By Dan Strohl

Hemmings

Reader Tim Moe recently approached us with an unusual Lost and Found request. See, he already knows where the car is – his own garage in Ormond Beach, Florida – and he already knows who built it – Dick Blakely, of Rockford, Illinois. He even knows when Blakely built it (1982) and what Blakely called it (the Blakely Baron).

What Tim doesn’t seem to know is where the design came from. Was it a kit that Dick Blakely modified? Was it Dick Blakely’s own design? Continue reading at Hemmings

By Dan Strohl

Hemmings

Virgil Exner figured heavily into the early Special Interest Autos articles, including at least one pair of stories in back-to-back issues: the Imperial Parade Phaeton story in SIA #38 and the story of the Mercer-Cobra in SIA #39, March-April 1977. Yet another real-life result of the Exner father-and-son team’s Esquire neoclassic sketches (along with the 1966 Duesenberg), the Exners relied on the Copper Development Association to provide the funding, Carroll Shelby to provide the chassis and on Italian coachbuilder Sibona-Basano to provide the body. Continue reading at Hemmings

Everybody’s a documentary producer nowadays. Cheap video cameras have led to innumerable media passes at every automotive event in the country, including Bonneville. Travel to the salt flats in August and you’re sure to run across dozens of camera-wielding "journalists" aiming to create yet another documentary about the pursuit of land-speed records. Only problem is, where’s the end result?

Benn Karne, however, is one of the few who actually delivered a DVD from his time spent both on the flats and with a handful of racers in preparation for Speedweek. He originally released Bonneville: Wide Open as a 52-minute documentary in 2004, but recently re-released the DVD with double the footage in bonus features.

It’s by no means a Hollywood production; it lacks narration and jumps from topic to topic with little transition. On the other hand, neither is the topic; land-speed racing remains the last ad-hoc, do-it-yourself racing venue where a slick entrant from GM might follow a rough-and-tumble entrant from a guy from Pocatello, Idaho.

Most of the bonus footage, however, really should have been included in the original version of the documentary. Some of the material expands on the stories of the individual racers that Karne profiled, but the real treat is the complete footage of a run–after all, what better use can one think of for a video camera on the salt flats?

I recently saw two interesting, but wildly different, cars on the Hemmings online classifieds for the same price. The first, a 1957 Ford Thunderbird, proves that blackwall tires instantly testosterone-ify any vehicle from the 1950s. Normally, I’m not that much of a fan of first-gen T-birds; leave ‘em to the lost-in-the-‘50s, sock-hop-and-James-Dean types. But the blackwall tires, the body color wheels and the McCulloch blower underhood all have me reconsidering early Birds. The second, a chopped, slammed and apparently stretched 1955 Porsche 356A, proves that, well, it doesn’t really prove much. The ad doesn’t state whether it’s a repro body or not; either way, some Porsche purist will have a heart attack at the sight of it.