Classic American July 2014

Kenny Wayne

Shepherd

Duster

XTreme lee

aND his amaziNg DoDge collecTioN

challenger

Rusty 279 JULY 2014

relic?

1966 DoDge The UK’s Number 1 for 25 years

... or perfect patina!

www.classic-american.com

America’s ★CLASSIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE★

la gaNgsTer’s car reformeD & resToreD!

first sport

1956 Ford

Tech: how

s car

Thunderb

ird

to decode GM VIn co

600 mile

des

miracle

2008 Mus

tang

Compact Edsel

’69 69 Mach 1 Mustang

1961 Com et

Standard of the 1933 Caddy world The UK’s newesT

vintage lifestyle event No. 279 July 2014

£4.30

74

23

48

53

The UK’s newesT

vintage lifestyle event

32

67

Contents July 2014

Regulars

Features

6 12 14 16 18 20 81 84 86 89 92 94 96 98 105 111 122

23 1933 Cadillac V16 Town Sedan 28 1956 Ford Thunderbird 32 1961 Mercury Comet 36 1966 Dodge Coronet 42 VIN Decoding: GM 48 2008 Ford Mustang 53 Kenny Wayne Shepherd Collection 67 Event Report: ATOMIC 74 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1

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

36

28

classic-american.com 5

1933 Cadillac

Words: Mike Renaut Photography: Mat Richardson

Bob Lucas has a refreshingly relaxed attitude to his rare 1933 Cadillac. He uses it most days just like any other car and if something breaks he fixes it himself.

S

hould you ever feel the need to bring a town the size of Maidstone to a virtual standstill I can recommend using Bob Lucas’ 1933 Cadillac. Simply parking it outside the county council offices draws inquisitive crowds. Fortunately, Bob is more than happy to

answer questions and show folks around his car.

Anyone who wants to sit behind the wheel only has to ask. Eventually I manage to drag Bob away and enquire if he minds so many people touching his rare classic. “I don’t worry about it – it’s a car,” laughs Bob, “I let kids climb on it if they want to

stand on the running boards. When we’re done here I need to do some shopping so I’ll just stick it in the multi-storey car park. I buy two tickets and park it across two spaces – it’ll be fine.

“It goes out in the rain, but I try not to get it muddy because it takes six hours to get ❯❯

classic-american.com 23

everything clean. There’s no problem using it every day, it’ll cruise for hours at 75mph.” Bob is no stranger to American cars and reels off a long list of desirable motors he’s previously owned, I didn’t catch them all but three GT500 Mustangs, a GTO, an AAR ’Cuda, several Lincolns and a Buick 455 Stage 1 are good going.

Bob bought the Cadillac in 2010: “It’s not my first Thirties car, I had a 1937 Triumph Dolomite and wanted a stable mate for it. I’d gone to Aberdeen to buy a 1937 Jaguar SS the owner had described as being in concours condition; when I saw it the Jag was anything but. However, he had a collection of cars and this Cadillac caught my eye.” The Cadillac looked great but it didn’t sound so good.

“Mechanically it was a dog,” laughs Bob. “We did a quick run around the block and I later realised that was as far as it could have driven, but I just had to have it.”

Bob’s Cadillac is a 1933 five-seater Town Sedan on a 140in wheelbase, with a body by Fisher. It’s engine number 604 of the V12 cars built that year and has a manual three-speed gearbox. Paperwork that accompanied the car shows it was ordered on May 8, 1933, was originally painted classic blue and shipped to Cadillac’s New York branch one month later.

The price of the 4980lb car would have been around $3095.

The Cadillac was originally painted Classic Blue.

Dealing with depression

At the time Bob’s car rolled off the production line Cadillac was fighting for sales against many rivals. Errett Lobban Cord (whose empire included Cord and Auburn) was claiming his Duesenberg as the ‘world’s finest car’, while Reo and Stutz were also having a stab at the luxury car market. The growing recession would kill some off, but Ford’s Lincoln V12 and Chrysler’s Custom Imperial Eight were built by companies large enough to weather the storm.

Cadillac’s biggest threat actually came from Marmon who built glorious V16 cars with alloy bodies and a certified 100mph-plus top speed, but Howard Marmon’s car production sadly wouldn’t survive the Great Depression.

