libraries at the time), the Henry Ford Museum archives, the auto history collection of the Detroit Public Library, the AMA library and the Chrysler archives.

In those days, Detroit’s research facilities were open to just about anyone, and visitors were free to roam and browse at will. I could choose photos, and the car companies would nearly always make dupes for free and mail them to my office—very different from today.

On one such trip, I stopped by the Chrysler archives looking for pictures of experimental cars of the 1930s and ’40s. In a file of styling photographs, and I stumbled across a series of 8×10 glossies of a 1936 scale model that looked to me like a Bonneville streamliner. Interesting, I thought, and I tried to find out why this model was built, who made it and what became of it. No one seemed to know.

Then, about a month ago, I happened to be watching a movie called Speed. The movie, released in mid 1936, starred a very young Jimmy Stewart. The plot revolved around his work for a mythical car company. Stewart’s character had invented a new type of carburetor, and to test its performance, the company entered a car in the Indy 500 and also built a streamliner to set speed records at Muroc.

Some of the stock footage in Speed clearly came from Chrysler: scenes of assembly lines and executive offices. Also, most of the passenger cars in the movie were 1936 DeSotos, so apparently Chrysler Corp. had a hand in making this film.

More to the point, the significance of that streamlined scale model finally dawned on me. The clay must have been a study for the shape of the movie streamliner, a car called the “Falcon.” I have no proof, but the similarities between the 1936 Chrysler scale model and the 1936 Falcon are remarkable: the envelope body, the glass canopy and the large, single tailfin.

I’m not sure I’ve actually solved a mystery here, but I’d like to present the evidence as a possible theory. And I’d very much appreciate hearing from anyone who knows more about the connection (or lack thereof) between the Chrysler model and the movie streamliner. –Michael Lamm

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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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Marlowe from ALCHEMYcreative on Vimeo.

Photos and captions by Stan Mott

Around the world in three years. What? In a go kart?

The only recorded instance of a go kart being driven around the world was a circumnavigation by Stan Mott of New York, who drove a Lambretta-engined 175-c.c. Italkart (wIth a ground clearance of two inches) 23,300 land miles through 28 countries from February 15, 1961, to June 5, 1964, beginning and finishing in New York. Why did he do it? A bet over a cup of coffee! Read Stan’s entire account of his adventures in PDF format, published in Argosy Magazine, November, 1964. Reprinted here by permission. Thanks, Stan.

Surveying the terrain outside Quarzazate, Morrocco.

Gokart in rain-ravaged Cyclops cardboard body not fooling Bobby in Dover, England. Note: For those readers who no longer believe in photographs in this Photoshopped world, see genuine, non-retouched drawings:

“The story behind these drawings, as briefly as possible:  Back in 1961, gokarts were a worldwide fad.  Whenever I was stopped by police in Italy, a crowd gathered.  They always took my side and shouted the police down.  In France, the French considered me insane.  But, as they consider insanity part of life, and as I was alive, I had a right to drive on French roads.  Not so in England.  British customs impounded my gokart as soon as I drove off the Calais/Dover ferry.  A British gokart fan, whom I had befriended by mail, picked me up in his van and delivered me and gokart to London.  There we figured I could go on TV, gain public sympathy, and special permission to drive on English roads.  I got on the Oiff Mitchelmore TV show.  But no special permission.  The problem then was to get back to Dover, 70 miles east.  My British fan didn’t have the time.  I’d have to drive.  How? If gokarts were illegal, what about a teeny experimental car?  Ah!  I built a speedy dart thing out of a TV cardboard box, masking tape and grey paint.  I lettered “CYCLOPS” on the front and “EXPERIMENTAL–DANGER” on the sides for style, attached a Florida license plate an American sailor gave me in Naples for legality, and at 2 a.m set out.  All went well… until it rained.  Racing down the M20 highway, trying to reach Dover before daylight, water arcing off the tires, the body began to disintegrate.  The engine shut down.  A piece of wet cardboard had plastered itself on the Lambretta 175cc engine’s cooling air intake.  Over heated.  I ripped it off and waited.  The rain increased.  The engine cooled and started.  Off again, with pieces of the body flapping and ripping off.  The rain became torrential.  When I reached Dover, the body looked like a half eaten sardine.  I tried to hide in the ferry dock.  A bobby spotted me.  The game was up.  He sauntered over.  “I say, I saw this on the telly.  Good going!”  God bless you, sir, I thought.  “May I take a photo of you next to the gokart?”, I asked.  “Oh, quite.  I’ll pretend I’m writing you up.  Can’t approve of anything illegal, ha, ha!”  “No sir.”  Click!  I escaped on the next ferry.” From A Kart In Jolly England, April 1963 Karting World magazine.

On the “Right side” of The Wall, West Berlin, with Swiss traveling companion Christine having just escaped Soviet dominated East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, July 1962.

Taking a shortcut in Hannover, Germany, during the wet summer of 1962.

Local traffic outside Damascus, Syria, May 1963.

Racing gokarts with King Hussein of Jordan at Amman Airport, June 1963.

Asking directions outside Badlapur, India, en route from Mumbai to Poona, August 1963.

The Wright Brothers

When Orville and Wilbur Wright were designing their airplane, they were so involved with the project that they could hardly wait for morning to get back to work, and then would stay late at night trying to solve the issues that had kept man on the ground. They were deeply committed and involved—in love with what they were doing. Their airplane design was not a model of an esthetic styling study, but it nonetheless was a beautiful design in its delicate simplicity. They were perfectionists, knowing that all of the parts had to be designed to be perfectly integrated or the device wouldn’t work. A statement of minimalism. There was nothing on the airplane that didn’t have to be there for it to function.

Car design, where details, gestures, graphics, surfacing, stance, and proportion have an integrated quality that supports a clear, discernible theme are designs that tug heartstrings. It is a matter of personal preference as to what designs have this quality, but each of us have our favorites. You know the feeling—you round a corner and are suddenly eye to headlight with a stunning design that is clearly several cuts above the ordinary. Whatever group designed that car had vision, loved what they were doing, and were blessed with a system that allowed it to go into production.

There was a time where design was like that for all of us. Freedom of expression. Focused, uncomplicated creativity.

This artistic video is about a motorcycle builder in Los Angeles who loves what he is doing. He customizes old Hondas and makes them into European-style cafe racers. He’s intoxicated by the gratification of realizing his creative vision. I would imagine that Orville and Wilbur shared the same potent brew.

Cafe Cowboy

Cafe cowboy from benedict campbell on Vimeo.

Dustin Knott’s website: www.kottmotorcycles.com.

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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