Classic American August 2014

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Contents August 2014

Regulars

Features

6 12 14 16 18 20 80 87 90 92 97 100 106 112 119 130

22 1969 Plymouth Hemi Road Runner 28 1955 Buick & 1965 Ford Mustang 35 1958 DeSoto Adventurer 41 1971 Cadillac Coupe De Ville 46 1949 Plymouth 50 Nash Healey 54 Kenny Bräck 61 American Speedfest Brands Hatch 67 1967 Ford Galaxie 73 AACI Summer Nats 84 Advertiser Profile 102 Can Am show

News Letters Tony Oksien Across the Pond From Here to Obscurity Subscription Offer Tex Trubshaw Drive Buy Back Issues Reviews Discoveries Club News Events & Cruises Service Directory Private Classifieds Next Month & Credits

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Third Time’s The Charm

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Owner for a third time: Jim Wilson.

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Plymouth Hemi Road Runner Photography: Jonathan Fleetwood

We asked Jim Wilson, the owner of this extraordinary Hemi Road Runner, to explain how he ended up buying and selling it, not once, not twice, but three times over a 32-year period…

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he definition of a muscle car is accepted as being a mid-size, base model two-door sedan, with a big engine… Nothing epitomises that automotive statement better than the Plymouth Road Runner, introduced for the 1968 model year. Plymouth already had a performance car in the GTX, but wanted to go back to muscle car basics with a car able to run a 14 second ¼ mile, but which cost less than $3000.

In a great marketing deal, Plymouth paid Warner Brothers $50,000 for use of the Road Runner cartoon character, then spent an additional $10,000 developing the ‘beep beep’ Road Runner sound for the horn. The initial cars were

very basic: manual steering, unassisted drum brakes, manual gearbox (no console, just a rubber boot for the gear lever), bench seats, rubber mats (no carpets) and a 383cu in V8 rated at 335bhp, in a Belvedere based 2-door pillared sedan. There was however the optional engine in the shape of the mighty 426 Hemi.

The Road Runner was a huge hit, selling about 45,000 units in the first year, rising to 85,000 cars in 1969, their most successful year, and arguably the best looking Road Runner of all.

Nearly all were equipped with the 383 engine.

Less than 1% of production were ordered with the maximum performance 426 Hemi engine.

The car you see here is one of those. In 1969 just 187 Road Runner Hardtop’s were built with the

426 Hemi engine and 727 automatic transmission – the best package for a street bully and weekend drag racer.

The ‘Hemi’ was rated at 425hp but was generally accepted to be over 450bhp in its standard configuration. This engine put a bogstandard Hemi Road Runner into the mid-13’s in the quarter mile, with a terminal speed over 100mph. The 426 Hemi has proved to be one of the best and most powerful engines of the muscle car era, and for 50 years one of the most successful race engines the world has ever seen, beginning with NASCAR and Super Stock, through Pro Stock, and still used today producing thousands of horsepower in Funny car and Top Fuel dragsters. ❯❯

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Italian styling, American running gear and British engineering made for a compelling roadster.

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The Nash-Healey sports car aimed to combine American beef with British sports car savvy and even Italian styling panache; in theory it was a great idea, in practice… well, Richard Heseltine explains…

ometimes it’s the simplest ideas that work best: take the meat and gristle of American running gear and garnish it with Italian style and European handling finesse – hey and indeed presto, you have something along the lines of the car pictured here – the Nash-Healey.

It’s a winning combination on so many levels, and one that is as common today as it was back in the Fifties. However, regardless of

Pinin Farinastyled coupe in Turin in 1953.

marque, almost all such ‘hybrids’ fail to last the distance. Some tank for fairly obvious reasons; they were too leftfield to succeed.

A fair few simply don’t offer anything out of the ordinary to tempt punters away from more exalted exotica. Others, however, come close to greatness, but their makers’ blindly optimistic, failure-is-impossible business model gets in the way.

Most cars of this type are born in much the same manner: an enthusiast decides to build

his dream machine and ropes in others to help realise his vision. Either that or they’re a do-itall-myself creative genius, although the latter archetype is greatly outnumbered by the former. In the case of the Nash-Healey, the central characters behind this intriguing Italian-styled, British-designed and Americanfunded machine were major players. It’s just that it was too bold and too expensive to succeed in its intended marketplace.

