This month we bring you the first of a new monthly column devoted to the many racing barn finds and...
The Berkeley Coachwork Company of Biggleswade was England’s top manufacturer of trailers in the 1950s. Company topper Charles Panter decided...
Chris Wickersham is a Devin expert who has restored nearly ten Devin-bodied cars including seven of the original Devin SS sports cars. Perhaps more importantly, he is of Irish descent. Why is that important? Because it seems there really may be something to the “luck of the Irish” thing. This...
One of the wildest racecar designs of the 1950s was penned by Mario Boano, for Carlo Abarth, in 1954. From...
Few early American racers did more than Ak Miller. He was a well-known hot rodder, successful long-distance racer, had more...
There are few things that car guys love more than the story of a fabulous automotive find…the wilder, the better. The Cobra in the barn; the toasted remains of a crashed and burnt racecar dug up from the infield; a Le Mans winning sarcophagus discovered in a bricked-in basement. Driving...
This month’s awesome Hidden Treasure was discovered in 1995, sitting behind a house in Glendale, Arizona. How awesome? You tell...
Every now and then something magical happens in vintage racing. Some happenings are spectacular, like Jim Hall and Vic Elford...
Few cars have had more racing success and are more legendary than the Porsche 550 Spyder. From the model’s first competitive outing (at the time it was known simply as Type 550) in May of 1953, Porsche immediately knew it had a winner. In a torrential rainstorm, Helmut Gloeckler piloted...
For as long as he can remember, James Peacock of Long Beach, California, has been afflicted with a palate for...
There’s always been something magical about the H-Modified cars of the ’50s and early ’60s. These 750-cc (and later 850-cc)...
The origins of the Packwood Special can be traced to California aerospace engineer Steve Mulholland, who gathered components over a two-year period with the plan of building his dream machine. When he bought a Mercedes 300SL Gullwing in 1958, the dream quickly faded and Mulholland soon ran an ad in...
One of my favorite telephone conversations of 2007 was with 1950s Bonneville-racing-legend Denny Larsen. For those of you unfamiliar, Larsen...
The Merrimack Street Garage of Manchester, New Hampshire, is steeped in tradition. The place has been an automotive landmark for...
Since the doors opened in 1924, the MG Car Company of Great Britain has been producing interesting and innovative automobiles. The decade of the 1950s was a particularly magical time for sports and competition cars, and MG was in the thick of it with factory racers and experimental cars. While...
Road racing in America started just after World War II and rapidly grew into a phenomenon. While many of the...
Don Blenderman is koo-koo for Kurtis cars. And why not? Frank Kurtis is arguably the greatest American racecar builder of...
By 1969 Formula Vee had become the most popular racing class on the planet. The cars were relatively economical to run and the competition was intense due to the single-spec nature of the formula. At the time, Volkswagen of America was posting record sales with the Beetle and was poised...
Vince di Pierro knows what he likes. So much so that four years ago he sank more than $100,000 into...
In my book Vintage American Road Racing Cars, I wrote, “Of all the Kurtis road racing cars, the 500X is...
Following the vast destruction of WW II, exciting new sports cars emerged from the rubble, which was just what the world needed: Italian-born rolling sculptures from Ferrari, Maserati, and Lancia, German-engineered masterpieces from Volkswagen and Porsche, and, of course, a host of fabulous sports cars from Great Britain and the...
Ever wonder what it must’ve been like way back when during those early shade-tree mechanic days when racers would vanish...
George Valerio of Lincoln, California, has been hunting cars for as long as he can remember. Yes, it’s the way...
The lunacy of automotive collecting has no bounds. My personal journey has taken me from Italian coach-builts to vintage racecars to French Panhard and Deutsch Bonnet and, most recently, hot rods. And all along the way I’ve been collecting literature in psychopathic quantities; if my house caught fire, you could...
The story of Chet Herbert is pure inspiration. Afflicted with polio at age 20, Herbert spent his life building a...
The Pikes Peak Hill Climb is the second-oldest major motor racing event in North America. The inaugural race was held...
The Ferrari 195 Inter was introduced in 1950 as a roadgoing machine to replace the 166. According to Stanley Nowak in Ferrari on the Road, a total of 27 cars left the factory over the short production run. It seems that 26 of the buyers understood Enzo’s intention for this...
Al Hoyt is an American hero. He flew 50 missions in a B-17 bomber during World War II and 100...
This is the story of four Reuters, blood relatives… but not necessarily to each other. It’s also the story of...
Veda and Karl Orr are legendary Hot Rodders. They were among the early racers who took to the dry lakes of Southern California in the 1930s, putting the go-pedal down as hard as they could. Although the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) was formed in 1937, it was not until...
