classic car: history

Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Asanti Also Has $2 Million Wheels, Which Nobody Seems To Know

As I picked up the duPont Registry I bought while grocery shopping today, I thought the same Asanti ad for its latest ultra-exclusive wheel set, the Asanti Black Series, would appear. As I paged through, I saw the same ad, but something was different. There were three other sets of wheels at the bottom, which turned out to be their uber-ultra-mega-expensive Diamond Collection. The base wheel, made of cubic Zirconium, was priced at $250,000, a quarter of the price of the wheel we all know of, the famous $1,000,000 Diamond/Sapphire wheel set that was displayed at SEMA and comes with a free Bentley. But there was also another wheel on the page, which hasn't gotten any of the attention of its $1 Million brother. The Asanti AFS 103 Series, made of nearly six times as many Diamonds as its brother with 1,200 Rubies sprinkled in, is priced at a monstrous $2,000,000! This is the flagship wheel set of the top series of the most expensive brand of an ultra-lux wheel company. In other words, Lexani makes Asanti which makes the Diamond Series which makes the AFS 103. These wheels eclipse their half-price brother to become the most expensive wheels on Earth. According to many reports, the Diamond Series is dead, but this ad in the January issue of the duPont registry tells otherwise. I wonder if it comes with two free Bentleys...

Monday, December 14, 2009

What Would You Do With a '32 Ford?

There's a new poll out today that will be going on until January. We are asking you guys to think of what you would do with a 1932 ford if you had the money to do exactly what you wanted. Are you a stocker freak and so would restore it to exact factory specs? Do you like 40's Bonneville-style stuff, making a period-correct salt roadster? Do you have the need for speed and you transform it into a drag car with no hope for road use? Do you rat rod it on a budget? Do you go the most common route nowadays and build a comfortable modern street rod? Do you drive a tattered car daily? Or do you have some crazy idea of your own? It's your choice. Vote in the poll now and tell us more about your dream '32 below in comments.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The Most Eye-Catching Car At Iola: Ultimate Tribute Cavalier!

Ah, Iola Old Car Show and Swap Meet. The meeting point of every car-obsessed person in the Northern section of the Midwest. For a weekend, the tiny town of Iola, WI is lit up with gleaming chrome and trailers full of rusting vintage Cragars, wheels, bumpers, and any other automotive item you could need. A full-fledged car show, a giant swap meet, a car corral, and an auction all packed into one three-day-long event that attracts thousands of men carrying their reluctant wives and the occasional genuinely interested woman. There are Dodge Chargers, Kaisers, BMWs and Duesenburgs, and all of them are interesting to anyone who loves cars. Its almost impossible to resist coming each year. Of all these cars, you'd think that the most interesting would be some classic Ferrari of Duesenburg, but this July it wasn't so. This year, the car that stole the show wasn't a car featured in multiple magazines, not a historic Bonneville racer, but a 1998 Chevy Cavalier.

Yep, you heard that right. Walking among the many drivers for sale in the Car Corral section, near the end of my day in Iola this July, I was pretty bored and feeling kind of down. We had just been by the auction section, where the economy had lead to only one out of 10 cars we saw go up on the block sold. All of the cars I was around were drivers, with the top price being around $50,000 for a '57 Corvette, and I was going to leave in about half an hour. I was heading back to the swap meet section when a crowd obscuring a car caught my eye. The crowd was larger than the one around the featured driver Auburn/Cord/Duesenburg collection, larger than the one around the custom '54 Kaiser Manhattan featured in Hot Rod Magazine, and larger than the one around the highest-mileage car in the world, a Volvo P1800 coupe. I rushed over to see what all the fuss was about. Was it a used Bugatti for sale? A Fiat 500 with an Enzo motor? As I got closer I saw the truth. It was a Cavalier, decked out in custom gear making it a rolling tribute to Chevrolet coupes. It had '54 Corvette headlights and grille, '57 Bel Air-style rear fenders, '63 Corvette split-window rear glass, Impala hints and more. It's powered by an unknown motor, hopefully a V-8, with a nice blower on it, and it was being offered for an amazing deal of $4,000! Thats 5 different cars with a total value of $301,692 for just $4,000. No, just kidding. I wouldn't buy it either, but it does make for a good conversation.

Friday, August 21, 2009

You Can Have Your Ferraris; We'll Take Our Buicks!

Though if you look at the real facts, cities like LA and Miami aren't the wealthiest per capita, but if you take a stroll down a street like Rodeo Drive or Sunset Boulevard you'd think very differently. While I object to these cars being used as status symbols by rich people who don't really appreciate them or use them on the track, it does make for eye candy when you see two Ferrari F430 Scuderias parked next to a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a Bugatti EB110.

Here in Green Bay, the most expensive new car you're likely to see on an average day is an Audi A4 or a Lexus GS350, so we freak out when we see something that would be unnoticeable in Beverly hills, like a BMW 6-series or a base-model Corvette. People in these cities are so lucky, and they don't even realize it. They just keep texting, barely registering a Ford GT or even a Bugatti Veyron Pur Sang. This is craziness for us in good ol' (and admittedly good-car-starved) Wisconsin.