Packard also built a V12 that had somehow turned a $7 million loss in 1932 into profit for 1933 and Rolls-Royce was also taking a share of the rapidly decreasing market too. Cadillac could not afford to sit idly by. Things had seemed much rosier when Henry Leland became director of the Cadillac Automobile Company in August 1902. The name came from Le Sieur Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, who in 1701 founded ‘the town on the strait’ or ‘la ville d’etroit’. The ‘strait’ being the water that separates modern Detroit from Windsor, Ontario. The first Cadillac cars borrowed heavily from designs Leland had shared while working with Henry Ford, but

were priced above those of Ford, and arguably boasted superior build quality.

In 1909 the Cadillac Motor Car Company was acquired by General Motors at a cost of $4.5 million. GM had been in financial trouble and profitable Cadillac now kept it afloat. The first Cadillac V8, owing some of its design to a previous De Dion-Bouton engine, appeared in 1914 and the existing four-cylinder engine was phased out. In 1915 over 13,000 Cadillacs were produced – exceptional sales for a car costing over $2000. Along the way Leland, with son Wilfred, would start the Lincoln Motor Company (later forced into receivership and sold to Ford in 1922 after a government clerical error presented them with an excessive tax bill) and later design rear-engined and four-wheel drive cars.

Seeing a gap between the most expensive $2000 Buick and the cheapest $3000 Cadillac models, in 1927 GM introduced a $2500 LaSalle division – which shared Cadillac’s engines and prestige. In 1928 Cadillac/LaSalle sold more than 50,000 cars and 1929 saw chromium plating, safety glass and synchromesh gearboxes added. Times were good, right up until late October when the New York Stock Exchange failed.

Just weeks after the crash, Cadillac unveiled its 452 chassis housing the first V16 engine built in regular production quantities; a 452cu in ohv motor that produced 175bhp.

Accompanying it was a new V12, its announcement held back to allow a bigger

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 secret cache of images that he had lost for decades…

Words & photography: Steve Miles

H

ello again! Here comes another lot of grotty old mono photographs in this, feature the second, drawn from what we’re calling the ‘lost files’.

This time I’m looking at cars of the later 40s – from the resumption of private car production after the war up to 1950.

If you haven’t put two and two together, let me explain – because these pictures were effectively missing from my negative files, the spread of vehicles included is quite random, and a bit odd!

There are about 400 pictures all told, and there’s quite a bias towards older cars; I remember there being a whole folder of old 120 rollfilm negs of prewar and just postwar cars, which is now missing, which accounts for the number of these that I now have to share with you.

I’m delighted to have found the prints,

1946 Buick Super

having thought that they were gone for ever, and I hope you’ll enjoy this taster of them.

The immediate postwar years saw an enormous surge in sales in the USA; the economy was booming, perhaps surprisingly to us here in the UK where ours was in real trouble after the war, and the public were hungry for new cars with all production having stopped in early 1942.

The first cars available were warmedover 1942 models; the factories had been tied up with war manufacture and there had been little or no time to develop new cars for the resumption. Studebaker was first with an all-new car for the 1947 model year; the rest didn’t have something new until 1948 or 49. In some cases, the carry-over models remained unchanged until there was a new car so

that you can’t separate the ’46-’48 cars visually; others did make detail changes that distinguish each year’s production.

And it was a time of innovation.

Oldsmobile had introduced the first automatic transmission in 1940, the same year that Packard fitted the first automotive air conditioning systems, but it was in the late 40s when other manufacturers got onto those bandwagons.

After the war Chrysler designed the first power steering system, and fitted the world’s first disc brakes on the ’49 Imperials, even if they turned out to be a bit of a disaster! And we saw power window lifts, the first ones hydraulic in operation, and power seats, for the first time. The American car was turning into the vehicle we all recognise today.

GM had introduced new bodies for 1942 with long swooping lines, and they managed to still look very modern until the all-new ’49 cars were ready. Buick as ever relied on its powerful valve-in-head straight eights, 248 cubic inches in the low price Special and this Super, 320 cubic incher in the 129in wheelbase Roadmaster. This car was for sale at Portobello Motors in 1967 – for £75!

58 classic-american.com

1946 Mercury Series 69M

Mercury had been introduced in 1939 to plug the gap between Ford and Lincoln, and proved a runaway success – think Mustang in later years!

For ’46 there was this slightly-altered 1942 car, powered by a bigger 239cu in version of Ford’s flathead V8. I came across this rather scruffy convertible parked outside a St Ebbe’s apartment block around 1963.