To understand the car’s place in the world, you have to take into account that it came

about by chance. Donald Mitchell Healey was both a gifted sportsman and a gifted engineer, his competition successes including outright honours on the 1931 Monte Carlo Rally and the following year’s Alpine Trial. Away from driving, he held several motor industry posts, rising to become technical director at the Triumph Motor Company shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. However, at the end of hostilities, ‘DMH’ decided to go it alone. The result was a raft of Riley-engined products under his own name including the skimpy, cycle-winged Silverstone sports car. Results were soon garnered in motor sport, too, with class wins on the 194748 Alpine rallies and in the ’48 Targa Florio and Mille Miglia just for starters. There was, however, one slight problem: in the immediate postwar years, the mantra ‘export or die’ was seared on to the collective consciousness. Supplies of raw materials were scarce and the British economy was precariously balanced, so earning muchneeded foreign currency such as Yankee dollars was paramount.

Healey had toyed with offering the Silverstone model with Cadillac V8 power, one such car having already been converted by fellow racer/manufacturer Briggs Cunningham.

The plan came to naught as General Motors wasn’t receptive, but the idea of an AngloAmerican hybrid was never far away. It was while on a business trip to the US aboard the Queen Elizabeth in 1949 that Healey first encountered George Mason, the president of the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation. Both shared a keen interest in photography, Healey displaying a fascination for Mason’s new 3D camera; by the end of the voyage the duo had struck up a deal whereby Nash engines would be dropped into the Silverstone.

Except that scheme came to naught. Instead, a new car emerged, with a fully-enclosed body and a 3.8-litre straight-six, equipped with dual carbs and a reworked cylinder head. The boxsection steel ladder-frame chassis was essentially a widened and beefed-up Silverstone item. The front suspension was also lifted from the same car, comprising coil springs, trailing arms and an anti-roll bar. The rear end was suspended by a beam axle located by a Panhard rod, but with coil springs rather than the Silverstone’s leaf springs. The prototype Nash-Healey took an impressive fourth place overall in the 1950 Le Mans 24 Hours, the first production car debuting later that year at the Paris Motor Show.

Early examples featured aluminium coachwork by Panelcraft Sheet Metal of Woodgate, Birmingham, options included

Nash-Healeys under construction in the Donald Healey Motor Company’s Warwickshire factory.

overdrive and leather upholstery. When shown at the Chicago Auto Show in February 1951, expectations were high. Mason desired a more youthful image for Nash and hoped that this new roadster would confer precisely that.

It didn’t. With a launch price of $4063, it was more expensive than most contemporary Cadillacs. Potential customers also struggled to get past the Nash badge while marque dealers viewed it as an unnecessary distraction. Mason was also less than enamoured with the car’s styling which had

Odd-looking roadster Nash-Healey placed eleventh in 1953 Le Mans 24 Hours.

reputedly been penned by Healey himself. Just 104 roadsters were made before Mason demanded a makeover.

During the Fifties, it wasn’t uncommon for American manufacturers to look to Italy for assistance with either styling cars or building one-off show queens. Nash was no different, roping in Pinin Farina to inject a little flair into its rather dowdy line-up. Not that the Turin firm made much of an impact other than to expertly refine the Healey’s slightly slab-sided outline for 1952. The new, heavily reworked body featured a lower windscreen, more curvaceous rear haunches and vestigial tail fins. Altogether more striking, however, was the adoption of Nash’s inset corporate grille/headlight arrangement. The restyled second-generation edition broke cover at the 1952 Chicago Auto Show but its lofty price tag remained a stumbling block.

Not that Nash would ever have made any money of its halo product. Indeed, it lost around £3000 per car: Nash sent drivetains to ’Healey’s Warwick facility; Kenosha, Wisconsin, completed rolling chassis then were sent to ❯❯

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HEsRE OVTEhR e lost file Steve Miles’ ever popular Over Here images of American cars captured on the streets of Britain in the Sixties is back after the discovery of a cache of images that he had lost for decades…

Words & photography: Steve Miles

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he third outing for these newlyrecovered pictures, and we’re moving on to cars from the Fifties.

I told you last time that the balance of these photos is pretty odd; there are a lot of really early cars, from the Thirties to the early Fifties, but then there seems to be a bit of a spread – a smattering of later Fifties stuff and some early Sixties.

Then there’s quite a bit of late Sixties, even early Seventies. These are pictures that I took as I began to use colour film.