One thing that Wisconsin does have though, is Buicks. About a week ago Jalopnik had an article about eastern Wisconsin, where the author pointed out that there were Buicks everywhere, which I hadn't noticed before but now I realize. He said that he had never seen a Buick Rainier SUV (A Chevy TrailBlazer in disguise) in California, yet saw five in one day while traveling through Eastern Wisconsin. I've also seen plenty of Buick Terrazas and many other Buicks that are rare in other parts of the nation. Comparisons have been made between Wisconsin and China in the way of Buicks-per-capita.

Nobody knows quite why Buicks are so popular in Wisconsin. They are known to be dependable and cushy for a GM, with even the older ones having better reliability than many modern cars such as the Toyota Camry. 3800-engined Buicks last forever and are also marginally more rust-proof than other cars of that era, such as a Ford Escort. Buicks are more stable than other average cars in the snow, making Winter driving easier than if you were in a Mitsubishi 3000GT, and modern Buicks are actually Better-looking than competition from Saab without being as flashy as Cadillac.

Though mostly known for retired-persons transporting the rest of the country, you can find Buicks being chosen by people in their twenties in the same car lot as used Nissan Altimas and Cadillacs. Maybe Buick's new Lacrosse and Regal will signal a return to the youth market for most of the nation, but it won't change much in eastern Wisconsin, as a regular kid's practical choice of car for the money is usually a Buick a third of the time, with a Chevy Cavalier or Pontiac variant making up half of the grid and the rest being whatever they saw on the side of the road with a "for sale" sign first. Photo from Strutmasters.com

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Hot Off The Press: New '05-'09 Mustang Retro Kit

So you have an '06 Mustang GT and like it, but want a lot more attention and oomph. Do you do what everyone does and just do a custom paint job or a fart exhaust pipe? No! You're a real car enthusiast, not some teen. If you have custom exhaust, you have performance to match. If you get a snazzy paint job, it means "Hey look, it's got a modified V-8 in it!" This is why this new kit exists. There is a new company, so new it is yet to be named, that has created this prototype for two body kits to put on last-gen Mustang. The front part is their first kit, which has all the styling of a '69 Shelby GT500, and the back part is based off of a Mach 1. The kit is also not just for the car's body, with high-performance upgrades throughout in authentic vintage-style pieces and parts. Details are scarce about this new company and its suppliers, but some things I've found out are that Cobra Fiberclass in Jackson, MO are going to supply some parts, as well as Shelby Parts and Restoration in Green Bay, which is how I found out about this in the first place. So if you want some real, late-60's muscle in your 'Stang and a Shelby or Mach 1 you can drive every day, look for the is kit on the market, probably after a few more predictable prototypes showcasing each kit.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

TVR: An Overlooked Competitor

Ever heard of TVR? The company has been around, thriving, since 1947, when it was established by Trevor Wilkinson making high-performance machines for well-heeled buyers. The cars were originally based on components from production car companies, but in the 90's TVR designed and introduced the famous AJP8 V-8 in the Cerbera. Needless to say, it went way beyond eexpectations, rocketing the Cerbera to 100MPH in nine seconds flat. TVR's heritage goes back, and they've always been there, not a major worry of those at Aston Martin or Maserati, but always there. Their current range doen't do anything to distract from the fact that TVR cars are luxed-up race cars, not designed as road cars. The Sagaris is very extreme, with functional vents everywhere on the car, and the Tuscan S is relatively toned-down for more road use. Overall, TVR is an extremely overlooked, but also underestimated, company that makes great cars. Photo from Jalopnik.com

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Time To Say Goodbye

As you've probably heard, Pontiac's future has been revised from previous "niche" brand plans and the entire brand is going to be killed off because of mismanagement and the economy. Instead of telling you all of Pontiac's triumphs, I present to you these photos, which show why Pontiac was so influential and great.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

It's All In The Badge

Ford created a landmark, a tribute to a legend, the GT supercar. It was priced well under rivals from other companies and was a car upwards of 200 MPH. It's downfall: the blue oval. If Lamborghini would've stolen Ford's design plans and put a Lambo badge on it, they could have sold it for three times as more AND have more demand.
This is the sad truth in the supercar business. Ultra-luxury concoctions from long-established makers of exotics automatically get a thumbs-up, while homegrown, and often cheaper, supercars are ignored and dismissed as inferior. Take the Corvette ZR1 for example. Many hail it as a miracle, but still others say it is horrible just because it is a GM creation from America. In the Eighties, when Ferrari 308s were beat by the little four-door Dodge Omni GLH-S, the Ferrari still got a better rap than the then-new ZR-1 Corvette from the Eighties, which was an altogether much better car. If you take a car from a company with supercar history and make it expensive, people will think it is better. Who cares about the interior? As Jay Leno said (this may not be an exact quote): "People complain about the Corvette's interior. I say, just use the 150k you save by getting a Corvette to get a good interior." Leno also says that, out of all his supercars, which includes Lamborghinis and Ferraris, the 'Vette is the most practical and is very exhilarating. Take that, Italy!