1946-8 Dodge Custom

The first postwar Mopar cars were produced from 1946 through 1948 without change, so I can’t put a firm year on this Club Coupe, snapped in Worcester Street, the junction with George Street in the right background. Like GM, Chrysler had introduced all-new cars for ’42, and only tidier grilles distinguish the postwar from the prewar versions. The 230cu in L-head Six had been new for ’42 too, and would only disappear in 1959.

1946-8 Plymouth Special DeLuxe

The same applies for Plymouth – ’46 through ’48 cars are inseparable.

This is a really old pic, taken in St Giles’ in 1960; another five-window Club Coupe. Plymouth kept the smaller 218cu in Six that it’d shared with Dodge before 1942 until 1954 when it too went to the 230cu in version. There wasn’t a lot of imagination used in model names back then – most of the cheaper brands offered ‘Special’, ‘DeLuxe’ or ‘Custom’ or a combination of the three!

1947 Cadillac Fleetwood 60 Special

You can tell the difference between a ’46 and a ’47 Cadillac – spot the parking lights! They were among the first with a new postwar car, for 1948, but this is the ’47 model in metallic maroon, in Summertown, Oxford. I bought a PB series Vauxhall Velox from North Oxford Garages over the road there, in 1969; this pic is a bit earlier, about 1963.

1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster

Another prewar carry-over – Chevrolet changed the grille every year, and then came out with a new car for ’49. Another really old picture, from 1960 or 61, on Woodstock Road near the Radcliffe Infirmary.

Chevy offered three lines – Stylemaster was the cheap one, Fleetmaster a bit pricier, and Fleetline were the two fastback cars.

The Stovebolt Six was already venerable, introduced in 1929, and would soldier on until 1962.

1948 Buick Special

Still clearly the prewar body but with a new grille, Buick was still selling cars in the UK on the back of royal patronage although this is a US-built LHD car. Three series were on offer: Special on a 121in wheelbase and Super on a 124in chassis both with the smaller 248cu in straight eight, Roadmaster sat on a big 129in chassis with the 320cu in engine; Century, the prewar mid-price car had been dropped but would be back in 1954.

classic-american.com 59

1965 mustang & 1955 Buick Century

On sale: august 21

Next

Month 36page

Free

Supplement

1967 Ford galaxie

Hemi road runner

Indy Champ Kenny Brack nash Healey

1971 Cadillac

1958 DeSoto EDITOR

Ben Klemenzson bklemenzson@mortons.co.uk DESIGN

Michael Baumber CONTRIBUTORS

Huw Evans, Richard Coney, Steve Havelock, Will Shiers, Matt Richardson, Paul Bussey, Nigel Boothman, Mike Renaut, Tony Oksien, Richard Heseltine, Jim Maxwell, Douglas McPherson, Steve Havelock, Steve Miles, Neal Reed

DIVISIONAL ADVERTISING MANAGER

Sue Keily skeily@mortons.co.uk ADVERTISING

Sophie Brown slbrown@mortons.co.uk Tel: 01507 529416

Dan Savage

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR

Nigel Hole

EDITORIAL ADDRESS

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER

WEBSITE

Paul Deacon

CIRCULATION MANAGER

Tim Hartley

MARKETING MANAGER

122 classic-american.com

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

CLASSIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE, PO Box 99, Horncastle, Lincs LN9 6LZ

Steve O’Hara

Julie Brown

Craig Lamb

Nicole Appleyard nappleyard@mortons.co.uk 01507 529576

GROUP PRODUCTION EDITOR PUBLISHER

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Charlotte Park cpark@mortons.co.uk

www.classic-american.com GENERAL QUERIES, BACK ISSUES & PRIVATE ADS

01507 529529 24hr answerphone, help@classicmagazines.co.uk www.classicmagazines.co.uk

ARCHIVE ENQUIRIES

Jane Skayman jskayman@mortons.co.uk Tel: 01507 529423 SUBSCRIPTION

Full subscription rates (but see page 20 for offers): (12 months 12 issues, inc post and packing) – UK £50.40. Export rates are also available – see page 20 for more details. UK subscriptions are zero-rated for the purposes of Value Added Tax. DISTRIBUTION

COMAG, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QE. Telephone 01895 433600 PRINTING

William Gibbons & Sons Wolverhampton

Independent publisher since 1885

Member of the Professional Publishers Association

Having trouble finding a copy of this magazine?

Why not just ask your local newsagent to reserve you a copy each month

ON SALE DATE NEXT ISSUE August 21 © Mortons Media Group Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publisher.