I never did try to sort and file any colour negatives, so again these are not included in the regular ‘Over Here’ files, but I’ve now included them among the ‘lost files’. For now, I’m showing you a

selection of the lost 6x6 negatives, cars up to about 1953, plus a few of the odd later ones that had also escaped, how I don’t know!

The early Fifties continued the astonishingly rapid evolution of the US car which had really begun just before the war with the introduction of the first automatic transmission and sleeker, allenveloping bodies. By about 1954 all the convenience options we take for granted now were at least being offered – power seats and windows, self-seeking radios, self-dipping headlights, air con, cruise control – albeit in rather crude forms.

The shapes had continued to change too – even the suggested shape of a

1951 Cadillac 62 series convertible

separate rear fender was disappearing, and lines were becoming long and low and wide, to reach their ultimate expression by the end of the decade.

Here, right-hand drive versions of many US cars were still relatively commonplace, many of them as ever Canadian-built to take advantage of the lower import tariff from Commonwealth countries.

The cars in these pictures are, as always, just someone’s daily transport, mostly regarded then as expensive ‘old bangers’ that no one wanted. One or two look a bit better cared for – the ’52 Packard had clearly just been resprayed – but most of them are distinctly on the scruffy side. I hope you like them.

Clean, solid and straight even if the door window is badly cracked, cruising around Mayfair somewhere in about 1963 or ’64; black with a rather faded tan fabric top. The ’51 Cadillac still had the new ohv 331cu in V8 introduced for the ’49 models, and it was the last year for the cut-price (well they did cost under $3000) manual shift 61 series sedan and coupe.

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1951 Ford Custom Victoria hardtop coupe

For ’51 Ford continued the ‘shoebox’ body from 1949, with a new grille and bigger tail-lights, in two series, DeLuxe (six-cylinder) and Custom (V8). The hardtop coupe was new for ’51 and only available as a V8 – this grey-over-metallic-blue hardtop was sat in the snow and semi-darkness in a secluded corner of Oxford’s one-time canal basin in 1963.

1952 Chevrolet Special Styleline four-door sedan

The ’52 Chevy was still based on the new-for-1949 GM A-body, and still relied on the venerable stovebolt Six: 216.5cu in for manual cars or 235.5 for those with Powerglide – and the auto ’box actually changed gear on its own now. The Special was the low-price car, DeLuxe the better-trimmed choice – only a single DeLuxe Fleetline coupe was still listed in the fastback style. This 10-year-old dark blue sedan parked in St Giles’, Oxford.

1952 Chrysler Windsor DeLuxe four-door sedan

Black, RHD, UK-delivered, still tidy and clean and parked in a Mayfair square (Eaton Square? I think so) in around 1963. Chrysler played all sorts of games with its export cars, but this is a ‘proper’ Chrysler.

Windsors still had the old 250cu in sidevalve Six; Saratoga, New Yorker and Imperial (not yet a separate make) the 331cu in hemi-head V8.

1952 Hudson Hornet four-door sedan

The opposite side of St Giles’ from the Chevy above; two-tone blue and RHD again. Hudson had been among the first with a new post-war car in 1948, but by now the ‘step-down’ body was looking very dated.

Cheapest Pacemaker had a 232cu in L-head Six, Wasp a bigger 262cu in version, both on a 119in wheelbase; Hornet sat on 124in and had exclusive use of the race-winning 308cu in Six. The Commodore Eight’s side-valve straight eight was smaller at 254cu in!

(1952) 25th series Packard 250 convertible

Packard still referred to its cars by series; 25th more or less corresponded with a ’52 model, only slightly changed from the 24th.

The 200s were the low-price sedans, 250 offered a mid-price hardtop and convertible; mid-price sedan was the 300 with top model the Patrician 400. All had super-smooth sidevalve straight eights, 288cu in for 200s and 327cu in for the rest. Resprayed in yellow and snapped in Hythe Bridge Street.

1952 Studebaker Champion DeLuxe four-door sedan

In 1952 we should have seen the glorious new Loewy-designed cars, but development delays led to a last revision of the 1947 body; Studebaker was 100 years old, having begun by building horse-drawn wagons in 1852.

Champion had the L-head Six, 169.6cu in, Commander the little 232cu in V8, and the top price Land Cruiser sat on a 4in longer chassis with a 119in wheelbase.

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